I’ve spent the last five and a half years being tended to by a score of doctors and nurses and it saved my life. It’s given me time to really examine their profession and the the abilities they have to save lives. Todays post will introduce odd facts and historical information where the roots of our current medical treatments began. Some of it is a little strange and also a little frightening but that’s how we’ve learned the skills being used today.
The first image of the doctors stitching up a wound can be found on the Edwin Smith Papyrus (1600 B.C.).
Ancient Egyptian medicine was considered so advanced that the rulers of neighboring kingdoms would often bribe, cajole, or even send someone to kidnap the Pharaoh’s best doctors.
The 3000-year-old “Ebers Papyrus” was written on a 65 foot long scroll and describes treatments for the eyes, skin, extremities, and organs. It also lists medicinal plants such as mustard, saffron, onions, garlic, thyme, sesame, caraway, and poppy seed, and offers more than 800 recipes for their use.
The Egyptians used opium as crude forms of anesthesia when operating on patients. They also created a milder painkiller by mixing water with vinegar and adding ground Memphite stone. The resulting “laughing gas” was inhaled.
The first known surgery for cataracts was performed in the Egyptian city of Alexandria in about A.D. 100.
A collection of 37 surgical instruments is engraved on the wall in the Egyptian Temple of Kom-Ombo (2d century B.C.). Some show amazing similarities to modern surgical instruments and includes scalpels, scissors, needles, forceps, lancets, hooks, and pincers.
The original Hippocratic Oath was written by a school of philosophers known as the Pythagoreans and was actually a reaction against the writings of Hippocrates. The Pythagoreans were conservative and even backward looking in many ways forbidding many medical practices, including the surgery.
The Romans considered cabbage to be a magically protective food. The philosopher Cato wrote that Romans should not only eat cabbage at every meal, but also drink the urine of someone who’d eaten cabbage two days before.
In both ancient Greece and Rome, doctors didn’t need licenses or any formal training to practice. Anyone could call himself a doctor. If his methods worked, he attracted more patients, if not, he found himself another job.
Most Roman surgical instruments were made of bronze, or occasionally of silver. Iron was considered taboo by both Greeks and Romans and was never used for surgical instruments on religious grounds.
I find it amazing that the longer I live the less I seem to know. I’ve spent many years compiling and posting odd facts and there’s no end in sight. Here are two questions that most people have wondered about at one time or another but never really obtained a reasonable answer for. Here’s your reasonable answers.
HOW DID THE WORD “COCKTAIL” ORIGINATE?
A cocktail is an alcoholic drink that comprises a number of ingredients that are mixed or shaken together. There are hundreds of different concoctions and their often sweet, colorful and interestingly named, such as the Grasshopper, the Rusty Nail, Sex on the Beach and the Slippery Nipple. There seem to be hundreds of explanations for the origination of that word but many of them are utter nonsense. This is one explanation that caught my attention, and I immediately chose to believe it. In the 18th century an innkeeper named Betsy Flanigan stole chickens from her neighbors and cooked them for her patrons. After the meal, she would serve mixed drinks and place a chicken feather in each of them. At this display, one French customer yelled, “Vive le cocktail.“ I know that sounds silly but it’s no sillier than many of the others I’ve read about. This is my favorite explanation, and I hope it’s true.
WHEN AND HOW WAS TOILET PAPER INVENTED?
The Chinese invented toilet paper in the 14th century, and the Bureau of Imperial Supplies produced paper for use by the Chinese emperors. In 1857 the first factory producing toilet paper was made by American Joseph Cayetty who named his product Therapeutic Paper, and it was sold in packs of 500 sheets. Before the invention of toilet paper, different areas of the world use different things. Public toilets in ancient Rome provided a moist sponge on the end of the stick, while the Vikings who occupied England used discarded wool, and later in the Middle Ages that was replaced by a balls of hay. In Hawaii, meanwhile, coconut husks were used, while the early Eskimos used snow and tundra moss. French royalty used strips of lace and British lords used pages from books. In the United States, newspapers and telephone directories were commonly used, as were other books. The Old Farmer’s Almanac was actually printed with a hole punched through the corner of each page so that it could be hung in outhouses, and the Sears catalog was widely used until it began being printed on glossy paper. It’s use as a hygiene product became instantly unpopular as did corncobs in farm country.
