Tag: Summer 2018
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Edvard Munch: sickness and death
These two paintings by the famous Norwegian artist Edvard Munch (1863-1944) reflect his lifelong melancholia and obsession with sickness and death. This has been attributed to his childhood experiences of his father’s drifting towards insanity, his mother’s death from tuberculosis, and the later death of two siblings from the same disease. Melancholia affected the artist…
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Los Caprichos
This is engraving number 40 from the Los Caprichos series by Francisco de Goya, published in 1799 and showing a donkey as a doctor attending a dying man in his bed. The doctor wears a watch to count the patient’s pulse but not a stethoscope because this had not yet been invented. It suggests that the…
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Our recipes reflect our genetic makeup
Margit BurmeisterAnn Arbor, Michigan, United States Europeans eat cream, yogurt, and lots of cheese. Middle Eastern and Indian cuisine feature yogurt and a cheese called paneer, but recipes from East or Southeast Asia usually do not include dairy products. Traditional recipes, while being an important part of culture, also reflect the genetic make-up of a…
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Unlocking the secrets of longevity: the potential of Cannonau
Samuele CannasPisa, Italy “O gentlemen, the time of life is short! / To spend that shortness basely were too long, / If life did ride upon a dial’s point, / Still ending at the arrival of an hour.”– William Shakespeare, Henry IV, Part I, Act V, Scene 2 Humans have always pursued the search for…
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The health food crusade and the super-food saint: exploring the discourse of healthy eating
Alice RyrieManchester, United Kingdom In our increasingly secular society, the value of health is rising. Moral values that used to be dominated by religion are now a matter of health: “in many ways the church has been replaced by the gymnasium.”1 Due to the rising pressure to be healthy, new problems have arisen about what…
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Food colors: a history of food in art and literature
Sayantu BasuKolkata, West Bengal, India “Nothing would be more tiresome than eating and drinking if God had not made them a pleasure as well as a necessity.” This is how Voltaire upholds the significance of food in human existence and in a way summarizes man’s dependence on his daily source of energy. Food has always…
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“It’s vinegar saved her”: folk medicine, food, and the flu in A Time of Angels
Rachel Conrad BrackenRootstown, Ohio, USA The publication of Karen Hesse’s young adult novel, A Time of Angels (1997), coincides with a renewed interest in the history of the 1918–1919 “Spanish flu” pandemic and a proliferation of multidisciplinary studies of contagion and culture.1 Yet A Time of Angels is also a novel about food and folk medicine…
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Tales out of medical school
Charles H. HalstedDavis, California, USA In first-year anatomy class, I shared a rectangular metal table with three other twenty-one-year-old men and our assigned corpse, a blank-eyed, obese, and lifeless white seventyish woman. Half of my classmates were former Eastern prep school boys, the others mostly Jewish men from New York City. There were two women…