More specifically concerning: health
The Diseases and Casualties this Week
23 April 2003, around 8.19.
London 39 · From the 12 of September to the 19 · 1665 Abortive23 Aged57 Bedridden1 Bleeding1 Cancer1 Childbed39 Chrisomes20 Collick1 Consumption129 Convulsion71 Dropsie31 Drowned 3. one at Stepney, one at St. Katharine near the Tower, and one at St. Margaret Westminster(3) Feaver332 Flox and Small-pox8 Found dead in the street at St. Olave Southwark1 […]
Useful Hints
11 May 2015, around 5.52.
A selection of ‘useful hints’ from Rambles in Rome (9th edition, 1903, page xiv) by S. Russell Forbes: Avoid bad odours. Do not ride in an open carriage at night. Take lunch in the middle of the day. This is essential. It is better to take a light breakfast an lunch, than a heavy breakfast […]
Montaigne 1.30
7 August 2015, around 6.34.
vos conturbemini. For to him whom fasting would make more healthful and more sprightly, and to him to whose palate fish were more acceptable than flesh, the prescription of these would have no curative effect; no more than in the other sort of physic, where drugs have no effect upon him who swallows them with […]
Crambe repetita (39)
15 August 2015, around 5.22.
Pliny the Elder, The Natural History.
new regimen
8 February 2023, around 4.37.
ὁ βίος βραχὺς, ἡ δὲ τέχνη μακρὴ, ὁ δὲ καιρὸς ὀξὺς, ἡ δὲ πεῖρα σφαλερὴ, ἡ δὲ κρίσις χαλεπή. Life is short; art is long; opportunity [the moment] fugitive; experience delusive; judgment difficult. —Hippocrates (Aphorisms, 1.1, trans. Thomas Coar, 1822) Reading some of the Hippocratic writings in the morning, I like to imagine the book […]
resile
3 November 2023, around 9.13.
‘The Putrefaction of the Flesh of the Dying Emperor Galerius’, about 1413–1415 (Ms. 63, fol. 258) It is a short step from reading about how the early Greek philosophers tried to make sense of the world (and how scholars throughout the ages have tried to make sense of early Greek philosophers) to reading medical texts […]
cleanly
5 February 2024, around 12.48.
Orpheus running into a spot of trouble, cropped from Johann Wilhelm Baur’s illustrations to Ovid (ca. 1641) The hand that desires to cleanse the sores of other men must itself be clean, or the last state of the soul it touches may be worse than the first. —Eleanor Shipley Duckett (The Gateway to the Middle […]
Adversaria (11)
29 February 2024, around 4.00.
‘…poetry, which is like modern dance for uncoordinated people’ —Claire Dederer (Love & Trouble, ch. 13) ‘…The Editor, an avuncular but testy figure who might send a few encouraging words written in a discouraging hand’ —Lavinia Greenlaw (Some Answers Without Questions, p. 99) ‘I read the letters but couldn’t understand them. I could understand the […]
a vexed question
18 April 2024, around 8.39.
That Hamann, the son of a barber-surgeon, does not ask the (im)patient reader: what ails thee?1But that begs the question of whom the text serves, which need not worry us here. [↩]