Alain de Botton Presents an ASMR Reading of Proust’s Swann’s Way

Mar­cel Proust wrote Remem­brance of Things Past (À la recherche du temps per­du) over many years. The first vol­ume, Swan­n’s Way (Du côté de chez Swann), came out in 1913, and the last vol­ume, Time Regained (Le Temps retrou­vé), was pub­lished posthu­mous­ly in 1927. A mon­u­men­tal explo­ration of mem­o­ry, time, and human expe­ri­ence, the sev­en-vol­ume nov­el con­sists of 1,267,069 words. That dou­bles those in Tol­stoy’s War and Peace, mak­ing it one of the longest nov­els ever writ­ten.

Above, you can hear Alain de Bot­ton (author of How Proust Can Change Your Life) read the open­ing lines of Swan­n’s Way, with the goal of … well… putting you to sleep. His YouTube chan­nel writes: Proust’s nov­el “is very beau­ti­ful — and in a way a lit­tle bor­ing too. This is for all those among us who suf­fer from insom­nia — to send you into the best kind of sleep.” Make sure you add this 26-minute record­ing to your sleep/ASMR playlist. For de Bot­ton’s intro­duc­tion to the lit­er­ary phi­los­o­phy of Mar­cel Proust, watch this video here.

If you would like to sign up for Open Culture’s free email newslet­ter, please find it here. Or fol­low our posts on Threads, Face­book, BlueSky or Mastodon.

If you would like to sup­port the mis­sion of Open Cul­ture, con­sid­er mak­ing a dona­tion to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your con­tri­bu­tions will help us con­tin­ue pro­vid­ing the best free cul­tur­al and edu­ca­tion­al mate­ri­als to learn­ers every­where. You can con­tribute through Pay­Pal, Patre­on, and Ven­mo (@openculture). Thanks!

Relat­ed Con­tent 

An Intro­duc­tion to the Lit­er­ary Phi­los­o­phy of Mar­cel Proust, Pre­sent­ed in a Mon­ty Python-Style Ani­ma­tion

Mar­cel Proust Fills Out a Ques­tion­naire in 1890: The Man­u­script of the ‘Proust Ques­tion­naire’

The First Known Footage of Mar­cel Proust Dis­cov­ered: Watch It Online

The Cork-Lined Bed­room & Writ­ing Room of Mar­cel Proust, the Orig­i­nal Mas­ter of Social Dis­tanc­ing

6,000 Let­ters by Mar­cel Proust to Be Dig­i­tized & Put Online

Is Coffee Good for You?: A Coffee Connoisseur Reviews the Scientific Research

Accord­ing to NPR, “Caf­feine is the most wide­ly con­sumed drug in the world. Here in the U.S., accord­ing to a 2022 sur­vey, more than 93% of adults con­sume caf­feine, and of those, 75% con­sume caf­feine at least once a day.” Giv­en the preva­lence of cof­fee world­wide, it pays to ask a sim­ple ques­tion: Is cof­fee good for you? Above, James Hoff­mann, the author of The World Atlas of Cof­fee, pro­vides an overview of research exam­in­ing the rela­tion­ship between cof­fee and var­i­ous dimen­sions of health, includ­ing the gut/microbiome, sleep, can­cer, cog­ni­tion, mor­tal­i­ty and more. If you want to explore this sub­ject more deeply, Hoff­mann has cre­at­ed a list of the research papers reviewed here.

If you would like to sign up for Open Culture’s free email newslet­ter, please find it here. Or fol­low our posts on Threads, Face­book, BlueSky or Mastodon.

If you would like to sup­port the mis­sion of Open Cul­ture, con­sid­er mak­ing a dona­tion to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your con­tri­bu­tions will help us con­tin­ue pro­vid­ing the best free cul­tur­al and edu­ca­tion­al mate­ri­als to learn­ers every­where. You can con­tribute through Pay­Pal, Patre­on, and Ven­mo (@openculture). Thanks!

