This semester in my HSCI 3013 class (History of Science to the Age of Newton), I tried a new type of assignment: I asked students to edit Wikipedia articles. I got most of my inspiration and technical assistance for this project from my colleague Dr. John Stewart. Dr. Stewart has done projects like this in his own history of science course and has given presentations on how to use Wikipedia in the classroom. He and Stacy Zemke gave a very helpful presentation on this topic last October and posted helpful links. Dr. Stewart has also let me pick his brain over lunch and coffee on numerous occasions, for which I am enormously grateful.
This assignment accompanied lessons on the history of anatomy. The history of anatomy in the medieval and early modern periods is still very much dominated by Andreas Vesalius, even after work of Katharine Park and Andrew Cunningham. This is especially true of the way we present the history of anatomy in history of science courses (where time is limited) and even in history of medicine classes. Even scholarly work that discusses the lesser-known anatomists typically ignores anatomists working in the medieval Islamic world. (The idea that religious beliefs and taboos prevented dissection of human cadavers in the Islamic world remains pervasive, but to my knowledge largely undocumented and unproven.) I wanted to give students the opportunity to explore the work of a variety of medieval and early modern anatomists, and also to contribute to the general stock of knowledge on medieval and early modern anatomy.
I have five groups of about seven to nine students each in my classroom (dictated by the fact that the room has five tables with nine seats a piece). I picked five medieval and early modern anatomists who had very short articles on Wikipedia: Ibn al-Nafis, Mansur ibn Ilyas, Gabriele Zerbi, Alessandro Achillini, and Realdo Columbo. (If you click on these links you will be taken to Wikipedia pages created almost entirely by my students.) Some were short enough to be classified as “stubs” and others were only a couple of paragraphs long. I also selected these anatomists because I was able to find several accessible readings on each. “Accessible” in this context means the articles or book chapters were in English and they were either available on-line or I could obtain them through inter-library loan. Wikipedia articles must meet a “notability” criteria, which means that there must be “significant coverage” of the topic in secondary sources. Wikipedia is NOT a venue for original research. Wikipedia defines “significant coverage” as “two independent secondary sources from reputable publishers.” This means that I had to be sure at least two authors had written in English on each of these anatomists. I had to reject a few good candidates because there just wasn’t enough secondary literature in English. I gave the students these readings. I did not ask them to find their own sources. Certainly, I could have asked them to track down sources, but I have other assignments designed to teach research skills, and in this particular assignment I wanted them to focus on learning how a Wikipedia article is constructed and edited and to think about how the writing style expected in an encyclopedia article is very different from that expected in an research paper. I asked students to increase the article five-fold, and to add images (where possible) and sources.
Each student was required to sign up for a Wikipedia account and give me their user name so I could verify that they had contributed to the group effort. Each student was expected to read the secondary sources on their anatomist outside of class and to go through the Wikipedia training for students (which takes about an hour). I devoted three fifty-minute class periods to working on this project. Although in theory students could all work on this independently and discuss their edits on-line, I found that they really wanted and needed the time to meet up face to face and plan out who would do what edits, and then to look over the whole article as a group and edit it for consistency.
I hope this makes students more critical and careful users of Wikipedia in the future. If it inspires them to do more Wikipedia editing, that’s all to the good. If it inspires my students – or some one else – to undertake original research to write fuller and better accounts of these anatomists’ work, that would be fantastic.
One of Mansur ibn Ilyas’ colored illustrations of human anatomy. This illustration highlights the arterial and nervous systems as viewed from behind. From: Mansur ibn Ilyas: Tashrīḥ-i badan-i insān. تشريح بدن انسان. Manuscript, ca. 1450, U.S. National Library of Medicine.
This semester I tried a new type of assignment in my HSCI 3013 class. I had students transcribe and analyze recipes from an early modern English manuscript recipe book held by and digitized by the Wellcome Library in London. You can find the catalog record, and link to the digital version of MS 8097 here. According to the Wellcome catalog record, the manuscript is from the 17th and early 18th century. It contains multiple hands, but none of the authors are known. One section of the book contains recipes for food, and the other contains recipes for medicines.
My choice of this particular manuscript was serendipitous. A group of students in my HSCI 3013 class last fall found it while researching early modern diseases and remedies. (Their work on a remedy for jaundice is described in A Bill of Mortality (and a peck of snails) ) After they drew my attention to it, I started paging through the book, and I was utterly charmed. The culinary recipes are a delightful mix of the familiar (rice pudding and coffee cake) and the very unfamiliar (calfs head pie and roasted pigeons). The medical recipes evoke the pain and suffering of everyday life, both in the past and in the present: sore breasts from nursing, smallpox, coughs, back pain, burns, plague and miscarriages. The writers frequently name the people who gave them the recipes, suggesting a larger community and a network of people exchanging recipes and information. The recipe for preserving walnuts includes the detail that “Sir Harbottle Grimstone found great good by these, but he used to eat them dry [before] going to bed.” (MS8097a pg. 86). Although the authors of this book are unknown, every so often they use “I” or “my” or “me” in a recipe and one catches a fleeting glimpse of their lives. In a remedy “for a cold,” the author comments that this medicine is good for children’s coughs and adds, “mine found good by it” (MS8097a pg. 113). It was this last aspect of the book, these tantalizing glimpses of the lived experience of women and men and children in the past, that inspired me to incorporate this manuscript into my class.
One of my goals as a teacher of history is to bring the past alive, to get students to see people in the past as living, breathing, three-dimensional individuals. Once an elementary school teacher told me that one of her students asked if there was color in the past. She didn’t at first understand the question, but then she realized he was confused because historical photographs are all black and white or sepia-toned. He wondered if that was what the past actually looked like. I’ve always thought that this charmingly naïve question was actually pretty astute. Many students of history see the past in sepia tones, whether they realize it or not. It is especially easy for students in history of science classes to see the people we are studying (Galileo, Newton, Cavendish) as disembodied minds, not as people who had to fill their bellies, deal with aches and pains and attend to sick children. Further, most of the people we study in the history of science are named individuals (mostly men) who published their work, or who left written records that were carefully preserved by their families or students or friends or colleagues. I want my students to see that a much broader range of people, women as well as men, contributed to exploration of the natural world in the early modern period.
