Category: History Essays
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María de las Mercedes, the Spanish Romantic queen
Nicolas RoblesBadajoz, Spain Ya Mercedes está muerta,muerta está, que yo la ví,cuatro duques la llevabanpor las calles de Madrid. Mercedes is already dead,she’s dead, I did saw her,four dukes were her carryingthrough the streets of Madrid.—Popular Spanish song María de la Mercedes de Orleans y Borbón was born in Madrid, Spain, on June 24, 1860.…
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They made their own insulin: The story of Eva and Viktor Saxl
Ellen DavisChapel Hill, North Carolina, United States Eva Saxl not only saved her own life by making insulin during World War II, but together with her husband Viktor, saved the lives of over 400 people with diabetes in war-torn Shanghai. Her life story has remained relatively obscure—I had first seen Eva’s photo in 1991 on the…
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Paolo Sarpi: Venetian hero, Roman heretic
Sally MetzlerChicago, Illinois, United States Though an obscure figure today, for many years Fra Paolo Sarpi (1552–1623) loomed large in the ecclesiastical, scientific, and political arenas of Europe. Macaulay praised him as his “favorite modern historian,”1 Boswell called him a genius, and Samuel Johnson considered translating him to the English-speaking world. A venerable polymath, he…
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The Turk’s Head Literary Club
Elizabeth SteinhartJMS PearceHull, England We share a fascination for the varied activities, relics, and quirky names of eighteenth- and nineteenth-centuries’ gentlemen’s clubs and societies. One of us (ES) recently found the blue plaque of the Turk’s Head Literary Club above a Chinese supermarket in London’s Soho. Distinguished literati, physicians, and scientists were members of such…
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Early observations of the pulse
JMS PearceHull, England Over the centuries, various devices bearing names now unfamiliar (Clepsydra, water clock, pulsilogium, Sphygmologia, Pulse Watch) were used to measure the pulse.The examination of the pulse to assist in diagnosis and prognosis dates back to ancient Egyptian, Indian, and Chinese physicians. Because they had little understanding of cardiovascular physiology, we might wonder…
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Hittite medicine
Some 3,000 to 7,000 years BC there lived in southern Ukraine or perhaps northern Anatolia a people we now know as the Indo-Europeans.1,2 They were the ancestors of most of the linguistically related nations of Europe and Western Asia, and eventually they split into Eastern and Western groups. The latter comprised the Hittites, a now…
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Anatomical correlation of the bronze liver of Piacenza with fresh sheep livers
Belle van RosmalenThomas van GulikAmsterdam, Netherlands The Palazzo Farnese in the town of Piacenza, Italy, houses an archaeological museum called the Musei Civici. Its collection includes an Etruscan model of a sheep’s liver cast in bronze, known as the Piacenza liver.1 (Fig 1) The Etruscans were an ancient civilization with a unique language, culture, and…
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Emperor Otto II, malaria, and aloe
Sally MetzlerChicago, Illinois, United States Holy Roman Emperor Emperor Otto II (AD 955–983) conquered the Saracens and quelled the invading Magyar menace. However, his ambitious reign abruptly ended, not in battle, but in bed. At the young age of twenty-eight, he departed from this world. Tradition maintains that a malarial fever caused his premature death.…
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Mary Ann Bickerdyke
Julius BonelloEmma RyanPeoria, Illinois, United States The colonel had had enough of her disrespect. He would consult his general about this nasty old woman. “I didn’t know we had any nasty old women in our Army,” General Sherman remarked. “Who might she be now?” “I believe she calls herself Bickerdyke, sir.” “Mother Bickerdyke?” the general…