Relat­ed Con­tent 

Philoso­phers Drink­ing Cof­fee: The Exces­sive Habits of Kant, Voltaire & Kierkegaard

How Cof­fee Affects Your Brain: A Very Quick Primer

Why Cof­fee Naps Will Perk You Up More Than Either Cof­fee, or Naps, Alone

Paul Gia­mat­ti Plays Hon­oré de Balzac, Hopped Up on 50 Cof­fees Per Day

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The Map of Medicine: A Comprehensive Animation Shows How the Fields of Modern Medicine Fit Together

The Hip­po­crat­ic Oath is pop­u­lar­ly imag­ined as begin­ning with, or at least involv­ing, the com­mand “First, do no harm.” In fact, noth­ing like it appears among the orig­i­nal Greek words attrib­uted to Hip­pocrates; the Latin phrase pri­mum non nocere seems to have been added in the sev­enth cen­tu­ry. But the prin­ci­ple makes a high­ly suit­able start­ing point for Dominic Wal­li­man’s video tour above of his new Com­pre­hen­sive Map of Med­i­cine. A physi­cist and sci­ence writer, Wal­li­man has pre­vi­ous­ly been fea­tured many times here on Open Cul­ture for his Youtube chan­nel Domain of Sci­ence and his maps of oth­er fields, from physics, chem­istry, and biol­o­gy to math­e­mat­ics, engi­neer­ing, and com­put­er sci­ence.

This new map marks a return after what, to Wal­li­man’s fans, felt like a long hia­tus indeed. The pro­longed absence speaks to the ambi­tion of the project, whose sub­ject demands the inte­gra­tion of a large num­ber of fields and sub-fields both the­o­ret­i­cal and prac­ti­cal.

For med­i­cine exist­ed long before sci­ence — sci­ence as we know it today, at least— and two and a half mil­len­nia after the time of Hip­pocrates, the con­nec­tions and inter­ac­tions between the realm of med­i­cine presided over by doc­tors and that presided over by sci­en­tists are com­plex and not eas­i­ly under­stood by the pub­lic. Hence the impor­tance of Wal­li­man’s clar­i­ty of visu­al expla­na­tion, as it has evolved through­out his sci­en­tif­ic map-mak­ing career, as well as his clar­i­ty of ver­bal expla­na­tion, on dis­play through all 50 min­utes of this video.

As Wal­li­man empha­sizes right at the out­set, he isn’t a med­ical doc­tor — but he is a “doc­tor” in the sense that he has a PhD, and intel­lec­tu­al­ly, he comes more than well-placed to under­stand how each part of med­i­cine relates to the oth­ers. This is espe­cial­ly true of a less­er-known area of study like med­ical physics, whose fruits include imag­ing tech­niques like X‑ray, MRI, CT, and ultra­sound, with which many of us have first-hand expe­ri­ence as patients. Few non-spe­cial­ists will ever be direct­ly involved in the prac­tice of, say, biol­o­gy or engi­neer­ing, but in the twen­ty-first cen­tu­ry, it’s the rare human being indeed who nev­er encoun­ters the real­i­ty of med­i­cine. The next time you find your­self in treat­ment, it cer­tain­ly could­n’t do any harm to ori­ent your­self on its map.

Relat­ed con­tent:

The Map of Biol­o­gy: Ani­ma­tion Shows How All the Dif­fer­ent Fields in Biol­o­gy Fit Togeth­er

Every­thing You Need To Know About Virus­es: A Quick Visu­al Expla­na­tion of Virus­es in 9 Images

The Map of Chem­istry: New Ani­ma­tion Sum­ma­rizes the Entire Field of Chem­istry in 12 Min­utes

Down­load 100,000+ Images From The His­to­ry of Med­i­cine, All Free Cour­tesy of The Well­come Library

Info­graph­ics Show How the Dif­fer­ent Fields of Biol­o­gy, Chem­istry, Math­e­mat­ics, Physics & Com­put­er Sci­ence Fit Togeth­er

The Archive of Heal­ing Is Now Online: UCLA’s Dig­i­tal Data­base Pro­vides Access to Thou­sands of Tra­di­tion­al & Alter­na­tive Heal­ing Meth­ods