I intend to write at least two more posts on this manuscript and what my students were able to do with it. They have just turned in their assignments, and I am just beginning to sort through them. The day the project was due, my teaching assistant (Calandra McCool) and I recreated five recipes from the manuscript for students to taste. We chose the hedgehog (see below), rice pudding, taffity tart, coffee cake and fried cucumbers. We will write more about these recipes in a subsequent post. For now, I’d like to share my favorite, the hedgehog. Don’t worry, it’s not an ACTUAL hedgehog, but a dessert made to look like a hedgehog!
The hedgehog, p. 33.
To make a Hedge Hogg.
Take a pint of sweet Cream very thick, beat 2 whole eggs and strain them, put to it 2 spoonfulls of Sowre Cream, for want of that take butter milk, seting it together on the fire stiring it all one way untill it comes to curds and whey, then tye it into a strainer and let it hang up that the whey may run from it, when it has done droping take the curd and mix with it a quarter of a pound of blanched and beaten Almonds with roswater, sweeten it to your tast, make it in to the from [i.e. form] of a Hedge Hogg with a spoon in your dish, putting 2 curance for the 2 eyes keep out 10 Almonds to cut into long pieces and stick them on thick for bristles on the top, when you bring it to the table, have a pint of cream ready boyled and seasoned with sugar and rosewater and quite cold, put it to the hedghog so sende it up. this looks pritty and eats very well.
Here’s the recipe in somewhat modernized form, although none of the ingredients have been altered. I’ve added in a few measurements to reflect how much sugar and rosewater I used, but no one should feel bound by that.
For hedgehog:
1 pint heavy whipping cream
2 eggs
2 tablespoons sour cream or buttermilk
¼ pound blanched almonds, finely ground
1 tablespoon rose water
¼ cup sugar
3 raisins or currants
Slivered almonds
For sauce:
1 pint heavy whipping cream
1 tablespoon rosewater
Sugar to taste
Directions:
Combine heavy whipping cream and sour cream (or buttermilk) in a saucepan.
Beat two eggs together and add them to the cream mixture through a strainer.
Heat the cream and egg mixture over medium heat, stirring constantly. Do not allow the mixture to boil over.
After about 20 minutes, the mixture will start to thicken and form curds. Continue stirring until it is about the texture of cottage cheese (the curds are not quite this big, and there will be a bit more liquid).
But the mixture into a cheesecloth bag. I placed a wide strip of cheesecloth over a plate (with the edges hanging over the plate), dumped the mixture onto the cheesecloth on the plate, and then wrapped the edges of the cheesecloth around the entire mixture, gently squeezing out excess liquid.
Hang the bag over a bowl and allow it to drip for a while. I let it drip for over an hour the first time I tried this. That’s longer than it needed to get all the liquid out, but you also want it to cool down enough that you can handle it.
When the bag of curds has stopped dripping and is cool enough to handle, add the ground almonds, sugar and rosewater. I ground the almonds in “ye Olde Cuisinart.” If that’s not authentic enough for you, I suppose you could use a mortar and pestle, or just chop them super fine with a knife. I used ¼ cup sugar and a tablespoon of rosewater, but you could use more or less. (It tastes fine without the rosewater, if you can’t find this.)
Shape the resulting mixture into a hedgehog. (Note: the first time I tried this recipe, the mixture was a bit too mushy to mold properly so I stuck it in the refrigerator for about an hour to stiffen it up. Then it worked fine. The second time I guess I’d gotten the hang of it, because I was able to shape it immediately after mixing it.) A hedgehog is basically a dome, with a pointy head stuck on it. Add raisins or currants for eyes and nose and stick slivered almonds all over the dome to make the bristles. Refrigerate until you are ready to serve. Keeps fine overnight.
Full disclosure – this little beasty is so rich I did not actually feel the need to douse him in sweetened cream, so I did not make the sauce. But if you want to go whole hog (or whole hedgehog), heat a pint of heavy cream over medium heat, add sugar to taste and stir until dissolved. Take off heat, add rosewater and chill.
I was INCREDIBLY pleased with how this came out. While I am a pretty competent cook and baker, I am NOT skilled at things like cake decoration. I DO NOT attempt anything I see on Pinterest. But this actually looks like a hedgehog! And I thought it tasted delicious. It’s a bit like mascarpone with ground almonds, although the flavor is definitely creamy, not at all cheesy. My students seemed to like it as well. Several took pictures of it before we cut it up, and there was none left over.
My three-year-old son Niels was so disappointed that I was taking the hedgehog to my class that I had to promise to make him another one. For Niels’s hedgehog, I halved the recipe and used chocolate chips for the eyes and nose because he doesn’t like raisins.
In the spring semester of 2014, I taught a new course (for me and for my department): a junior seminar (HSCI 3993) designed to give junior history of science majors a serious research experience before they embarked on their senior capstone projects. I had each of my students pick a sixteenth- or seventeenth-century book from the History of Science Collections at the University of Oklahoma. They worked with the digitization laboratory (the DigiLab) to produce high quality digital images of their chosen book, and they wrote research papers and iBooks about their book.
One of my students, Jonathan Self, chose the first English translation of Euclid’s Elements, published in London in 1570.
The book has a series of pop-up diagrams to illustrate three-dimensional geometric shapes.
The book is very commonly referred to as “John Dee’s Euclid,” after the famous English mathematician, astrologer and sage, known for his conversations with angelic spirits. Dee wrote an introduction to the English translation of Euclid, but it is unclear whether he contributed to the book in any other way. It appears to have been Henry Billingsley, a far less well-known figure, who did the major work of translating the work. Jonathan wrote a paper on this book. He also made an iBook, which he titled “Billingsley’s Euclid,” that really showcases the spectacular three-dimensional illustrations. The iBook is available for download from the iTunes store.
Although this wasn’t essential to his research project, Jonathan and I were both intrigued by the many marks of ownership in OU’s copy of the English translation of Euclid. Would it be possible, we wondered, to figure out some of the different people who owned this book over the centuries? What follows is the (admittedly still incomplete) results of our investigations into the provenance of this particular edition of Euclid. I will begin with the most recent owner and work backwards chronologically.
The newest bookplate is that of Herbert McLean Evans (1882 – 1971). Evans was a prominent American physician, a professor of anatomy at the Johns Hopkins University and then at the University of California at Berkeley. He is known for his research in embryology, endocrinology and histology. He was an avid collector of rare books in the history of science. On his death, most of his collection passed to the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin. For more on Evans, see here and here
Identifying Evans was simple. Next we tried to figure out who the other bookplates belonged to, and who else had put their name in the book. I tweeted pictures of the bookplates and signatures and asked if anyone recognized them. I got some very generous and helpful replies from Andrew Aberdein (@andrewaberdein), Professor of Philosophy at the Florida Institute of Technology, that enabled us to identify two more owners.
