Wednesday, April 08, 2009
WAX VERITAS 2
Further to the earlier posting regarding the medical museum exhibits and the horrors of medieval surgery, and whilst scanning the pictures of tourists ceding their ice cream to the quite frankly more-deserving seagulls, I found a highly entertaining background article by David Morton on some of those dubious old school interventions where - amongst other delights - we learn about clysters, The Wound Man, St. Fiacre's curse, venesection, and the wonderful saying 'the better the witch, the better the midwife'.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Posts
3 comments:
Great article. Have you read Bread of Dreams by Piero Camporesi. A fantastic book on the culture early Europe that claims that because of humger and 'bad bread' people were living in a contstant state of hallucination.
Nothing to do with this post (apologies), but check out these incredible african fetishes.
Hilarious. Those poor bastards of yore. It was telling how superior treatments came from cultures that were considered lesser.
And, that kidney stone treatment read like a lap dance from hell.
Post a Comment