Tag: Stewart Justman
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Tales of the psychosomatic in the Lyrical Ballads
Stewart JustmanMissoula, Montana, United States The year 1800 saw the publication of John Haygarth’s historic pamphlet Of the Imagination as a Cause and as a Cure of Disorders of the Body, an inquiry into what we now know as the nocebo and placebo effects. The same year saw the second edition of Wordsworth and Coleridge’s…
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Musical evenings on HMS Bounty
Stewart JustmanMissoula, Montana, United States Dispatched to Tahiti in 1787 to gather breadfruit trees to be transplanted to the West Indies, HMS Bounty was a small ship with every possible inch allotted to botanical cargo. Spare too was the crew, which included no marines who might have acted as Lieutenant William Bligh’s bodyguards in the…
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“God Helps Them That Help Themselves”: Poor Richard and the inoculation controversy
Stewart JustmanMissoula, Montana, United States Before vaccination there was inoculation, and long before opposition to vaccination for Covid-19 there was furious resistance to the practice of inoculating for smallpox. Upon being introduced into Boston in 1721, in the midst of an outbreak of smallpox—exactly the wrong time and place for a dispassionate trial of a…