The bookplate right above Evans’ plate is that of James Veitch, Lord Eliock (or Elliock) (1712 – 1793). According to the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Veitch was Scottish. He was educated at Edinburgh University and then at Leiden. He served at the court of the Crown Prince Frederick of Prussia (late Frederick II, “the Great”) for several years. He returned to Scotland and practiced law. He was well connected in literary and intellectual circles. He became a judge in 1761, acquiring the title Lord Elliock.
Veitch put his bookplate over an earlier owner’s plate. It is possible to make out a bit of the previous owner’s motto under Veitch’s plate. I believe that the motto on the underlying bookplate reads “sine labore nihil” (nothing without work). Professor Aberdein informs me that this is the motto on the Colebourne coat of arms. On the verso of the title page, the name “William Coleburne” has been crossed out. I have been unable to find biographical information on William Colebourne (or Coleburne). Underneath William Coleburne’s name, someone has written (or perhaps more accurately scrawled) words that look like: Gekaufft zu Edinburg in Januar 1765 für fünff [illegible] (Purchased in Edinburgh in January, 1765, for five [illegible]). As Veitch spent several years in Prussia, he must surely have been fluent in German, so it seems at least plausible that he wrote this.
Above the bookplates, someone has written: “This book I bought of Mr. Robert Anderson December 1698 I gave [illegible] for it.” The name Robert Anderson is hardly uncommon, so we cannot identify this person with certainty. However, there is a somewhat obscure mathematician of this name, whose exact dates are not known. According to the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, the mathematician Robert Anderson was active between 1666 and 1696. He was described by one of his contemporary mathematicians, John Collins, as “very able in algebra and solid geometry.” He published a book called Stereometrical Propositions (1668) and another called The Genuine Use and Effects of the Gunne as Well Experimentally as Mathematically Demonstrated (1674). Finally, there is a name we can’t make out with the date 1647.
So between us, Jonathan and I, with Professor Aberdein’s assistance, have the names of four previous owners of OU’s Euclid: Robert Anderson, William Colebourne (or Coleburne), James Veitch, and Herbert McLean Evans. This is hardly a complete history of the ownership of this book. The earliest date we can find written in the book is 1647, and it was published in 1570. We also can’t tell WHY some of these people owned this book and what use they made of it. If the mathematician Robert Anderson was in fact the owner, it would seem fairly natural that he would be interested in a work on geometry. But why did a Scottish judge in the eighteenth century own this book? Was it of purely antiquarian interest? Did he expect to learn geometry from it? If he purchased it in 1765, he would have been in his early fifties – hardly a schoolboy! (Of course, the handwriting may not be his. He could have sold the book to someone else in 1765. The bookplate says “Lord Eliock,” a title he gained in 1761, but he could certainly have owned the book before he added his bookplate.)
Interestingly, in the eighteenth century there was considerable interest in teaching geometry with three-dimensional models. The Whipple Museum of the History of Science in Cambridge has some eighteenth-century model kits used for teaching and learning geometry. For images of these models, see here. Is there any connection between the paper models of the first English Euclid and these wooden models?
What I’ve presented here may read like a detective story without a proper ending. If anything, this investigation into the owners of OU’s English Euclid has opened up more questions than it answered. I’d like to make two broad observations about what I have learned from this investigation. First, it reminded me quite forcefully that books have long histories. Since my area of specialty is the sixteenth century, when I deal with books printed in the sixteenth century I tend to focus on the contexts in which they were produced (by authors and illustrators and printers) and the immediate uses of the book by different groups of readers. This is what all of the historical literature on the English Euclid, including Jonathan Self’s iBook, focuses on. But how was the book read and used by seventeenth-, eighteenth- and even nineteenth-century readers? It wasn’t always a historical artifact stored in a climate-controlled vault. The question of how the meanings and uses of books change over time is one that I don’t think gets asked enough in the history of the book. This translation of Euclid, with its tantalizing traces of former owners, invites further reflection on these issues.
My second observation is that this was one of my first experiences of the powerful new possibilities for research and collaboration in the digital humanities, and new ways of integrating research and teaching. The exploration into the provenance of a unique book in OU’s History of Science Collections was part of a research project initiated by an undergraduate student as part of an undergraduate class. When Jonathan chose this book, he worked with Barbara Laufersweiler (@barbaraell) and her staff in OU’s Digitization Laboratory (@OULibDigitize) to get high quality images (and I do mean HIGH – the full size files are too big for this blog). It was the availability of these high quality images that made it possible for us to share the marks of ownership on Twitter and get expert advice from Andrew Aberdein, one of a large and generous community of twitterstorians. (For more reflections on the highly productive relationship between digital scholarship and book history, I recommend Matthew G. Kirschenbaum and Sarah Werner, “Digital Scholarship and Digital Studies: The State of the Discipline” Book History 17 (2014) pp. 406-458, available as a pdf on Sara Werner’s blog Wynken de Worde). A digitized copy of the entire book will eventually be available as an open-access resource to scholars, teachers and students of all kinds.
All images courtesy of the OU History of Science Collections.
This Bill of Mortality is a dense document, crammed with facts and figures on death and disease in seventeenth-century England. The English started collecting data on numbers of births and deaths and causes of death in the sixteenth century as a way of tracking potential plague epidemics. This particular Bill is much reproduced because it is the total Bill of Mortality for the year 1665, which was the year London experienced a devastating plague epidemic. According to the Bill, 68,596 people in London died of the plague. For more on this plague see here and here. I like to use this Bill in class to discuss some more general issues about morbidity and mortality in the early modern world.
The top two thirds of the Bill list numbers of people buried in each parish in London and its immediate surroundings. You can see (if you look carefully at the numbers) the huge differences in numbers of deaths between parishes. The two parishes with the biggest body counts are Stepney parish, where 8595 people were buried, and St. Giles Cripplegate, where 8,069 people were buried. On the other end of the spectrum, we see Allhallows, where ten people were buried and St. John the Evangelist, where only nine people died. This reflects in part the widely varying sizes of London parishes (the parish of St. John the Evangelist was only one acre), but it also reflects the varying economic levels. Poorer parishes were much harder hit, something that did not escape contemporary observers.