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

Urine Wheels in Medieval Manuscripts: Discover the Curious Diagnostic Tool Used by Medieval Doctors

If you went to the doc­tor in late medieval Europe hop­ing to get a health com­plaint checked out, you could be sure of one thing: you’d have to hand over a urine sam­ple. Though it dates back at least as far as the fourth mil­len­ni­um BC, the prac­tice of uroscopy, as it’s called, seems to have been regard­ed as a near-uni­ver­sal diag­nos­tic tool by the thir­teenth cen­tu­ry. At Medievalists.net, you can read excerpts of the then-defin­i­tive text On Urines, writ­ten about that time by French roy­al physi­cian Gilles de Cor­beil.

When a skilled physi­cian exam­ines a patien­t’s urine, de Cor­beil explains, “health or ill­ness, strength or debil­i­ty, defi­cien­cy, excess, or bal­ance, are deter­mined with cer­tain­ty.” Urine “dark­ened by a black cloudi­ness, and mud­died with sed­i­ment, if pro­duced on a crit­i­cal day of an ill­ness, and accom­pa­nied by poor hear­ing and insom­nia, por­tends a flux of blood from the nose”; depend­ing on oth­er fac­tors, “the patient will die or recov­er.”

Urine that looks livid near the sur­face could indi­cate a vari­ety of con­di­tions: “a mild form of hemitri­teus fever; falling sick­ness; ascites; syn­ochal fever; the rup­ture of a vein; catarrh, stran­gury; an ail­ment of the womb; a flux; a defect of the lungs; pain in the joints; con­sump­tive phithi­sis; the extinc­tion of nat­ur­al heat.”

White urine could be a sig­nal of every­thing from drop­sy to lipothymia to hem­or­rhoids; wine-col­ored urine “means dan­ger to health when it accom­pa­nies a con­tin­ued fever; it is less to be feared if there is no fever.”

We may feel tempt­ed, 800 years lat­er, to dis­card all of this as pre-sci­en­tif­ic non­sense. But com­pared with oth­er diag­nos­tic meth­ods in the Mid­dle Ages, uroscopy had a decent track record. “Urine was a par­tic­u­lar­ly use­ful tool for diag­nos­ing lep­rosy,” writes the Pub­lic Domain Review’s Kather­ine Har­vey, “because the imme­di­ate phys­i­o­log­i­cal cause was thought to be a mal­func­tion­ing liv­er — an organ which was cen­tral to the diges­tive process, and thus any prob­lems would be vis­i­ble in the urine.” Indeed, “new forms of urine analy­sis have devel­oped from these ancient tra­di­tions, and our present-day med­ical land­scape is awash with urine sam­ples.”

That’s cer­tain­ly a vivid image, and so are the “urine wheels” that accom­pa­ny Har­vey’s piece: elab­o­rate illus­tra­tions designed to help doc­tors iden­ti­fy the par­tic­u­lar hue of a giv­en sam­ple, each one col­ored with the best pig­men­ta­tion tech­niques of the time. But “there was no stan­dard­iza­tion,” notes Atlas Obscu­ra’s Sarah Laskow, “and while some book pub­lish­ers cre­at­ed detailed col­or­ing instruc­tions, the arti­sans who did the work didn’t always con­form to those spec­i­fi­ca­tions.” As much pres­tige as these vol­umes sure­ly exud­ed on the book­shelf, it was as true then as it is now that you become a good doc­tor not by read­ing man­u­als, but by get­ting your hands dirty.

via The Pub­lic Domain Review

Relat­ed con­tent:

Behold the Medieval Wound Man: The Poor Soul Who Illus­trat­ed the Injuries a Per­son Might Receive Through War, Acci­dent or Dis­ease

How the Bril­liant Col­ors of Medieval Illu­mi­nat­ed Man­u­scripts Were Made with Alche­my

Behold a 15th-Cen­tu­ry Ital­ian Man­u­script Fea­tur­ing Med­i­c­i­nal Plants with Fan­tas­ti­cal Human Faces

1,000-Year-Old Illus­trat­ed Guide to the Med­i­c­i­nal Use of Plants Now Dig­i­tized & Put Online

Down­load 100,000+ Images From The His­to­ry of Med­i­cine, All Free Cour­tesy of The Well­come Library

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

Discover Pemmican, The Power Bar Invented Centuries Ago by Native American Tribes

Out­door enthu­si­asts of a non-veg­e­tar­i­an stripe, do you weary of gar­den vari­ety ener­gy bars and trail mix?

