Tag: women
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“Can you define the word ‘woman’?”
Jayant RadhakrishnanDarien, Illinois, United States “The more you know the more you realize you don’t know.”— Aristotle (384 BCE-322 BCE) On March 22, 2022, a US senator asked the nominee for Associate Justice of the United States Supreme Court: “Can you define the word woman?” The nominee replied, “I can’t.” The senator followed up with,…
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Women surgeons
Moustapha AbousamraVentura, California, United States Last spring, I spent three months in the Texas Hill Country. It is a place that at once can be beautiful and hostile. The fields of blue bonnets in full bloom are breathtaking. The cacti that abound around barbed wire fences at first glance appear ominous with their threatening thorns,…
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Creating a race of orphans: Lebensborn, the “spring of life”
Howard FischerUppsala, Sweden Nazi Germany was a racial state. People of “pure” Aryan or Nordic heritage were believed to have superior physical, intellectual, and moral qualities. People from other ethnic or racial groups were undesirable, and a potential source of “pollution” in an Aryan nation. One of the Reich’s main functions was to eliminate racial…
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Salernitan women
Vicent RodillaAlicia López-CastellanoValencia, Spain The first medical school in the Western world is thought to be the Schola Medica Salernitana (Figure 1), which traces its origins to the dispensary of an early medieval monastery.1 The medical school at Salerno achieved celebrity between the tenth and thirteenth centuries, before it was overshadowed by universities at Bologna…
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Red Cross humanitarianism and female volunteers in Australia
Ian WillisCamden, NSW, Austalia “There were a lot of people who had lost everything,” said Australian Red Cross volunteer Tracey Ayrton, who has been providing comfort to bushfire victims at the Laurieton evacuation centre in northern New South Wales. Tracey, who has taken time off work, has been volunteering for over ten years. She says,…
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Bloody women
M.K.K. Hague-YearlMontréal, Québec, Canada Sitting with little fanfare inside a twentieth-century red hardcover binding is a single leaf whose bibliographic record contains brackets of uncertainty: “[Calendar for Austria, 1496.] [Kaspar Hochfeder, Nürnberg? 1495.]” The catalogue offers only a basic description: “The woodcut occupying the whole lower portion depicts a zodiac man, two bloodletting scenes, a…
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A history of blood: hysteria, taboos, and evil
Danielle DalechekNorfolk, Virginia, United States “Who has fully realized that history is not contained in thick books but lives in our very blood?”— Carl Jung Historically, the opposite of purity was often viewed and represented as evil. This was especially true if you happened to be a woman. Even the most chaste and abiding women…