If we turn to the bottom third of this document, we see all the deaths in London listed by cause of death. Obviously, plague was far and away the biggest cause of death in 1665. Other major causes of death (i.e. things that killed a thousand or more people) were: aged (1545), ague and fever (5257), chrisoms and infants (1258), consumption and tissick (4808), convulsion and mother (2036), dropsy and tympany (1478), griping in the guts (1288), teeth and worms (2614), spotted fever and purples (1929) and surfeit (1251). Several of these “causes” are actually age categories. “Aged” would include people who died of old age. Chrisoms and infants are deaths (from a variety of causes) of children under the age of one year. Likewise, the category “Teeth” includes child deaths coincident with teething. As Rebecca Onion has pointed out in a post on the Bills of Mortality, they document the very high rates of infant and child death in the early modern period.
In many (perhaps MOST!) cases, the causes of death do not fit modern disease categories. I had groups of students look up each cause of death in the Oxford English Dictionary, in order to understand the 17th-century use of the term. Many of these definitions are taken verbatim from the OED. I list them here for those who might be interested. Some of the oddest are “calenture” (in which a sailor believes the sea is a field and leaps into it) and “plannet” (which we believe to be the condition of being struck by the malign influence of a planet). Others, especially those involving the deaths of children, are very poignant. Headmouldshot and overlaid were ways that very young infants could die. And one would like to know the tragic stories behind the bleak “found dead in the street” and “grief.”
Abortive and Stilborne: Miscarried fetuses or stillborn infants.
Aged: Of advanced age; very old.
Ague and Feaver: An acute or high fever; disease, or a disease characterized by such a fever.
Appoplex and Suddenly: Apoplexy means a malady, very sudden in its attack, which arrests more or less completely the powers of sense and motion; it is usually caused by an effusion of blood or serum in the brain, and preceded by giddiness, partial loss of muscular power, etc.
Bedrid: Confined to bed through sickness or infirmity. Worn out, decrepit, impotent.
Blasted: Balefully or perniciously blown or breathed upon; stricken by meteoric or supernatural agency, a parching wind, lightning, an alleged malignant planet; the wrath and curse of heaven; blighted.
Bleeding: The flowing or dropping of blood (from a wound, etc.); hæmorrhage.
Bloody Flux: Bloody diarrhoea; disease causing such diarrhoea, spec. dysentery of infectious origin; an instance of this; now hist. or arch. Also (now rare): (an instance of) bleeding from another part of the body, spec. menstrual bleeding, esp. when excessive or prolonged.
Scowring: A looseness or flux of the bowels, diarrhœa.
Flux: An abnormally copious flowing of blood, excrement, etc. from the bowels or other organs; a morbid or excessive discharge. spec.An early name for dysentery.
Burnt: Set on fire, consumed with fire.
Scalded: Inflamed or raw as if injured by hot water.
Calenture: A disease incident to sailors within the tropics, characterized by delirium in which the patient, it is said, fancies the sea to be green fields, and desires to leap into it. The word was also used to mean fever and sometimes sunstroke.
Cancer: Any of various types of non-healing sore or ulcer.
Gangrene: Necrosis (death) of an area of tissue in the body, esp. as a result of impairment of its blood supply, often accompanied by bacterial infection and putrefaction; an instance of this process; a small circumscribed ulcer on the skin, esp. on the leg or in the mouth.
Fistula: A long, narrow, suppurating canal of morbid origin in some part of the body; a long, sinuous pipe-like ulcer with a narrow orifice.
Canker: A chronic, non-healing sore or ulcer, esp. one that extends into surrounding tissue; (in early use) spec. a cancer, or the disease cancer.
Thrush: A disease, chiefly of infants, characterized by white vesicular specks on the inside of the mouth and throat, and on the lips and tongue, caused by a parasitic fungus.
Childbed: Maternal death in childbirth or immediately after.
Chrisomes and Infants: A chrisom is an infant that dies within a month of birth (and was often buried in the “chrisom” or christening gown). An infant is a child under a year.
Cold and Cough: Respiratory sickness.
Collick and Winde: Severe paroxysmal griping pains in the belly, due to various affections of the bowels or other parts; also to the affections of which such pains are the characteristic symptom.
Consumption: abnormality or loss of humors, resulting in wasting (extreme weight loss) of the body; later used more specifically for tuberculosis.
Tissick: (Also phthisis) Coughing or wheezing; any of various diseases characterized by this, esp. asthma or bronchitis.
Convulsion: An involuntary contraction, stiffening, or ‘drawing up’ of a muscle, limb, etc.; cramp; tetanus.
Mother: A medical condition thought to arise from a disorder of the uterus, esp. its (supposed) upward displacement against other organs. Also: a condition with similar symptoms in men and children.
Distracted: Mental disturbance, perplexity. Deranged or mad.
Dropsie and Timpany: Accumulation of water in the lungs, brain, et cetera; morbid swelling, tumors.
Drowned: Killed by submersion in water.
Executed: Killed by an outside force.
Flox and Small Pox: An acute infectious disease characterized by high fever, headache and backache, and a rash which affects esp. the face and extremities and consists of pustules which heal with scarring
Found Dead in Streets, Fields, etc.: Unknown cause of death.
French pox: Syphilis.
Frighted: Affected with fright, scared.
Gout: A specific constitutional disease occurring in paroxysms, usually hereditary and in male subjects; characterized by painful inflammation of the smaller joints, esp. that of the great toe, and the deposition of sodium urate in the form of chalk-stones; it often spreads to the larger joints and the internal organs. The name is derived from the notion of the ‘dropping’ of a morbid material from the blood in and around the joints.
Sciatica: Originally: pain in the hip; disease causing such pain. In later use: the condition of having pain along the course of the sciatic nerve, radiating from the hip down the back of the leg, and most commonly resulting from protrusion of a lumbar vertebral disc.
Grief: Hardship, suffering; a kind, or cause, of hardship or suffering.
Griping in the Guts: Severe pain in abdomen and bowels.
Hanged and made away themselves: Suicide.
Headmouldshot and Mouldfallen: Disease or injury affecting the sutures or bones of the skull; a condition in which the skull is compressed in the pelvic canal during delivery, causing the cranial bones to ride over each other.
Jaundies: A morbid condition caused by obstruction of the bile, and characterized by yellowness of the conjunctiva, skin, fluids, and tissues, and by constipation, loss of appetite, and weakness.
Impoftume: A purulent swelling or cyst in any part of the body; an abscess.