Seventy percent of Swedish women claim to have participated in a threesome.
Every year more than 11,000 Americans hurt themselves trying out bizarre sexual positions.
The average person spends two weeks of their life kissing.
Forty-six percent of women say a good night’s sleep is better than sex.
Elvis Presley called his penis “Little Elvis.”
The sperm count of American men is down thirty percent from thirty years ago.
Americans spend more money each year at strip clubs than that all the theaters and classical concert halls in the country combined.
In ancient Greece and Rome dildos were made out of animal horns, ivory, gold, silver, and even glass.
Only thirty-one percent of men admit to looking at other women when in the company of their spouse or girlfriend. Their partners say the figure is actually closer to sixty-four percent.
In ancient Rome, men found guilty of rape had their testicles crushed between two stones as a punishment.
And here’s one of my all-time favorite sexual facts: Four popes have died while participating in sexual acts.
I think today we should get a little more intellectual than the run-of-the-mill limericks and off-color jokes. After blogging for more than fifteen years I’ve become a true lover of words. Another plus about words is that they come together to form books, lots and lots of books. Every year when I make my New Year’s resolutions, I normally have one requiring that I read at least one hundred books for the year. I have never ever not accomplished that resolution. The only thing I enjoy more than writing words is reading those written by others, it’s just the coolest thing ever. So today this post will be a short trivia lesson about words, language, and books. I hope you find them interesting . . .
One of the greatest orators of all time – Demosthenes was once a stutterer who stubbornly trained himself out of it, reportedly by putting pebbles in his mouth and practicing speaking aloud.
The Polish actress Helena Modjeska was popular with audiences for her realistic and emotional style of acting. She once gave a dramatic reading in her native tongue at a dinner party of people who did know the Polish language, and her listeners were in tears when she finished. It turned out she had merely recited the Polish alphabet.
The French philosopher Rene Descartes sarcastically speculated that monkeys and apes actually have the ability to speak but choose not to.
The inhabitants of a slum called Trastevere, near Rome, speak a dialect all their own. They claim to have more than 2000 vulgar words to describe human genitalia.
The phrase “What a guy!” is a cry of derision in Great Britain and a cry of adoration in the United States.
The average daily issue of the Congressional Record carries more than 4 million words – the approximate equivalent of 20 long novels. It is printed and published overnight.
A forty-five-letter word connoting a lung disease, pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis, is the longest word in Webster’s Third New International Dictionary. The longest word in the Oxford English Dictionary means the act of estimating something as worthless- floccipaucinihilipilification, which has twenty-nine letters.
The Scottish writer Robert Bontine Conningshame Graham, who had won a seat as a Liberal member of Parliament in 1886, was suspended from the House of Commons for having the audacity to use the word “damn” in a public speech.
The word “ozone” got its name from the Greek ozo, which means “I smell.” It was first officially used in 1840.
All of the world’s main alphabets have developed from an alphabet invented 3600 years ago in the Middle East and known as the North Semitic Alphabet.
Now that the NFL season has come to a close for me, I can mourn for a few months until the baseball season starts. Then I’ll have yet another team that will tease me and disappoint me like they’ve done for 20 years and offering nothing in return. After the letdown of the Steeler loss, I decided that posting today would be a real crap shoot. Since I’m something of a science nerd, let me lay some interesting facts out for you that you may have not heard of before. No more sports postings for the foreseeable future. Let’s get started…
7% of licensed drivers in the United States are 16 and 17-year-olds, and they are responsible for 30% of all automobiles fatalities.
The driest place on Earth is Calama, in the Atacama Desert in Chile. Not a drop of rain has ever been seen there.