Per­haps you’re feel­ing adven­tur­ous enough to make your own pem­mi­can, var­i­ous­ly described by Tast­ing His­to­rys Max Miller, above, as “history’s Pow­er Bar” and “a meaty ver­sion of a sur­vival food that has a shelf life not mea­sured in months but in decades, just like hard tack.”

Per­haps you’re already well acquaint­ed with this  low-carb, keto­genic portable pro­vi­sion, a culi­nary sta­ple of the upper half of North Amer­i­ca long before the first Euro­pean traders set foot on the land. Many indige­nous com­mu­ni­ties across North Amer­i­ca are still pro­duc­ing pem­mi­can for both per­son­al and cer­e­mo­ni­al con­sump­tion.

Back in 1743, Hudson’s Bay Com­pa­ny fur trad­er James Isham was one of the first to doc­u­ment pem­mi­can pro­duc­tion for an Eng­lish read­er­ship:

 [Meat] beat between two Stones, till some of itt is as small as Dust…when pound­ed they putt itt into a bag and will Keep for sev­er­al Years, the Bones they also pound small and Boil them…to Reserve the fatt, which fatt is fine and sweet as any Butter…Reckon’d by some Very good food by the Eng­lish as well as Natives.

Per­haps now would be a good time to give thanks for the plen­ti­ful food options most of us have access to in the 21st-cen­tu­ry (and pay it for­ward with a dona­tion to an orga­ni­za­tion fight­ing food inse­cu­ri­ty…)

A time may come when know­ing how to make pem­mi­can could give us a leg up on sur­viv­ing, but for now, exe­cu­tion of this recipe is like­ly more of a curios­i­ty sat­is­fi­er.

To be fair, it’s not designed to be a del­i­ca­cy, but rather an extreme­ly long last­ing source of calo­ries, four times as nour­ish­ing as the same weight of fresh meat.

If you want to try it, lay in 2 pounds of meat — bison is his­tor­i­cal­ly the most pop­u­lar and most doc­u­ment­ed, but deer, elk, moose, beef, fish, or fowl work well too.

You’ll also need an equal amount of suet, though heed Miller’s advice and add just enough to make things stick.

Bump the fla­vor up a notch with ground dried berries, sug­ar, or salt.

(Miller went the tra­di­tion­al route with choke­ber­ries, pro­cured in an extreme­ly 21st-cen­tu­ry man­ner.)

In terms of appli­ances, feel free to use such mod­ern con­ve­niences as your oven, your blender, and a small pan or mold.

(Please report back if you take the old school route with fire, direct sun­light, mor­tar, pes­tle, and a bag formed from undressed hide.)

Giv­en Miller’s response to the fin­ished dish, we’re hunch­ing most of us will rest con­tent to feast on his­tor­i­cal con­text alone, as Miller digs into the Pem­mi­can Procla­ma­tion of 1814, the Sev­en Oaks Inci­dent and the unique role the bira­cial, bilin­gual Métis peo­ple of Cana­da played in the North Amer­i­can fur trade

Those still up for it should feel free to take their pem­mi­can to the next lev­el by boil­ing it with wild onions or the tops of parsnips, to pro­duce a ruba­boo or rechaud, as bushcrafter Mark Young does below.

You can also get a taste of pem­mi­can by order­ing the Tan­ka Bars that Oglala Lako­ta-owned small busi­ness pro­duces on South Dakota’s Pine Ridge Reser­va­tion.