Kild by severall accidents: Implies that death was caused by accidental means.
Kings evill: Scrofula (a constitutional disease characterized mainly by chronic enlargement and degeneration of the lymphatic glands), which in England and France was formerly supposed to be curable by the king’s (or queen’s) touch.
Leprosie: A disease causing scaliness, loss of pigmentation, or scabbiness of the skin; an instance or type of such disease; (now hist.). In later use: the chronic disease caused by infection with the bacterium Mycobacterium leprae, which affects mainly the skin and peripheral nerves, causing nodular and macular lesions of the skin which are often pale and scaly, and loss of sensory and motor function (esp. in the limbs) resulting in destruction of tissue and deformity of the affected parts of the body in severe untreated cases.
Lethargy: A disorder characterized by morbid drowsiness or prolonged and unnatural sleep.
Livergrown: Suffering from an enlarged liver, or a liver adherent to other part.
Meagrom and Headach: Dizziness or vertigo; headache, specifically migraine.
Measles: An infectious disease caused by a morbillivirus, characterized by a dark red maculopapular rash preceded and accompanied by catarrh and fever, usually with Koplik’s spots in the early stages, tending to occur in epidemics that chiefly affect children. In early use also: any of various other diseases causing a red rash.
Murdered and Shot: Murdered and shot.
Overlaid and Starved: To overlay is to lie over or on top of so as to suffocate (a child, etc.); to smother by lying on (generally an accident associated with nursing a baby). Starved (at nurse) is the failure of an infant take in enough nutrients from breast milk.
Palsie: Paralysis or paresis (weakness) of all or part of the body, sometimes with tremor; an instance of this.
Plague: Any infectious disease which spreads rapidly and has a high mortality rate; an epidemic of such a disease. OR A particular affliction, calamity, or evil, esp. one interpreted as a sign of divine anger or justice, or as divine punishment or retribution (usually with reference to the ten plagues of Egypt described in Exodus chapters 7 to 12).
Plannet: Struck by the evil force of a planet.
Plurisie: Abscess of the ribs or inner surface of the chest; pain in the chest or the side, especially when stabbing in nature and exacerbated by inspiration or coughing.
Poysoned: Affected, made ill, or killed by poison (of a wound, etc.) infected.
Quinsie: Inflammation or swelling of the throat; tonsillitis
Rickets: A disease of children caused by vitamin D deficiency, which results in abnormal calcium and phosphorus metabolism and deficient mineralization of bone (osteomalacia) with skeletal deformity. In later use also (chiefly with distinguishing word): any of various other diseases resembling this, affecting children, adults, or animals, and typically of metabolic, nutritional, or renal origin.
Rising of the Lights: A medical condition characterized by difficulty in breathing or a choking sensation (probably arising from various causes, such as croup, asthma, pneumonia, or pulmonary embolism); (later also) indigestion with belching; heartburn.
Rupture: A break, tear, or split in a surface or substance, esp. the skin or other tissue.
Scurvy: A disease characterized by general debility of the body, extreme tenderness of the gums, foul breath, subcutaneous eruptions and pains in the limbs, induced by exposure and by a too liberal diet of salted foods. Now recognized as due to insufficient ascorbic acid (vitamin C) in the diet.
Shingles and Swine pox: Originally an inflammation or infection of the skin, esp. when accompanied by heat and redness; spec. erysipelas (obs.). In later use: a disease of the skin characterized by an eruption of vesicles on a reddened base, typically occurring along the distribution of a cranial or spinal nerve, and accompanied (and often preceded) by severe neuralgic pain.
Sores: A place in an animal body where the skin or flesh is diseased or injured so as to be painfully tender or raw; a sore place, such as that caused by an ulcer.
Ulcer: An erosive solution of continuity in any external or internal surface of the body, forming an open sore attended with a secretion of pus or other morbid matter.
Spleen: Excessive dejection or depression of spirits; gloominess and irritability; moroseness; melancholia.
Spotted fever: A fever characterized by the appearance of spots on the skin; now spec. epidemic cerebro-spinal meningitis, and typhus or petechial fever.
Purples: Any of various diseases characterized by a dark red or purplish rash; also used of the deadliest form of smallpox
Stopping of the stomach: Want of digestion; incapacity of or difficulty in digesting food.
Stone: A hard mineral mass resembling a stone or grain of sand which may form in the kidneys by the abnormal precipitation of salts (esp. calcium oxalate) dissolved in the urine; a renal calculus.
Stranguary: A disease of the urinary organs characterized by slow and painful emission of urine; also the condition of slow and painful urination.
Surfet: Excessive consumption of food or drink; overindulgence in eating or drinking; gluttony. Also in figurative contexts.
Teeth: Children who die as result of teething complications or fever during teething.
Worms: Any endoparasitic helminth breeding in the living body of men and other animals. Usu. pl. (formerly often with the). Also, the disease or disorder constituted by the presence of these parasites.
Vomiting: The act of ejecting the contents of the stomach through the mouth; an instance of this.
Wenn: A lump or protuberance on the body, a knot, bunch, wart.
Finally, to emphasize that early modern people DID have ways of coping with illness, and that they DID NOT just lay down and wait for death when they got sick (even if that sickness was the plague) I ask students to find 17th-century remedies for some of the diseases or conditions listed as causes of death in the Bill. One group (John Stacy, Taylor Greene, Kiley Poppino, Brandon Curd, Jason Troy, Michael Rath, and Matt Banks) found a hand-written collection of recipes from a 17th– or 18th-century English manuscript currently held by the Wellcome Library in London. One page of this book is reproduced below. You will see recipes for some of the ailments listed as causes of death on the Bill, including jaundice, thrush, plague and stone.
Here’s my favorite of the recipes they came up with – because how can you resist a recipe that begins: “take a peck of garden snails”?
For Jaundice, or weakness in the stomach.
Take a peck of garden snails, wash them in beer, and put them in an iron dripping pan on a hot fire of charcoal stirring them up and down, and set one end of the pan higher than the other that the liquor may run from them, and take it out with a ladle, and when it hath done coming, they are broiled enough, put them in a mortar and bruise them shells and all. Take a quart of earth worms, scour them with water and salt and wash them very clean and beat them in a mortar, then take angelica, 2 handfuls and lay in the bottom of your pot, 2 handfuls of selendine, on the top of them a quart of rosemary flowers. Agrimony and betony of each 2 good handfuls, bears foot red dock roots, bark of barberry tree, wood sorrel each a good handful and half, of rue half a handful, of fenugreek and turmeric each an ounce, saffron dried the weight of 6 ounces, a handful of clara. When these are put together in the pot, put your worms and snails and 3 gallons of the strongest ale you can get and cover it close for 24 hours, and when you go to put fire under it put in 6 ounces of harts horn shavings, but stir not lest you make those things go to the bottom that should be on top, and set on your alembic, and distill it with a fire, you may draw 5 or 6 quarts.