Using cesium atoms, the clock at the National Bureau of Standards in Washington, D.C., will gain or lose only one second in 300 years.
The lowest point that a person can get on this planet, unless he/she descends in a submarine, is where the Jordan River enters the Dead Sea – 1298 below sea level.
In terms of the resources he will use in his lifetime and the pollution he will cause; one citizen of the United States is the equivalent of approximately 80 citizens of India.
Modern archaeologists have not yet agreed on how large a crowd the Coliseum in Rome could hold in its glory days. One authority estimates 50,000, but about 45,000 is the generally accepted figure.
An acre of typical farm soil (to a depth of 6 inches) has a ton of fungi, several tons of bacteria, 200 pounds of protozoa (one celled animals) and 100 pounds of yeast.
To provide a modern person with all of life’s necessities and luxuries, at least 20 tons of raw materials must be dug from the earth each year.
There are 2,500,000 rivets in the Eiffel Tower.
The English astronomer Edmund Halley prepared the first detailed mortality tables, in 1693. Life-and-death could then be studied statistically, and the life insurance business was born.
Today is a good a day as any to look back through history to find some strange rules, laws or customs. In the past I’ve shown some seriously strange laws still on the books in this country. Now let’s take a trip back into history look at some of their foibles because in truth some of theirs are way stranger than ours.
It was once proposed in the Rhode Island legislature in the 1970s that there be enacted a two-dollar tax on every act of sexual intercourse.
A law was passed in England requiring all corpses to be buried in a wool shroud, thereby extorting support for Britain’s flagging wool trade. The act was repealed 148 years later, in 1814.
The average age of Elizabethan and Jacobean brides was about 24 and their bridegrooms around 27. The primary reason for delayed marriages was to limit births among poor people. The higher the social status, however, the younger the age at marriage.
As in Abraham’s time, it was the custom among men in Rome, when swearing to tell the truth, to place one’s right hand on one’s testicles. The English word testimony is related to this custom.
When a Chinese bystander ashore was killed accidentally by a cannon salvo of greeting from an English ship, during the early days of the China-Western trade, the English were forced to turn over to China the hapless gunner, who was promptly strangled.
The Tinguian people of the Philippines have their own way of kissing. They put their lives close to each other’s face and quickly inhale.
In 1853 Illinois passed a law that required any black entering the state and staying more than 10 days to pay a fine of $50. If he could not pay, the black could be sold into slavery for a period commensurate with the fine.
Over the centuries, playing cards have been put to strange uses. They became the first paper currency of Canada when the French governor, in 1685, use them to pay off some war debts. In 1765, the year of the Stamp Act, when every pack of playing cards was being taxed one shilling, they were also used for class admission at the University of Pennsylvania. Napoleon even used them as a ration cards during the French Revolution.
The town of High Wycombe in Buckinghamshire, England, carries on the multi-century custom called the “Weighing-in Ceremony.” In early May, the town’s mayor, mayoress, deputy town mayor, deputy mayoress, town clerk, and district counselors representing wards in the town’s boundaries are weighed in order to learn if they have grown fat at the public trough.
It’s 630am and I just finished watching Julius Caesar be murdered for the umpteenth time. What a bizarre way to start my day. I’m badly addicted to the late great HBO series, Rome, and watching it has slowly become my morning ritual. My fixation with all things Roman began in my junior year of high school with the reading of Julius Caesar and my three years of Latin language classes also helped. Later in college I became quite fond of wearing togas giving me a whole new appreciation for Roman ingenuity when it came to easy-removed clothing.
Over the years I’ve read almost everything I could find about that time period trying in vain to understand how such an advanced society could become so bloodthirsty and uncaring about human life. The history of the time gave me a great deal of respect for Spartacus and his minions who rose up and attempted to free themselves from slavery even though they were all killed in the process. I remain puzzled by the entire era which forces me to keep reading about it.