Watch more of Max Miller’s Tast­ing His­to­ry videos here.

– Ayun Hal­l­i­day is the Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine and author, most recent­ly, of Cre­ative, Not Famous: The Small Pota­to Man­i­festo and Cre­ative, Not Famous Activ­i­ty Book. Fol­low her @AyunHalliday. 

Behold a 15th-Century Italian Manuscript Featuring Medicinal Plants with Fantastical Human Faces

No mat­ter where you may stand on herbal med­i­cine as a viable 21st-cen­tu­ry option, it’s not hard to imag­ine we’d have all been true believ­ers back in the 15th-cen­tu­ry.

In an arti­cle for Heart Views, car­di­ol­o­gist Rachel Hajar lists some com­mon herbal treat­ments of the Mid­dle Ages:

Headache and aching joints were treat­ed with sweet-smelling herbs such as rose, laven­der, sage, and hay. A mix­ture of hen­bane and hem­lock was applied to aching joints. Corian­der was used to reduce fever. Stom­ach pains and sick­ness were treat­ed with worm­wood, mint, and balm. Lung prob­lems were treat­ed with a med­i­cine made of liquorice and com­frey. Cough syrups and drinks were pre­scribed for chest and head-colds and coughs.

If noth­ing else, such approach­es sound rather more pleas­ant than blood­let­ting.

Monks were respon­si­ble for the study and cul­ti­va­tion of med­i­c­i­nal herbs.

You may recall how one of Fri­ar Lawrence’s dai­ly tasks in Romeo and Juli­et involved ven­tur­ing into the monastery gar­den, to fill his bas­ket full “bale­ful weeds and pre­cious-juicèd flow­ers.”

(The pow­er­ful sleep­ing potion he con­coct­ed for the young lovers may have had dis­as­trous con­se­quences, but no one can claim it wasn’t effec­tive.)

Monks pre­served their herbal knowl­edge in illus­trat­ed books and man­u­scripts, many of which cleaved close­ly to works of clas­si­cal antiq­ui­ty such as Pliny the Elder’s Nat­u­ralis His­to­ria and Dioscordes’ De Mate­ria Med­ica.

These ear­ly med­ical texts can still be appre­ci­at­ed as art, par­tic­u­lar­ly when they con­tain fan­tas­ti­cal embell­ish­ments such as can be seen in Erbario, above, a hand­made 15th-cen­tu­ry herbal from north­ern Italy that was recent­ly added to the Uni­ver­si­ty of Penn­syl­va­nia Library’s col­lec­tion of rare books and man­u­scripts.

In addi­tion to straight­for­ward botan­i­cal illus­tra­tions, there are some roots, leaves, flow­ers and fruit (par­don the pro­noun) of a decid­ed­ly anthro­po­mor­phic bent.

Fan­cy­ing up draw­ings of plants with human faces and or drag­on-shaped roots was a medieval con­ven­tion.

Man­drake roots —  pre­scribed as an anes­thet­ic, an aphro­disi­ac, a fer­til­i­ty boost­er, and a sleep aid — were fre­quent­ly ren­dered as humans.

Wired’s Matt Simon writes that man­drake roots “can look bizarrely like a human body and leg­end holds that it can even come in male and female form:”

It’s said to spring from the drip­ping fat and blood and semen of a hanged man. Dare pull it the from the earth and it lets out a mon­strous scream, bestow­ing agony and death to all those with­in earshot.

Yikes! Can we get a spoon­ful of sug­ar to help that go down?

No won­der Juli­et, prepar­ing to quaff Fri­ar Lawrence’s sleep­ing potion in the fam­i­ly tomb, fret­ted that it might wear off pre­ma­ture­ly, leav­ing her sub­ject to “loath­some smells” and “shrieks like man­drakes torn out of the earth.”

Methinks some chamomile might have calmed those nerves…

View a dig­i­tized copy of Erbario here, or at the Pub­lic Domain Review.