I get asked this question a lot when I teach courses in the history of medicine or the history of science. Even more commonly, people tell me they “know” what plague doctors looked like: they had a mask with a long beak, goggles, gloves and a garment that covered them from chin to ankles. Indeed, the 12-year-old son of some friends of mine just dressed up as a plague doctor for Halloween in precisely this costume. But doubts about the historical accuracy of the plague mask have nagged at me for a while. If it was so common, why didn’t I ever run across mentions of this costume in historical sources or in histories of the plague written by academic historians? A Google search on “plague doctor” turns up an enormous number of images of men in beaked masks and black cloaks, and numerous sites that assert as historical fact that this is what doctors wore during plague epidemics. Let me give you a couple of my favorite examples:
There is a doctor character in the enormously popular video game Assassin’s Creed who wears a plague mask. I pulled this picture from the Assassin’s Creed Wiki, which explains that,
“To protect themselves from this pandemic, doctors dressed in a long black cloak covered with a coating of wax, along with a very primitive beak-shaped plague mask, although not all doctors chose to wear it. Within this Medico Della Peste mask, there were usually flower petals, burning incense or aromatic herbs to rid of bad smells, since it was believed that disease was transmitted through “bad air.” The eyes of the mask were also made out of glass, as it was believed that sicknesses could be caught through face-to-face contact with patients, or by touching infected objects.”
My other favorite was this fantastically creepy video on YouTube: The Plague Doctor. Set in 17th-century London, a sick gravedigger visits a plague doctor, only to be told he is dying and that the doctor will not treat him. In anger, he slashes the doctor’s protective glove, thus infecting him with the deadly plague.
My problem with these representations is that the only even remotely contemporary image I can find of a plague doctor in such a get up is this one, from 1656:
Paul Fürst, “Der Doctor Schnabel von Rom.” Reproduced from Eugen Holländer, Die Karikatur und Satire in der Medizin, 2nd ed. (Stuttgart, 1921), p. 171. Wikimedia Commons.
This image was originally a single-sheet broadside, produced by the German engraver Paul Fürst of Nuremberg. The reproduction that appears all over the internet (generally without attribution) is from Eugen Holländer’s Die Karikatur und Satire in der Medizin, 2nd ed. (Stuttgart, 1921). This entire book is available on-line here. The first thing I would note is that this is VERY late in the history of the plague. The very last plague epidemics in Europe were in the early eighteenth century. The second thing is that this is a SATIRE. As this seems to be the main primary source for what plague doctors wore and what they did, I’d like to look at it in detail. The title is “Der Doctor Schnabel von Rom” (Dr. Beak from Rome). The caption at the bottom is in German. I’ll give the original (for those who can read German but not the old-fashioned Gothic lettering) and my translation. (Corrections and suggestions are more than welcome!)
Kleidung wider den Tod zu Rom. Anno 1656. Also gehen die Doctores Medici daher zu Rom, wann sie die an der Pest erkranckte personen besuchen, sie zu curiren und tragen, sich widerm Gifft zu sichern, ein langes kleid von gewäxtem Tüch ihr Angesicht ist verlarvt, für den Augen haben sie grosse Crÿstalline Brillen, wider Nasen einen langen Schnabel mit wolriechender Specereÿ, in der Hände, welche mit Handschüher wol versehen ist, eine lange Rüthe und darmit deüten sie, was man thun, und gebraüchen sol.
Clothing to ward off death in Rome, 1656. The doctors of medicine in Rome go about thus, when they visit people sick with the plague in order to take care of them. And they wear, to protect themselves from poison [infection], a long robe made of waxed cloth. Their face is wrapped up; in front of their eyes they have large crystal glasses; over their nose they have a long beak filled with good-smelling spices; in their hands, which are protected by gloves, they carry a long rod and with this they indicate what people should do and what [medicines] they should use.
This sounds exactly like the description of the plague doctor’s attire from the Assassin’s Creed Wiki (and numerous other websites). That seems pretty conclusive, right? It’s a primary source document, so here we have a seventeenth-century person’s description of plague doctors he actually observed. Or do we? Here’s what gives me pause. The verses on either side of the figure are what mark the broadside as satirical (also calling the figure “Dr. Beak”). These verses are in a mixture of Latin and German. Again, I will include them here in both the original languages and my translation. I am not nearly good enough to render them into rhymed English, but I’ve tried to capture the sense of the originals. (Again, suggestions and corrections are welcome!)
Vos Creditis, als eine fabel
quod scribitur vom Doctor Schnabel
der fugit die Contagion
et aufert seinen Lohn darvon
Cadavera sucht er zu fristen
Gleich wie der Corvus auf der Misten
Ah Credite, sihet nicht dort hin
Dann Romae regnat die Pestin.
Quis non deberet sehr erschrecken
für seiner Virgul oder stecken
qua loquitur als wär er stumm
und deutet sein consilium.
Wie mancher Credit ohne zweiffel
das ihn tentir ein schwartzen teuffl
Marsupium heist seine Höll
und aurum die geholte seel.
You believe it is a fable
What is written about Dr. Beak
Who flees the contagion
And snatches his wage from it
He seeks cadavers to eke out a living
Just like the raven on the dung heap
Oh believe, don’t look away
For the plague rules Rome.
Who would not be very frightened
Before his little rod or stick
By which means he speaks as though he were mute, and indicates his decision
So many a one believes without doubt
That he is touched by a black devil
His hell is called “purse”
And the souls he fetches are gold.
