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 […]

In Italy, roughly 70% of households have a Bialetti Moka Pot. And chances are you have one too. But are you using it the right way? Probably not, says James Hoffmann, the author of The World Atlas of Coffee. Above, he sets the record straight, demonstrating the best technique for making a great cup of coffee. Enjoy this public service announcement and use it well.

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A decade ago, in Tokyo, 167 musicians performed a Beethoven classic with the “Matryomin,” a new-fangled instrument that lodges a theremin inside a matryoshka. A matryoshka, of course, is one of those Russian nested dolls where you find wooden dolls of decreasing size placed one inside the other. As for the theremin, it’s a century-old electronic musical instrument that requires no physical contact from the player. You can watch its inventor, Leon Theremin, give it a demo in the vintage video below. And via this link you can see the Matryomin Ensemble performing a mesmerizing version of Amazing Grace. Enjoy.

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See Japanese Musicians Play “Amazing Grace” with 273 Theremins Placed Inside Matryoshka Dolls–Then Learn How They Perform Their Magic

Soviet Inventor Léon Theremin Shows Off […]

Trombone may be Sweden’s Queen of Swing Gunhild Carling’s favorite instrument, but she blows some mean bagpipes too, as evidenced by her smoking hot performance of her late father, trumpeter Hans Carlings’ Bagpipe Blues, above.

A devotee of such early jazz greats as Freddie Keppard, Jelly Roll Morton, Bix Beiderbecke, and Billie Holiday, Carling told the Jerusalem Post some instruments “sing in my voice more than others”:

When I play trumpet, I try to be close to Louis Armstrong. Sometimes when I’m playing, I can hear him. It’s harder on the bagpipe, for example.

Vaudeville’s flame burns brightly in this consummate showwoman:

I grew up in the south of Sweden, outside of Malmo. Our house was full of variety – circus, acting, dance, vaudeville and novelty. I just picked up instruments from when I was very young and played them. I started with the drums, then the recorder, trombone and trumpet. Then I started tap dancing, and after that harmonica and bagpipe.

Carling keeps with tradition by populating the Carling Big Band with similarly multi-talented, musically inclined […]

Nobody knows more about cinema than critics. But in an entirely different way, nobody knows more about cinema than directors. That, perhaps, is one of the reasons that Sight and Sound magazine has, for the past thirty years, conducted two separate once-in-a-decade polls to determine the greatest films of all time. Last week we featured the results of Sight and Sound‘s latest critics poll here on Open Culture, but the outcome of the directors’ vote — whose electorate of 480 “spans experimental, arthouse, mainstream and genre filmmakers from around the world” — merits its own consideration.

As all the cinephile world knows by now, Chantal Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles came out on top of Sight and Sound‘s critics poll this year. That temporally expansive masterwork of potatoes, veal cutlets, prostitution, and murder didn’t place quite so highly in the directors poll. It ranks at number four, below Ozu Yasujirō’s Tokyo Story, Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather, Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane, and — at number one — Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, which, for those who make movies, evidently remains the “ultimate trip” that its late-sixties marketing […]