Tag: Belgium
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The Manneken Pis: Still peeing after all these years
Howard FischerUppsala, Sweden “Belgium’s culture of excretion goes back centuries.”1– Jean-Claude Lebensztejn, art historian and professor at the University of Paris Artists in the low countries did not hesitate to depict human bodily functions. The great Netherlandish painter Pieter Bruegel the Elder (1525–1569) had scenes of defecation in his paintings2 in the sixteenth century. The…
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Ruggero Oddi: Brilliant physician and victim of gaslighting by the Congo Free State
Eli Ehrenpreis Skokie, Illinois, United States Ruggero Oddi in 1900 during his post as acting director of the Physiological Institute of Genoa. Referenced in Alexander Rollett Letter Edition, L.2629. When Ruggero Oddi (1864–1913) was a medical student at the University of Bologna, he performed studies detailing the physiology of the biliary sphincter. This work…
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Dirty, dark, dangerous: coal miners’ nystagmus
Ronald Fishman Chicago, Illinois, United States A coal miner without a headlamp digging an undercut at the coal face, using only the dim light supplied by a small flame lamp. From Snell 12 It’s dark as a dungeon and damp as the dew, Where the danger is double and pleasures are few Where the rain…