 

via the Pub­lic Domain Review

Relat­ed Con­tent 

1,000-Year-Old Illus­trat­ed Guide to the Med­i­c­i­nal Use of Plants Now Dig­i­tized & Put Online

A Beau­ti­ful 1897 Illus­trat­ed Book Shows How Flow­ers Become Art Nou­veau Designs

The New Herbal: A Mas­ter­piece of Renais­sance Botan­i­cal Illus­tra­tions Gets Repub­lished in a Beau­ti­ful 900-Page Book by Taschen

A Curi­ous Herbal: 500 Beau­ti­ful Illus­tra­tions of Med­i­c­i­nal Plants Drawn by Eliz­a­beth Black­well in 1737 (to Save Her Fam­i­ly from Finan­cial Ruin)

- Ayun Hal­l­i­day is the Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine and author, most recent­ly, of Cre­ative, Not Famous: The Small Pota­to Man­i­festo.  Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

The Chemist Alice Ball Pioneered a Treatment for Leprosy in 1915–and Then Others Stole the Credit for It


It’s bit­ter­sweet when­ev­er a pio­neer­ing, long over­looked female sci­en­tist is final­ly giv­en the recog­ni­tion she deserves, espe­cial­ly so when the sci­en­tist in ques­tion is a per­son of col­or.

Chemist Alice Ball’s youth and dri­ve — just 23 in 1915, when she dis­cov­ered a gen­tle, but effec­tive method for treat­ing lep­rosy — make her an excel­lent role mod­el for stu­dents with an inter­est in STEM.

But in a move that’s only shock­ing for its famil­iar­i­ty, an oppor­tunis­tic male col­league, Arthur Dean, fina­gled a way to claim cred­it for her work.

We’ve all heard the tales of female sci­en­tists who were inte­gral team play­ers on impor­tant projects, who ulti­mate­ly saw their role vast­ly down­played upon pub­li­ca­tion or their names left off of a pres­ti­gious award.

But Dean’s claim that he was the one who had dis­cov­ered an injectable water-sol­u­ble method for treat­ing lep­rosy with oil from the seeds of the chaul­moogra fruit is all the more galling, giv­en that he did so after Alice Ball’s trag­i­cal­ly ear­ly death at the age of 24, sus­pect­ed to be the result of acci­den­tal poi­son­ing dur­ing a class­room lab demon­stra­tion.

Not every­one believed him.

Ball, the Uni­ver­si­ty of Hawaii chem­istry department’s first Black female grad­u­ate stu­dent, and, sub­se­quent­ly, its first Black female chem­istry instruc­tor, had come to the atten­tion of Har­ry T. Holl­mann, a U.S. Pub­lic Health Offi­cer who shared her con­vic­tion that chaul­moogra oil might hold the key to treat­ing lep­rosy.

After her death in 1916, Holl­mann reviewed Dean’s pub­li­ca­tions regard­ing the high­ly suc­cess­ful new lep­rosy treat­ment then referred to as the Dean Method and wrote that he could not see “any improve­ment what­so­ev­er over the orig­i­nal [method] as worked out by Miss Ball:”

After a great amount of exper­i­men­tal work, Miss Ball solved the prob­lem for me by mak­ing the eth­yl esters of the fat­ty acids found in chaul­moogra oil.

Type “the Dean Method lep­rosy” into a search engine and you’ll be reward­ed with a sat­is­fy­ing wealth of Alice Ball pro­files, all of which go into detail regard­ing her dis­cov­ery of what became known as the Ball Method, in use until the 1940s.

Kath­leen M. Wong’s arti­cle on this trail­blaz­ing sci­en­tist in the Smith­son­ian Mag­a­zine delves into why Hollmann’s pro­fes­sion­al efforts to posthu­mous­ly con­fer cred­it where cred­it was due were insuf­fi­cient to secure Ball her right­ful place in sci­ence his­to­ry.

That began to change in the 1990s when Stan Ali, a retiree research­ing Black peo­ple in Hawaii, found his inter­est piqued by a ref­er­ence to a “young Negro chemist” work­ing on lep­rosy in The Samar­i­tans of Molokai.