The verses begin by marking the plague doctor as an UNFAMILIAR sight. You may believe what I’m about to tell you is just a fable, the author begins. In other words, this is NOT how doctors in Germany dress. This is a strange, Italian custom. And then he goes on to lampoon the plague doctors of Rome. They protect themselves from contagion, but they profit from it. They seek out the dying to get money from them, just like ravens (or crows) scavenging in a pile of shit. Like the Devil, who goes among the dying, seeking souls he can drag into hell, Dr. Beak goes among the dying, seeking gold coins to put in his purse. This satire certainly resonates with a good bit of contemporary critique of doctors as rapacious and greedy. But I wonder, was the comparison of the plague doctor to a raven inspired by the resemblance of the plague mask to a bird’s beak, or was it the other way around? Was the mask in this image exaggerated to look beak-like because of the comparison to an avian scavenger? Note that the fingers on the gloves are elongated and pointed, like the talons of a bird. There is nothing in either the poem or the passage below the image to indicate why this might be medically efficacious. Finally, at the end of the rod is an hour glass with wings, a visual symbol of the saying “tempus fugit” (time flies) (originally from Virgil’s Georgics). Surely no plague doctor ever literally carried such a device! Rather, the emblem suggests that the doctor is the harbinger of death rather than a savior. All things considered, I’m left unconvinced that this is a literal description of the costume of a plague doctor. And I’ve yet to find evidence that would convince me.
Why does it matter whether or not plague doctors dressed up like ghoulish carrion birds? One problem I have with the popularity of the figure of the plague doctor is that it erases the very real contributions of women to medical practice generally, and to the care of plague victims specifically. Numerous historians of medicine (I’m thinking here of Monica Green, Katherine Park, Margaret Pelling, Mary Fissell, Deborah Harkness and Gianna Pomata among others) have documented the presence of female healers in medieval and early modern Europe. These women did not function exclusively as midwives (although all midwives were women). Rather, they performed a wide range of medical services and treated men, women and children for all kinds of illnesses and injuries. A substantial amount of medical care in medieval and early modern Europe was provided by women, and yet women do not figure in any popular representations of the plague, except perhaps as victims. In 17th-century England, where the creepy video is ostensibly set, the people who sought out plague victims and determined the cause of death were women called “searchers.” They did the dangerous work of examining dead bodies, not the doctors. (For more on the searchers, see here.) Indeed, there were repeated accusations in early modern London that “doctors,” that is, men with medical degrees who were members of the Royal Society of Physicians, fled London for their country houses whenever a plague epidemic threatened. These same doctors then complained bitterly about female “empirics” cutting into their business by treating plague victims.
So, what’s my answer to the question? Did plague doctors actually wear those masks? I still don’t know. But I find the question of when and why the figure of the masked plague doctor became iconic in representations of plague to be an increasingly intriguing one.
This is a guest post by Peter Barker (@voxcanis). All photos of Chinese instruments are his own.
In 2002 I was invited to a conference in China. I used the opportunity to visit the Tychonic instruments preserved in Beijing. Constructed with the help of Jesuit missionaries at the Imperial Court, the observatory was originally located inside the “Forbidden City” — the Imperial compound — but was later moved to its current location, a watchtower on the original city wall.
The instruments were made of bronze, and have survived much better than their European counterparts. Here are the original illustrations from Tycho’s book about astronomical instruments, self-published in 1598, together with pictures of similar instruments from Beijing. Here is a bipartite arc, used for accurately measuring angular distances between stars that lie near to each other.
Courtesy of OU History of Science Collections.
Compare the base with Tycho’s version.
Next is a large armillary, which could make observations of objects at any angular separation.
Courtesy of OU History of Science Collections.
After conversion from instrument readings to precise celestial coordinates, Tycho’s results were permanently recorded on a giant celestial globe, which also functioned as an analog computer. Tycho’s version was wood sheathed in copper.
Courtesy of OU History of Science Collections.
Here is the Beijing globe, with a close-up of the star patterns on its surface.
Tychonic astronomy was so successful at the Imperial Court that within 30 years books were appearing that claimed it was a Chinese invention.
The pictures from Tycho’s instrument book, plus an English translation may be found here.
Check out the biographies of men (and one woman) who made important contributions to the development of science in the Islamic world, and eventually in Europe as well, in our new pages under Islamic Astronomy. All biographies are written by students in HSCI 3013.
Medieval Moslem Astronomers (Photo courtesy of University of North Florida)
In my introduction to the course, I discussed Raphael’s painting “The School of Athens,” in which Aristotle is one of the two central figures. We will be spending a considerable amount of time in this course discussing the works of Aristotle, in the subject areas of astronomy, meteorology, physics and biology. In fact, we will spend more time examining Aristotle and his influence than any other figure in this course. However, the Aristotle that you will encounter in this history of science course is not the Aristotle you would encounter in a philosophy course or a political science course. We will focus on a few selected works by Aristotle on a relatively narrow range of topics given Aristotle’s total output. Further, there is a huge gap between the actual flesh and blood man named Aristotle who lived in Athens over two thousand years ago – a person we can only know in a fragmentary way through his extant writings and some archaeological evidence – and historical reconstructions of Aristotle. I say “historical reconstructionS” (plural), because there are and have been many many different historical reconstructions of Aristotle. In different times and places people have imagined who Aristotle was and why he was important in very different ways.
Last week we explored some of these different ways of imaging Aristotle. We began by looking at one of the most common images of Aristotle in the modern Western world. A Google image search on “Aristotle” pulls up dozens of versions of this image:
Wikimedia Commons.
This bust is a Roman copy in marble of a Greek bronze bust of Aristotle by Lysippus, ca. 330 BCE. I think the fact that this is the first and most common image of Aristotle that pops up on a Google search suggests that we in modern America tend to see Aristotle as a venerable, ancient, historical figure. We see him as very far removed in time from us – the marble bust is not nearly as lifelike as the richly imagined, colorful figure in Raphael’s painting. Further, we tend to associate Aristotle with a number of fields that have been (and to a large extend continue to be) predominantly white and male: science, philosophy, and politics. (I judge this in part by the types of websites that use this particular image of Aristotle.) And yet, this is not, historically the only way of imagining Aristotle or the only way of assessing his importance. I asked students to explore different ways of imaging Aristotle by finding images of Aristotle from a range of periods and contexts. Each of the five discussion groups selected a different image of Aristotle and discussed possible meaning of this image. Each group selected a different image – and to my relief, no two groups picked the same image! The five groups picked widely varying images in different media, by different artists and from different time periods. I’ve arranged them here in chronological order, along with some of the information and links each group found.
1) This image was contributed by Zachary Connor, Sofia Buscarini, Lindsey Hamilton, Bryce Corlee, Nicole Palmeter, Benjamin Kraft and Cameron Owens.
British Library MS Or.2784, folio 96r.
