Tag: Winter 2018
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Collections complete: experiential centres of learning
Lynsey Grosfield Rude, Denmark The period between roughly 1520 and 1590 was a time of growing efforts to understand the world of science through hands-on exercises in collecting and cataloging natural objects, observation, dissection, and experimentation in the fields of anatomy, botany, and museum science. This was also the time of the High Renaissance…
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Beyond eating yogurt
Margad Zorigt Mongolia When I was studying in Australia, an American teacher asked us what we usually did in the evening in our countries. I said Mongolians drink yogurt before sleep. The teacher was surprised at my answer: “Your country’s people drink yogurt? In my country we eat yogurt.” In the Mongolian language we…
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Ghosts from the Ether Dome
Isabel Legarda Belmont, Massachusetts, United States The ether dome today. Author photo. On October 16, 1846, dentist William Morton successfully demonstrated the use of ether as an anesthetic inside Massachusetts General Hospital’s Bulfinch Pavilion. That day, now passed down to us as “Ether Day,” is often seen as a turning point for surgery both…
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Disease mapping: tracing the urban epidemic
Astrid Primadhani Jakarta, Indonesia Snow’s map analysis to Thessian polygons (Cliff & Haggert) (1988): Atlas of Disease Distributions In August 1854 a deadly cholera outbreak struck the Soho neighborhood of London.1 Within thirty-six hours, rapid death ensued as the dense and unsanitary condition of the working-class neighborhood became a haven for the spread of…
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Shackleton’s angel
Paul G. Firth Boston, Massachusetts, United States Shackleton’s angel. Photo by Paul Firth. South Georgia Island is a tortured upheaval of mountain and glacier that falls in chaos to the jagged coastline of the South Atlantic Ocean.1 From thirty miles of this wind-blasted sub-Antarctic wilderness came walking on the afternoon of the 20 May 1916…
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Joseph Roth, a visionary poet and victim of European history
Frank Wollheim Sweden Joseph and Friedl in Berlin, 1927. From Wilhelm von Sternberg. Joseph Roth, Kiepenheuer & Wirtsch, 2009. Joseph Roth was born on 2 September 1894 in Brody, then a Galician town in the Austrian-Hungarian Monarchy, bordering Russia. His parents married in 1892 and like two thirds of the 20,000 inhabitants were Hassidic…