Nexican Pharmacy Poster (detail)
Dan Funderburgh
from The Artist’s Guide to Making Money
Male enhancement spam, cleverly recast as vintage advertising ephemera: Dan Funderburgh’s contribution to the The Artist’s Guide to Making Money (”Disclaimer: Do not expect any actual advice, tips, or tricks for making money. We can in no way guarantee that you will ever make money as an artist, or otherwise.”).
Via Good Magazine.
Add comment May 31st, 2007
Anatomical Venus Wax Model at the Semmelweiss Medical Museum
by Curious Expeditions
Some posts on one of my favorite topics: first, Curious Expeditions had a first-hand account of a visit to the Josephinum. Then, Proceedings of the Athanasius Kircher Society followed up by listing no less than fourteen other museums, almost all European, with notable collections of wax sculpture or moulage (La Specola is #2).
Of course, if you’re going to plan a summer jaunt to Europe to commune with medical models, why limit yourself to wax and moulage? Curious Expeditions also “ran into” an ivory obstetric figurine by Zick at the Semmelweis Medical Museum, and have a smashing flickrset of the occasion, from which I abducted the Venus image at the top of this post. I’m convinced Curious Expeditions are the new Rick Steves of the wunderkammer set. . .
3 comments May 31st, 2007
image: honey in an istanbul market, from culiblog
Why doesn’t honey need to be refrigerated?
My mentor Tom (who taught me most of what I know about teaching) loved to ask this question on biology quizzes. It’s my favorite kind of question: it forces you to apply general scientific principles to a new situation, not a far-fetched one, but a common situation you’d never thought about before. Although I could reason it out, I was embarrassed that I’d never bothered to wonder why honey has such a long shelf life. There are many small puzzles like this in daily life, that go completely unexamined.
Anyway, honey is antibacterial primarily because it’s so highly concentrated - there is significantly less water in honey (which is about 80% sugar and less than 20% water) than in a bacterial cell. To put it crudely, the honey sucks the water out of the bacteria by osmosis, and the bacteria deflate. Honey can also draw water out of humid air - supposedly, placing honey in pastries keeps them from going stale as quickly. The principle of osmosis is essential to biology, and this answer is the most important one.
But honey has other antibacterial properties as well. Its acidity impedes the growth of many microbes, it contains a variety of antioxidants, and it releases low levels of hydrogen peroxide when diluted. You can see why all of these properties would be adaptive: bees don’t want bacteria raiding their pantries any more than we do!
The exact composition and flavor of honey depend on the types of flowers the bees are allowed to harvest; some honeys, like active manuka honey, are reputed to have increased antibacterial properties and are sold as medicinal supplements. (FYI - Meadowfoam honey, while not notably medicinal, tastes mindblowingly like toasted marshmallow. Try it, it’s amazing.)
Honey was used in the ancient world as a medicine and preservative (guess what was used to embalm Dracula’s detatched head?) But for a while honey seems to have been ignored by the medical community, which is strange, because studies are now finding that honey may be just as good as many other antibacterial treatments for topical wounds like diabetic ulcers, which are notoriously persistent.
My mother has impaired circulation (non-diabetic) and her injuries take months to heal over, even with state-of-the-art burn creams and special bandaging. I’ve convinced her to try honey next time: it would be cheaper and easier to find, it would keep bandages from sticking, it would absorb the fluid that leaks from these wounds, and according to several users, it smells much better than the typical topical ointment. (Why do medicines taste and smell so awful, anyway?) The whole idea seems so obvious, I’m surprised I’ve never heard of honey as a folk remedy, the way Aloe vera is touted for sunburn: in my family we cut leaves off the plant and squeezed the gel straight onto the burn. But it turns out there’s not much scientific evidence to support this kind of use of the plant. Maybe we should have used honey?
Here’s a final question: if honey is antibacterial, why can’t you feed it to babies? It turns out honey preserves not just the heads of putative vampires, but also the spores of C. botulinum, which causes the rare but serious disease of botulism. The botulinum spores won’t proliferate in the honey, but they can’t be removed, either (sterilizing them by common methods would compromise the quality of the honey). These spores are harmless to healthy adults, but infants under one year of age can become seriously, even fatally ill. So if you try honey as a topical ointment on yourself or others, be careful not to use it where a baby could ingest it.