I’ve heard so many people over the years comparing the situation in this country to Rome’s decline and in some ways agreed with them. The only accurate comparison for me concerned the continuing lack of morality in Rome that seemed to increase year by year with their affluence. The United States seems to me to be in a similar rut but comparing the two in their entirety is like comparing apples with oranges.
I’ve been reading for the last few months a book written in the mid-1700’s by Edward Gibbons, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. It’s a difficult read on a good day as are all books written by so-called intellectuals. There are as many footnotes as actual text in the book and I wanted to scream out loud before I made it through the first 100 pages. It became somewhat easier when I decided to completely disregard all of the footnotes and just read the actual text. I’ll probably finish reading this cumbersome tome in a few months but it won’t be easy. Unfortunately there’s just enough valuable information in it to keep me reading to the end.
I just finished my second cup of hot black coffee and I can feel my energy level beginning to rise. I’ll be spending some time today putting the finishing touches to a print I’ve been working on. It’s an abstraction of a family photo taken last Christmas in front of the tree. It’s more of an experiment in the use of vivid colors while working with materials that are somewhat new to me. It’s preparing me for a more detailed and difficult project that I’ll be starting in the next few weeks using these same materials. As always practice and preparation make for a satisfactory completion of any project.
I’ll watch a few more minutes of Rome then get up to face my day. I should be safe since the Ides of March are still a few weeks away.
Don’t you just love the month of February? We get to celebrate Ground Hog Day, Lincoln’s Birthday, Valentines Day, and of course this year, Super Bowl Sunday. I wish I had all of the money spent preparing for and the celebration of a stupid football game. Do I sound like a sports hater? I’m not exactly sure but I think I just may be one.
I played a great deal of sports in my life and thoroughly enjoyed all of those activities. I had a great deal of success in my endeavors with Little League Baseball, Pony League Baseball, High School Baseball, Basketball and Football, American Legion Baseball, Semi-Pro Baseball, Racquetball, Bowling, and others I’ve probably forgotten. I’m not bragging but trying to show many of the reasons why I should be a screaming and hollering fanatic for all sports. Why is it that that watching sports except for possibly Little League Baseball is like getting my teeth drilled without Novocain.
As a younger man I often got caught up in following the Pittsburgh Pirates and Steelers and considered myself a loyal fan. That being said, I hate watching their games even when they’re winning. I’ve never been able to admit my dislike of watching sports because my father would have disowned me. He was an avid fan of most sports and was quite the accomplished athlete in his own right.
So why? I’ve only mentioned football because of all the Super Bowl hoop-la over the last week or so. My better-half who in truth is a fan, a fan of the parties and get-togethers, and interaction with her friends but only a so-so fan of the sport. I think the great majority of fans are just like her.
I’m reminded of our addiction as a society to sports every time I watch an episode of Spartacus. I suppose the human race has advanced from the Roman’s version of the Super Bowl held at the Coliseum where gladiators killed Christians, animals, and themselves in great numbers. With crowds of thousands cheering, betting, and orgying their hearts out. They called it then “bread and circuses” which allowed the political caste to maintain control over the great unwashed.
Do you see any similarities? These days we make it possible for our gladiators, the biggest and strongest of us, to be paid great sums of money to punish themselves and many times damage themselves critically. The money and glory, as in Rome, were all that ever mattered. Does that ring a bell for you? It not such an honorable profession when you see a super successful man like Mike Webster, formerly of the four time Super Bowl winning Steelers, suffering from amnesia, dementia, depression, and acute bone and muscle pain after his retirement. He lived out of his pickup truck or in train stations for years between Wisconsin and Pittsburgh. Webster’s wife finally divorced him six months before his death in 2002. He was only 50 years old.
Of course, Webster was responsible for his own decisions but in my opinion the system was responsible for the pressures of money, fame, performance enhancers, and steroid use that ultimately destroyed him. Unfortunately he’s not alone.
Maybe that’s what makes celebrating these sports so difficult for me.
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