Ali teamed up with Paul Wer­mager, a retired Uni­ver­si­ty of Hawaii librar­i­an, and Kathryn Wad­dell Takara, a poet and pro­fes­sor in the Eth­nic Stud­ies Depart­ment. Togeth­er, they began comb­ing over old sources for any pass­ing ref­er­ence to Ball and her work. They came to believe that her absence from the sci­en­tif­ic record owed to sex­ism and racism:

Dur­ing and just after her life­time, she was believed to be part Hawai­ian, not Black. (Her birth and death cer­tifi­cates list both Ball and her par­ents as white, per­haps to “make trav­el, busi­ness and life in gen­er­al eas­i­er,” accord­ing to the Hon­olu­lu Star-Bul­letin.) In 1910, Black peo­ple made up just 0.4 per­cent of Hawaiʻi’s pop­u­la­tion.

“When [the news­pa­pers] real­ized she was not part Hawai­ian, but [Black], they felt they had made an embar­rass­ing mis­take, for­get­ting about it and hop­ing it would go away,” Ali said. “It did for 75 years.”

Their com­bined efforts spurred the state of Hawaii to declare Feb­ru­ary 28 Alice Ball Day. The Uni­ver­si­ty of Hawaii installed a com­mem­o­ra­tive plaque near a chaul­moogra tree on cam­pus. Her por­trait hangs in the university’s Hamil­ton Library, along­side a posthu­mous­ly award­ed Medal of Dis­tinc­tion.

(“Mean­while,” as Car­lyn L. Tani dry­ly observes in Hon­olu­lu Mag­a­zine, “Dean Hall on the Uni­ver­si­ty of Hawai‘i Mānoa cam­pus stands as an endur­ing mon­u­ment to Arthur L. Dean.)

Fur­ther afield, the Lon­don School of Hygiene and Trop­i­cal Med­i­cine cel­e­brat­ed its 120th anniver­sary by adding Ball’s, Marie Sklodowska-Curie’s and Flo­rence Nightingale’s names to a frieze that had pre­vi­ous­ly hon­ored 23 emi­nent men.

And now, the God­moth­er of Punk Pat­ti Smith has tak­en it upon her­self to intro­duce Ball to an even wider audi­ence, after run­ning across a ref­er­ence to her while con­duct­ing research for her just released A Book of Days.

As Smith notes in an inter­view with Numéro:

Things have real­ly changed. I think we are liv­ing in a very beau­ti­ful peri­od of time because there are so many female artists, poets, sci­en­tists, and activists. Through books espe­cial­ly, we are redis­cov­er­ing and valu­ing the women who have been unjust­ly for­got­ten in our his­to­ry. Dur­ing my research, I came across a young black sci­en­tist who lived in Hawaii in the 1920s. At that time, there was a big lep­er colony in Hawaii. She had dis­cov­ered a treat­ment using the oil from the seeds of a tree to relieve the pain and allow patients to see their friends and fam­i­ly. Her name was Alice Ball, and she died at just 24 after a ter­ri­ble chem­i­cal acci­dent dur­ing an exper­i­ment. Her research was tak­en up by a pro­fes­sor who removed her name from the study to take full cred­it. It is only recent­ly that peo­ple have dis­cov­ered that she was the one who did the work.

Relat­ed Con­tent 

Joce­lyn Bell Bur­nell Changed Astron­o­my For­ev­er; Her Ph.D. Advi­sor Won the Nobel Prize for It

“The Matil­da Effect”: How Pio­neer­ing Women Sci­en­tists Have Been Denied Recog­ni­tion and Writ­ten Out of Sci­ence His­to­ry

How the Female Sci­en­tist Who Dis­cov­ered the Green­house Gas Effect Was For­got­ten by His­to­ry

Marie Curie Became the First Woman to Win a Nobel Prize, the First Per­son to Win Twice, and the Only Per­son in His­to­ry to Win in Two Dif­fer­ent Sci­ences

 

- Ayun Hal­l­i­day is the Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine and author, most recent­ly, of Cre­ative, Not Famous: The Small Pota­to Man­i­festo.  Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

Behold the Medieval Wound Man: The Poor Soul Who Illustrated the Injuries a Person Might Receive Through War, Accident or Disease

Do you swoon at the sight of blood?