4 comments May 30th, 2007
This is so self-indulgent, I have to apologize in advance. But I couldn’t resist posting Lily Burana’s description of the redoubtable, delectable Hugh Laurie in House, M.D.:
Constantly described as “brilliant but flawed,” House speaks to the part of us that wants to believe that we are so amazing, people will withstand our dread obnoxiousness to bask in our brainy, radiant glow. (Salon)
Damn right!
Although Burana’s piece is fluff, it captures the silly, navel-gazing indulgence of the celebrity crush quite well. Hugh Laurie isn’t Gregory House. Everything, down to the American accent, is an act. Right? Right.
But then Laurie goes and says something like this to Men’s Vogue:
“Probably, I fear happiness because I don’t know what follows,” he ventures. “To say ‘I’ve accomplished something,’ or ‘I look around and I see that my life pleases me,’ that would feel like a kind of death. If things ever were good enough, I wouldn’t know what to do afterwards.”
Damn right!
Sigh.
Add comment May 30th, 2007
You go, girlfriend.
From a window display in a comic book store in Toronto. Go see the rest of the photos for the Middle-earth doppelgangers of Beaker, Animal, the Chef, etc. (warning: Muppet blood is involved).
Via the essential Table of Malcontents, which has nearly obviated my need to blog at all.
1 comment May 30th, 2007
You’ve probably heard the recent reports of a winged cat. The cat’s Chinese owner
says the wings, which contain bones, make her pet look like a ‘cat angel’. Her explanation is that the cat sprouted the wings after being sexually harassed.
“A month ago, many female cats in heat came to harass him, and then the wings started to grow,” she said.
However, experts say the phenomenon is more likely down to a gene mutation, and say it shouldn’t prevent the cat living a normal life. (source)
Did the tomcat grow these wings just to fly away from his groupies? How Lamarckian of him!
More on winged cats at the end of this post. . . but first, there are much odder stories blamed on “gene mutations”. I ran across this dreadful mess in a 2005 issue of Pravda:
Geneticists say that mutations seriously change the set of chromosomes, and people with mutations can thus hardly be called humans.
In Yerevan in the former Soviet republic of Armenia, 18-year-old girl Narine Aivasyan shocked doctors with her unusual disease. The girl complained about an abscess on her wrist that had been hurting her for a long period already. When doctors opened the bandage on Narine’s hand they saw two very thin thorns sticking out of the hand. . . Doctors removed from 70 to 100 thorns from the girl’s arm every day. But they still appeared later, which suggested there were two or three parasite cells still staying in the girl’s organism. Doctors from many countries stated there was not a surgical but rather a microbiological problem.
When researchers studied the bigger thorns they arrived at a conclusion that they were no longer of vegetative origin. As a result of mutation, the patient got new unknown cells, some sort of a hybrid of a human and a plant. In other words, the young girl was turning into a cactus.
Yikes! I have no idea what is wrong with Narine, but I seriously doubt she was a Triffid. Honestly, I find the quality of this “journalism” far scarier than the ludicrous idea of cactus-human hybrids.
Unfortunately, it’s on the internet, and there are quite a few people out there who think that anything published on the internet is reliable. Including some of my former students.
So where should one go for reliable information about genetic diseases, without running into questionably sane sensationalism? My favorite authority is the invaluable OMIM (Online Mendelian Inheritance in Man). Users can search OMIM by the name of a gene, the name of its associated disease, or keywords (Tim at Sciencesque uses OMIM’s search function to select random genes for review). But I’ve found that even for senior biology majors, the information in OMIM can be dense and difficult. It’s best to supplement OMIM with some alternative, accessible, trustworthy sources - and ScienceRoll has compiled exactly such a useful list. I highly recommend bookmarking it.
Back to the winged cats. In fact, they do exist. But the usual explanation is matted hair, not mutation. Henry David Thoreau documented the first report of a winged cat in Walden:
she was of a dark brownish-grey colour, with a white spot on her throat, and white feet, and had a large bushy tail like a fox; that in the winter the fur grew thick and flattened out along her sides, forming strips ten or twelve inches long by two and a half wide, and under her chin like a muff, the upper side loose, the under matted like felt, and in the spring these appendages dropped off. They gave me a pair of her ‘wings,’ which I keep still. There is no appearance of a membrane about them. Some thought it was part flying squirrel or some other wild animal, which is not impossible, for, according to naturalists, prolific hybrids have been produced by the union of the marten and the domestic cat. This would have been the right kind of cat for me to keep, if I had kept any; for why should not a poet’s cat be winged as well as his horse?