This is an illumination from an Arabic manuscript produced in Baghdad in the first half of the thirteenth century. It depicts Aristotle (on the right) instructing Alexander the Great (on the left). The manuscript itself is a compilation of Aristotle’s works on animals together with works by the Syrian physician ‘Ubayd Allah ibn Bakhtishu. It is titled The Description and Uses of Animals, and it is currently held by the British Library in London (MS Or.2784, folio 96r). The artist is unknown. The group noted that this depiction of Aristotle in a medieval Arabic manuscript indicates his and his fellow Greeks’ influence on the approach to science in Islamic culture. They further noted the interesting detail that Aristotle is positioned slightly higher than Alexander the Great, perhaps indicating the very high esteem philosophy and Aristotle were held in the Islamic world.
2) These images were contributed by Conrad Young, Taylor Greene, Brandon Curd, Jason Troy, Kiley Poppino, Matt Banks, Michael Rath, John Stacy and Addie Bickerstaff.
Hans Baldung Grien, “Phyllis and Aristotle”(1503), held in Louvre. Wikimedia Commons.Hans Baldung Grien, “Phyllis and Aristotle” (1513). Wikimedia Commons.Aquamanile in the Form of Aristotle and Phyllis, Southern Netherlands, late 14th or early 15th century. Metropolitan Museum Of Art.
All of them depict the apocryphal story of Aristotle and Phyllis, a popular tale in the late Middle Ages and early modern period. There are some different variations of this story, but the basic gist is that Phyllis is the wife or mistress of Aristotle’s student Alexander the Great. In one version, Aristotle tells Alexander to refrain from sexual intercourse, and in retaliation, Phyllis seduces Aristotle, telling him that she will have sex with him if he will get down on all fours like a beast and let her ride him. The group thought that these images humanized Aristotle, commonly regarded as the father of Western philosophy. These images – which portray a woman using her powers of seduction to overcome the male intellect – may also reflect changing ideas about women and gender in this period. For more images of this story, click here. For a nice thought piece on this story, see Justin Smith’s blog.
3) This image was contributed by Zachary Smith, Eric Lopez, Austin Dickerson, Sam Black, Drew Bonham, Michael McQuaid, Justin Thrash, Sage Ranallo and Justin Mullins.
Jusepe de Ribera, “Aristotle” (1637). Wikimedia Commons.
This is a painting of Aristotle produced in 1637 by the Spanish artist Jusepe de Ribera. It is currently in the Indianapolis Museum of Art. It was one of six in a series commissioned for the Prince of Lichtenstein, all of which were ancient philosophers. The group pointed out that Ribera has depicted Aristotle in contemporary dress, rather than historical garb. Also, he holds a book and paper (two inventions that came long after Aristotle’s lifetime!). Ribera’s perception of Aristotle is that of an impoverished philosopher (note the torn sleeve), something that in the time period was becoming more prominent – very much akin to the “starving artist image” now. Perhaps his implication was that philosophers are not motivated by money. If you zoom in on the image, you can see that the top paper under Aristotle’s hand contains the artist’s signature. The paper below this appears to contain geometrical diagrams.
4) This image was contributed by Wamika Kumar, Vanessa Maynard, Kim Brooks, Courtlan Roland, Tanner Linn, Nathan McGuffey, Jessica Caballero and Morgan Blodgett.
Rembrandt, Aristotle with a Bust of Homer” (1653). Wikimedia Commons.
This is a painting titled “Aristotle with a Bust of Homer.” It was painted by the Dutch artist Rembrandt Van Rijn in 1653 for a Sicilian nobleman and art collector named Don Antonio Ruffo. The painting is now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. The group states that the image has been interpreted in different ways by scholars. Some argue that the image depicts Aristotle looking at the bust of Homer, envying his work. Another argument is that since Aristotle’s right hand (the dominant hand) is on top of the bust of Homer’s head, and his left hand is in the dark holding a golden chain, Rembrandt implies that knowledge (hand on brain) is more important than wealth (the hand with the golden chain in the dark). There are some interesting similarities with the Ribera image painted just a few years earlier. Rembrandt’s Aristotle, like Ribera’s, is dressed in contemporary fashion, and the theme of the superiority of knowledge to wealth may be present in both. However, note how splendidly Rembrandt’s Aristotle is dressed, with the enormous puffy silky sleeves and the heavy gold chain. This is a far cry from the tattered robes on Ribera’s Aristotle! For a great spoof of this image, see “Arisfroggle Contemplating the Bust of a Twerp.”
5) This image was contributed by Daniel Chamberlain, Jacob Moore, Ryan Fransen, Jacob Curtis, Laine Abernathy, Jessica Robertson, Carlos Ybarra, James Johnson and Collin Wade.
Francesco Hayez, “Aristotle” (1811). Wikimedia Commons.
This is a painting of Aristotle from 1811 by the Italian artist Francesco Hayez. He painted this while in Rome (1809-1814). It is currently in the Galleria dell’ Academia in Venice, Italy. Venice was Hayez’s hometown. In the painting, Hayez shows Aristotle deep in contemplation. Unlike the other four images of Aristotle, where he is shown in contemporary dress, Hayez portrays Aristotle in classical garb. The group suggests that by painting Aristotle in an ancient costume, Hayez depicts him more of a person from the past (rather like our picture of Aristotle today, as represented by the bust at the beginning of this post.) He’s someone in the pages of a history book, not a person whose work is still relevant. This could show the progression of modern thinking in Italy and Rome around the beginning of the nineteenth century.
If anyone has further information or thoughts on any of these images, or has more images of Aristotle to contribute, please comment!
Ptolemy, Epytoma… Almagestu{m} (Venice, 1496). OU History of Science Collections.
Welcome to the website/blog for HSCI 3013.001, The History of Science to the Age of Newton, at the University of Oklahoma. This site is still under construction, so please excuse the empty pages — they will all be filled eventually! This site contains (or will contain when it’s finished) almost all the reading material for HSCI 3013. It also contains links and references to some of the many resources for investigating the history of science in premodern times. I welcome suggestions for other resources and will add these throughout the semester. In addition to content that I add, there will also be a substantial amount of student-generated content. This site is open to the public, and I hope it is useful to people interested in exploring these topics. Some features of the course — the gradebook, a few copyright protected readings, and quizzes — will be on a private D2L site accessible only to students enrolled in the course.
The class is organized into three sections: Heavens, Earth, and Human Body. We will start this week with the heavens and examine ancient Greek ideas about the cosmos.
Before Newton 