Secrets of Wellness
Internet Snarkive: The Mistakes Are In The Past
Here lies an earthly trove of misguided ideas about gender, race, medicine, and everything else we were sure of. Whether you are researching when feeding mercury to syphilitic pregnant women was S.O.P., or just browsing the known conceptualized shapes of the globe; Internet Snarkive aims to better connect you to the daunting amount of books in our collection. Now grab an opium-phosphate, turn on your light-bath, and prepare for a crash course in our cracked history.
Operating Table, 1754
Here are the notes on the treatments of various known ailments to the human body according Professor Gerard Van Swieten. Translated into English, the volume comes from the University of Leydon (modern spelling: Leiden), Netherlands, established in 1575. While troubles with “burns and cancers” are bound to lead to getting hacked open in the 18th century, these were especially strange because of the expression of the patient, forcefulness of the procedure that was captured pretty well, and the what-the-fuck of those baby heads. Engraved on copper plates.
It’s Flu Season
I miss the days when PSA’s appealed to the public’s inner-Louis Caroll for flu-prevention versus a more self-congratulatory nature. We’ve also sadly devolved from ‘Muzzle the Microbe’ to a less-inspired ‘Cover the Cough’ campaign. Anyways, this is from a great book called ‘How To Keep Well’, full of helpful tips on not killing your baby or eating milk with flies in it,
Hide Your Anatomical Shame!
French medical book published in 1598, Paris with the fullest depictions of the human anatomy available. The illustrations in this volume are bizarre and beautiful, and occasionally accurate. It was intended as a comprehensive guide to surgery as we knew it, and the title reads “with portraits and figures of all human body parts and instruments necessary for the surgeon”.
It’s Good For You
The healing power of violet light
These are devices that emit ultraviolet light for the treatment of tuberculosis and lupus. Niels Finsen discovered that lupus was amenable to the rays when separated out by a system of quartz crystals. There was about a 50% recovery rate among patients undergoing this “light-ray” or phototherapy treatment. In this volume, a doctor recounts a patient on his deathbed - emaciated beyond recognition with TB - making a full recovery in about 7 months.
DO NOT LET THIS MAN MASSAGE YOUR FEET
History Of Prosthetic Hands
This is a representation of some of the first recorded artificial hands. Fig. 140 - 142 had been written about since the 15th century, supposedly created and used by an M. Sergius, great-grandson of Cataline. It was basically this hulking iron thing that was connected to the armor of the wearer allowing them to hold the reigns of their horses with it and wielding a weapon with their free hand. Later came an improvement that would remain largely unchanged until the 18th century.
On Fig 143:
“Here the thumb is immovable and the fingers are endowed with the power of protrusion In the hand of [Fig 140] the fingers are closed one after the other by the action of seceral springs, but in the hand of [Fig 142] all the fingers are opened and closed simultaneously under the influence of a single spring.”
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