Tag: James L. Franklin
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“Fart Proudly”: Benjamin Franklin’s “Prize Question” of 1781
James L. FranklinChicago, Illinois, United States One has no difficulty imagining that flatulence, flatus, or farting might have been a source of humor long before receiving any mention in the historical record. An early example of such humor appears in cuneiform writing of the Sumerians in 1900 BCE and can be traced forward in the…
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Born with a caul: Fact and fiction
James L. FranklinChicago, Illinois, United States In the opening paragraphs of Charles Dickens’ 1850 novel David Copperfield, the titular narrator David Copperfield informs us that he was “born with a caul.” He relates further that the caul was advertised in the newspapers at the “low price” of fifteen guineas in hopes that a sea-faring buyer…
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Arnold Schoenberg’s String Trio Op. 45: Notes on “My Fatality”
James L. FranklinChicago, Illinois, United States On August 2, 1946, the Austrian-born composer Arnold Schoenberg suffered a near fatal heart attack at his home in Los Angeles. Despite the fragile state of his health, on August 20th he was able to resume work on a string trio that had been commissioned by Harvard University. Schoenberg…
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Hendrick Goltzius (1558–1617): The artist’s hand
James L. FranklinChicago, Illinois, United States In 1588, when Hendrick Goltzius created this striking drawing (Fig. 1) of his deformed right hand, the thirty-year old Haarlem draftsman and engraver was already one of the most influential, well-recognized artists in Europe. In a sense, the drawing was his signature writ large, as evidenced in an anecdote…
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Rembrandt: Tobias Healing His Father’s Blindness
James L. FranklinChicago, Illinois, United States Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn’s Tobias Healing his Father’s Blindness, painted in 1636, depicts the climactic moment in the Book of Tobit when Tobias returns to his father’s home and instills the gall (bile) he had taken from a giant fish into his blind father’s eyes, thereby restoring his sight.1…
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From “punch drunk” to chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE)
James L. FranklinChicago, Illinois, United States At a critical moment in the second act of Terrance Blanchard’s opera Champion, based on the life of the boxer Emile Alphonse Griffith, Emile’s trainer Howie Albert asks the fighter, whose boxing career is in a steep decline, if he can remember a sequence of three simple words: “school,…
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Rita Levi-Montalcini (1909–2012): “Chance favors the prepared mind”
James L. FranklinChicago, Illinois, United States On December 10, 1986, Rita Levi-Montalcini and Stanley Cohen shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for their work in neurobiology and for the discovery of “nerve growth factor” (NGF) that has since shed light on tumors, wound healing, and other medical problems. Levi-Montalcini was the first Italian…
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From candles and swallowing swords to gastroscopy
George DuneaJames L. FranklinChicago, Illinois, United States In 1806, Philipp Bozzini of Mainz invented an instrument designed to explore the interior of the human body that he called the “Lichtleiter” (light conductor). It had a candle or an oil lamp as a source of light, and he used it to look at the ears, nose,…
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Steller’s Sea eagle: Who was Georg Wilhelm Steller?
James L. FranklinChicago, Illinois, United States The Steller’s Sea eagle (Haliaeetus pelagicus) handily outsizes the national bird of the United States, the Bald eagle (Haliaeetus leucocephalus). Steller’s Sea eagle is the heaviest eagle in the world: females weigh from thirteen to twenty pounds and males weigh between eleven and fifteen pounds. Its seven-foot wingspan is…
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Wilson on the couch: How Sigmund Freud and William C. Bullitt, an American diplomat, came to analyze the American president
James L. FranklinChicago, Illinois, United States In December 1966, Houghton Mifflin Company published Thomas Woodrow Wilson: Twenty-Eighth President of the United States, A Psychological Study by Sigmund Freud and William C. Bullitt. The curious fact that Sigmund Freud, the founder of psychoanalysis, and a former American diplomat, William C. Bullitt, who served in both the…