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Formed as a word and a chemical compound in an culturally diverse Europe, calomel came to America as a solution to epidemics also imported. It grew into a primary gesture, both medical and commercial, of the healing professions. Opposition to its use, founded on experience with the effects of consuming it, took the form of song and satire that echoed faintly after the drug was forgotten.
Whenever a new language is learned, a new culture is also learned. Swiderski provides instructive examples of language learning situations by describing multilingual events using more than twenty of the world's languages. All aspects of language learning from the physical environment of the classroom to the perceptions of events and emotions that languages express are considered. Australian aboriginal languages and Native American languages are analyzed to illustrate the world of differences of which English, Chinese, and Russian are also a part. The politics of language teaching and the effect of language policy in the classroom are brought out in concrete examples. This study will be of interest to language teachers and the general international community as well.
X-ray vision at first was the revival of the phantasmagoria and ground-penetrating sight of earlier centuries attached to the new technology of X-rays in the early twentieth century. The image-idea of the existence of rays that allow prepared eyes to see into clothing, through walls and into the earth, not feasible in fact, generated fictions and surrogates of how living beings would experience such an ability, what they would do with it and what it would do to them. Expressing both a need and a desire, X-ray vision underwent its own development gathering elements of play, inquiry and assault independent of X-ray technology but converging with microscopy, telescopy, television and surveillance.
Though modern scientists recognize mercury as a harmful environmental pollutant and one of the world's most dangerous elemental toxins, mercury was once considered a wondrous substance capable of eradicating internal disease, revolutionizing the paint and cosmetics industries and even entertaining the masses as part of amateur magic tricks and witch doctor scams. This work traces the history of mercury in popular culture, beginning in the early eighteenth century when Dr. Thomas Dover, nicknamed "Dr. Quicksilver," began prescribing doses of raw mercury to clear out intestinal blockages and rid the body of syphilis and other diseases. The author then details the role of mercury in several med...
The Pretended Asian also traces Psalmanazar's later career as a Grub Street hack writer and how his lifelong refusal to reveal his real identity - even after Europeans stopped believing he was a native of Formosa - may have rendered Psalmanazar a permanent outsider."--BOOK JACKET.
The exchange of landscape practice between China and Europe from 1500–1800 is an important chapter in art history. While the material forms of the outcome of this exchange, like jardin anglo-chinoisand Européenerie are well documented, this book moves further to examine the role of the exchange in identity formation in early modern China and Europe. Proposing the new paradigm of “entangled landscapes”, drawing from the concept of “entangled histories”, this book looks at landscape design, cartography, literature, philosophy and material culture of the period. Challenging simplistic, binary treatments of the movements of “influences” between China and Europe, Entangled Landscapes reveals how landscape exchanges entailed complex processes of appropriation, crossover and transformation, through which Chinese and European identities were formed. Exploring these complex processes via three themes—empire building, mediators’ constraints, and aesthetic negotiations, this work breaks new ground in landscape and East-West studies. Interdisciplinary and revisionist in its thrust, it will also benefit scholars of history, human geography and postcolonial studies.
A look at the historical development of the lethal disease and its relationship with humanity. A disease of soil, animals, and people, anthrax has threatened lives for at least two thousand years. Farmers have long recognized its lasting virulence, but in our time, anthrax has been associated with terrorism and warfare. What accounts for this frightening transformation? Death in a Small Package recounts how this ubiquitous agricultural disease came to be one of the deadliest and most feared biological weapons in the world. Bacillus anthracis is lethal. Animals killed by the disease are buried deep underground, where anthrax spores remain viable for decades or even centuries and, if accidenta...
John D. Garrigus provides a profound historical corrective, showing that enslaved Blacks in Saint-Domingue were hardly complacent before the Haitian Revolution. While scholars have looked beyond the island’s shores for the forces that inspired rebellion, Garrigus documents African resistance and political organizing decades before the 1791 revolt.
This text discusses a variety of approaches in visual sociology, including exemplars that connect visual sociology to the history of documentary, photojournalism and art photography.
Parkinson's, Alzheimer's, Tourette's, multiple sclerosis, stroke: all are neurological illnesses that create dysfunction, distress, and disability. With their symptoms ranging from impaired movement and paralysis to hallucinations and dementia, neurological patients present myriad puzzling disorders and medical challenges. Throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries countless stories about neurological patients appeared in newspapers, books, medical papers, and films. Often the patients were romanticized; indeed, it was common for physicians to cast neurological patients in a grand performance, allegedly giving audiences access to deep philosophical insights about the meaning of life a...