Suf­fer paper cuts as major trau­ma?

Cov­er your eyes when the knife comes out in the hor­ror movie?

If so, and also if not, fall to your knees and give thanks that you’re not the Wound Man, above.

A sta­ple of medieval med­ical his­to­ry, he’s a gris­ly com­pendi­um of the injuries and exter­nal afflic­tions that might befall a mor­tal of the peri­od- insect and ani­mal bites, spilled entrails, abscess­es, boils, infec­tions, plague-swollen glands, pierc­ings and cuts, both acci­den­tal and delib­er­ate­ly inflict­ed.

Any one of these trou­bles should be enough to fell him, yet he remains upright, dis­play­ing every last one of them simul­ta­ne­ous­ly, his expres­sion sto­ic.

He’s hard to look at, but as art his­to­ri­an Jack Hart­nell , author of Medieval Bod­ies: Life, Death and Art in the Mid­dle Ages writes in British Art Stud­ies:

The Wound Man was not a fig­ure designed to inspire fear or to men­ace. On the con­trary, he rep­re­sent­ed some­thing more hope­ful: an imag­i­na­tive and arrest­ing her­ald of the pow­er­ful knowl­edge that could be chan­nelled and dis­pensed through the prac­tice of medieval med­i­cine.

A valu­able edu­ca­tion­al resource for sur­geons for some three cen­turies, he began crop­ping up in south­ern Ger­many in the ear­ly 1400s. In an essay for the Pub­lic Domain Review, Hart­nell notes how these ear­ly spec­i­mens served “as a human table of con­tents”, direct­ing inter­est­ed par­ties to the spe­cif­ic pas­sages in the var­i­ous med­ical texts where infor­ma­tion on exist­ing treat­ments could be found.

The pro­to­col for injuries to the intestines or stom­ach called for stitch­ing the wound up with a fine thread and sprin­kling it with an anti­he­m­or­rhag­ic pow­der made from wine, hematite, nut­meg, white frank­in­cense, gum ara­bic, bright red sap from the Dra­cae­na cinnabari tree and a restora­tive quan­ti­ty of mum­my.

The Wound Man evolved along with med­ical knowl­edge, weapons of war­fare and art world trends.

The wood­cut Wound Man in Hans von Gersdorff’s 1517 land­mark Field­book of Surgery intro­duces can­non­balls to the ghast­ly mix.

And the engraver Robert White’s Wound Man in British sur­geon John Browne’s 1678 Com­pleat Dis­course of Wounds los­es the loin­cloth and grows his hair, mor­ph­ing into a neo­clas­si­cal beau­ty in the Saint Sebas­t­ian mold.

Sur­gi­cal knowl­edge even­tu­al­ly out­paced the Wound Man’s use­ful­ness, but pop­u­lar cul­ture is far from ready for him to lay down and die, as evi­denced by recent cameos in episodes of Han­ni­bal and the British com­e­dy quiz show, QI.


Delve into the his­to­ry of the Wound Man in Jack Hart­nel­l’s British Art Stud­ies arti­cle “Word­ing the Wound Man.”

via Pub­lic Domain Review

Relat­ed Con­tent

1,000-Year-Old Illus­trat­ed Guide to the Med­i­c­i­nal Use of Plants Now Dig­i­tized & Put Online

Dis­cov­er the Per­sian 11th Cen­tu­ry Canon of Med­i­cine, “The Most Famous Med­ical Text­book Ever Writ­ten”

How Illu­mi­nat­ed Medieval Man­u­scripts Were Made: A Step-by-Step Look at this Beau­ti­ful, Cen­turies-Old Craft

- Ayun Hal­l­i­day is the Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine and author, most recent­ly, of Cre­ative, Not Famous: The Small Pota­to Man­i­festo. Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

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