Thoreau’s “poet’s cat” sounds much like my own cat in appearance and coloring. Her fur forms felt-like dreadlocks that I have to cut out with scissors. Unattended, they could easily become ten inches long and stiff, like wings, before being shed when the anchor hairs fall out. (I doubt Thoreau appreciated what a pain it would be grooming a “poet’s cat”.)
Many cases of winged cats made serious news during the last century. In 1926, Time Magazine reported a case near Wapato, WA (where I spent several childhood summers). Most of the “wings” were probably caused by matted fur, or a genetic collagen deficiency called feline cutaneous asthenia (the cat equivalent of Ehlers-Danlos syndrome). Creative taxidermy artists have also pieced together fake winged cats.
The Chinese winged cat supposedly had bones in its “wings;” neither matted fur nor FCA (nor taxidermy, since it’s alive) would explain that. I’ve found large sticks and burrs completely encased in my cat’s matted fur, and they feel like small bones, so I’m skeptical. But if the wings really have a bone structure, then the cat may have supernumerary (extra) limbs of some degree. The cause could be a genetic mutation - or a non-genetic birth defect.
In any case, since its owner describes it as an “angel cat,” I hope it won’t share the unfortunate fate of the Russian “Devil Cat,” which was drowned by superstitious locals in 2004.
More: the winged cat page.
1 comment May 29th, 2007
I think this might be how Lost is going to end! (C’mon, like you have a better idea?)
Original creator of this image unknown - found here.
2 comments May 25th, 2007
Cunicularii
engraving
William Hogarth
Here’s a gem of weirdness that I somehow missed, courtesy of Providentia:
Towards the end of the year 1726, a rather astounding revelation involving a 25-year old maidservant named Mary Tofts came out. Contemporary sources described her as having “a healthy, strong constitution, small size, fair complexion, a very stupid and sullen temper, and unable to read and write”. According to Mary, she was weeding in a field when a rabbit sprang up near her and caused her to run away. This left her with a craving for rabbit. . . The resulting craving for rabbit meat supposedly influenced the remainder of her pregnancy and caused her to give birth to rabbits. . . She was so skillful in her pretense that she was able to convince her midwife, John Howard, that, over the course of a month, that she had given birth to nearly twenty rabbits (all dead).
Mary, without recourse to modern conveniences such as reality shows, was dedicated and inventive in her pursuit of celebrity (and a hoped-for royal pension). But she took her rabbit trick a little too far, embarrassing a number of prominent physicians, and was imprisoned for fraud:
A Prosecution is ordered to be carried on in the Court of King’s Bench, next Hillary Term, against Mary Toft of Godalmin, for an infamous Cheat and Imposture, in pretending to have brought forth 17 præter-natural Rabbits (source).
She was eventually discharged without prosecution - perhaps everyone just wanted to pretend the whole mess hadn’t happened.
I kind of do, too. Euw.
More:
Mary Toft - the Rabbit Breeder (Medical History, 1961); includes a larger reproduction of the Hogarth engraving above
Contemporary newspaper accounts
Bibliodyssey also mentioned Mary Toft a few weeks ago, in a collection of portraits of “Remarkable Persons.”
3 comments May 25th, 2007
You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves.from “Wild Geese,” by Mary Oliver
I’m violating an unspoken Poem of the Week rule today: I’ve already featured Mary Oliver. My excuse? Mary Oliver has been astonishingly prolific over the past half-century, and hers is the cleanest, gentlest nature poetry I know.
Some critics grumble that she is insufficiently challenging or unsurprising, but she leans so heavily on the sense of wondrous recognition fed by nature, I wonder if a failure to be moved isn’t primarily a failure of that wonder-sense.
In her 1999 book, Winter Hours, Oliver says:
Years ago I set three “rules” for myself. Every poem I write, I said, must have a genuine body, it must have sincere energy, and it must have a spiritual purpose. If a poem to my mind failed any one of those categories it was rebuked and redone, or discarded. Over the forty or so years during which writing poems has been my primary activity, I have added other admonitions and consents. I want every poem to “rest” in intensity. I want it to be rich with “pictures of the world.” I want it to carry threads from the perceptually felt world to the intellectual world.
That unabashed “spiritual purpose” in her agenda would, with another poet, raise my hackles immediately. But Oliver’s poems do not “live” in an intellectual space, nor even an overtly human space. Frequently, the only Homo sapiens traversing her world are the unnamed poet-witness and the rapt reader. Yet her poems make me feel rooted in humanity, grounded in my own body, aware of this lumpy, piecemeal tangle of cells which is somehow, miraculously, taking pleasure in language. Oliver’s poems are spiritual experiences for those who would not necessarily describe themselves as spiritual.
I read Mary Oliver when I need to be calmed and reassured, but I can’t (for tedious practicalities) go lie on my face in clover and count beetles. The first four lines of this poem alone are that kind of comfort. Now, the whole poem:
“Wild Geese”
Mary Oliver, Dream WorkYou do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting -
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.
5 comments May 25th, 2007
Good advice. Sometimes I think I should give up trying to plan my life, and just do whatever xkcd says.
See the full comic here.
4 comments May 24th, 2007
Portrait (thought to be of Charlotte Spaulding)
autochrome photograph
Edward Steichen, circa 1908
This is almost as good as discovering an unknown Klimt! Two Steichen autochromes (primitive color photographs) were recently donated to the George Eastman House collection of historic photographs. (Story - Sunday’s NYT)
The dreamy palette results from the primitive autochrome process. . . but I wouldn’t mind believing that light was just a different color in the first decades of this century. The last of the Gilded Age dwindling away, and all that.
Another Steichen photograph, The Pond-Moonlight (1904), sold for almost $3 million in 2006, well more than its weight in gold. The Pond-Moonlight is often described as autochrome, but predated Steichen’s adoption of the Lumiere autochrome process, which was not widely available until 1907. The Sotheby’s auction catalog listed it as multiple gum-bichromate print over platinum. (Not that I have any clue what that means.) The Pond-Moonlight was the most expensive photograph ever auctioned - until it was surpassed in 2007 by Andreas Gursky’s 99 Cent II Diptychon.
Add comment May 23rd, 2007
Wonderful Hugh Laurie (of House, M.D.) was honored by the Queen today. Between this and the season finale of Lost, it’s a good night for the only two television shows I bother following anymore.
Add comment May 23rd, 2007
Animal Locomotion plate 770 (detail)
collotype
Eadweard Muybridge, 1887
The latest edition of I and the Bird is presented by Via Negativa as a fine found poem:
The afternoon lull had set in, but we pressed on.
We spotted the lapwings again, out in the glasswort–
How high above the water the white flashes!
Who knows how they knew they were there,
Bird with bird, birds with the very air.
The poem reminded me of Eadweard Muybridge’s beautiful photographs of birds in flight, like the one at the top of this post. U Penn has a nice archive of Muybridge.
1 comment May 23rd, 2007
Final update: unless I hear otherwise I’m going to assume the comment bug is fixed. Let me know if you have any further problems anywhere on the site, and thanks to everyone who helped me troubleshoot.
Update: I just installed an updated version of Wordpress from scratch. It may have fixed the comments bug. . . if anyone wants to give it a try, go ahead!
Sadly, a number of things on the site went haywire in the process, which is why I hate updating and delay as long as possible. Please bear with the various problems with site layout, until I can go through and fix them all (the most obvious being the lack of page links at the top of this page and a few 404 not founds). I think the feed is working ok.
********
I’ve had several of you tell me that you can’t submit comments. I have tried repeatedly and can’t replicate the problem myself - all my own comments go through. So I can’t discern if it’s my server, Wordpress, or MySQL.
I’ve repaired my MySQL database; that may have fixed it. If you’ve been trying to post a comment, would you please try again, and let me know if it still doesn’t work? Either comment on this post, just as a test, or on the original post you tried to reply to (but please, if you write a long comment, save your comment text before submitting just in case! I know how irritating it is to lose a long comment and I’m really sorry!)
If comments still won’t submit, would you please email me (cicada (at) bioephemera.com) with the exact wording of the error you get? And if anyone more WP-savvy has a guess what the fix is, let me know that too.
Thank you so much!
6 comments May 22nd, 2007
Muskrat Box
Ron Pippin
I have not gotten a single thing done today, because I’ve spent hours browsing the archive of assemblage artist Ron Pippin. Has there ever been a more charming collection of steampunk-influenced taxidermical wonder-boxes?
This cryptically inscribed muskrat skull (above) is exactly my cup of Victorian-naturalist tea. And the partially mechanized vignettes, like “The Operation,” are simply haunting:
The Operation (detail)
Ron Pippin, 1994
Ron Pippin has been represented by the Sherry Frumkin Gallery and Obsolete, Inc. But I can’t find a current exhibit of his work - if anyone knows where he might be showing pieces, let me know.
4 comments May 21st, 2007
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