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How Mosquitoes Changed Everything

July 29, 2019

In 1698, five ships set sail from Scotland, carrying a cargo of fine trade goods, including wigs, woollen socks and blankets, mother-of-pearl combs, Bibles, and twenty-five thousand pairs of leather shoes

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How Mosquitoes Changed Everything

Monday, July 29th, 2019

There was even a printing press, with which the twelve hundred colonists aboard planned to manage a future busy with contracts and treaties. To make space for the luxuries, the usual rations for food and farming were reduced by half. But farming wasn’t the point. The ships’ destination was the Darien region of Panama, where the Company of Scotland hoped to create a trading hub that would bridge the isthmus and unite the world’s great oceans, while raising the economic prospects of a stubbornly independent kingdom that had just struggled through years of famine. The scheme was wildly popular in the desperate country, attracting a wide range of investors, from members of the national Parliament down to poor farmers; it has been estimated that between one-quarter and one-half of all the money in circulation in Scotland at the time followed the trade winds to Panama.

The expedition met with ruin. Colonists, sickened by yellow fever and strains of malaria for which their bodies were not prepared, began to die at the rate of a dozen a day. “The words that are repeated to the point of nausea in the diaries, letters, and accounts of the Scottish settlers are mosquitoes, fever, ague, and death,” the historian Timothy C. Winegard writes in his sprawling new book, “The Mosquito: A Human History of Our Deadliest Predator” (Dutton). After six months, with nearly half their number gone, the survivors—except those too weak to move, who were left behind on the shore—returned to their ships and fled north. Still, they kept dying in droves, their bodies thrown overboard. When a relief mission arrived in Darien, they found, of all the wigs and combs and shoes and ambition that had left Scotland, only a deserted printing press on an empty beach.

…continue reading ‘How Mosquitoes Changed Everything’

thumb image via The New Yorker Illustration by Ariel Davis

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The New Yorker

The Surgeon Had a Dilemma Only a Nazi Medical Text Could Resolve.

May 30, 2019

Was it ethical to use it? The meticulous, four-color paintings in the Pernkopf Topographic Anatomy of Man, which she had received as a gift upon graduating from medical school, were created by Viennese medical illustrators who were such ardent Nazis they included swastikas and lightning-bolt SS symbols in their signatures

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In a Colombian Family’s Dementia, a Journey Through Race and History

May 30, 2019

Just north of Medellín, the discovery of a disease-causing mutation in a previously unstudied family is rewriting history and upending racial myths

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In a Colombian Family’s Dementia, a Journey Through Race and History

Thursday, May 30th, 2019

PIEDAD’S HOUSE sits above the cemetery in Girardota, Colombia, just north of Medellín. From her front porch, the view gives way to green hills, each home to hamlets with sugarcane plots and tile-roofed houses tucked in among the trees. One of these hillside hamlets is where Piedad and her 11 siblings grew up. Their father, Horacio, worked in cane fields and sugar mills, and their mother sold fruit from her orchard; their grandmother made pots from clay she dug across the river. When earthquakes destroyed their home in 1979, the family moved into town and left rural life behind.

Horacio showed the first symptoms of dementia soon afterward. He ignored the food he was served and got lost returning from church. He grew aggressive and delusional, and Piedad would return from her job at a sugar-packing plant to help bathe him, holding back tears as he kicked and punched. Horacio died in 1984 from what his doctors called senile dementia, the same disease that killed his father and three of his siblings.

By the early 2000s, four of Piedad’s own siblings, then in their 40s and 50s, were showing signs of dementia. A local doctor referred them to a group of investigators in Medellín who studied families with a unique genetic mutation that causes early-onset Alzheimer’s disease. Nicknamed the Paisa mutation after the people of Colombia’s Antioquia region, who call themselves paisas, it occurred on a gene, called presenilin-1, implicated in familial Alzheimer’s. The families affected tended to be white farmers living in remote mountain towns that felt untouched by time.

…continue reading ‘In a Colombian Family’s Dementia, a Journey Through Race and History’

Thumb image via undark

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Undark

The Lucrative Black Market in Human Fat

May 28, 2019

In 16th- and 17th-century Europe, physicians, butchers, and executioners alike hawked the salutary effects of Axungia hominis

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America’s Long History With the Anti-Vaccination Movement

April 24, 2019

To better understand the controversy over New York’s measles outbreak, you have to go back to the late 19th century

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Historians Expose Early Scientists’ Debt to the Slave Trade

April 5, 2019

Hans Sloane collected specimens of cacao in Jamaica in the 1680s. Sloane often collected on or near slave plantations, taking advantage of slavery’s infrastructure to advance his science

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Historians Expose Early Scientists’ Debt to the Slave Trade

Friday, April 5th, 2019

At the dawn of the 1700s, European science seemed poised to conquer all of nature. Isaac Newton had recently published his monumental theory of gravity. Telescopes were opening up the heavens to study, and Robert Hooke and Antonie van Leeuwenhoek’s microscopes were doing the same for the miniature world. Fantastic new plants and animals were pouring in from Asia and the Americas. But one of the most important scientists alive then was someone few people have ever heard of, an apothecary and naturalist named James Petiver. And he was important for a startling reason: He had good connections within the slave trade.

Although he rarely left London, Petiver ran a global network of dozens of ship surgeons and captains who collected animal and plant specimens for him in far-flung colonies. Petiver set up a museum and research center with those specimens, and he and visiting scientists wrote papers that other naturalists (including Carl Linnaeus, the father of taxonomy) drew on. Between one-quarter and one-third of Petiver’s collectors worked in the slave trade, largely because he had no other options: Few ships outside the slave trade traveled to key points in Africa and Latin America. Petiver eventually amassed the largest natural history collection in the world, and it never would have happened without slavery.

Petiver wasn’t unique. By examining scientific papers, correspondence between naturalists, and the records of slaving companies, historians are now seeing new connections between science and slavery and piecing together just how deeply intertwined they were. “The biggest surprise is, for a topic that has been ignored for so long, how much there was once I started digging,” says Kathleen Murphy, a science historian at California Polytechnic State University in San Luis Obispo who’s writing a book about the topic. She adds, “There’s a tendency to think about the history of science in this—I don’t want to say triumphant, but—progressive way, that it’s always a force for good. We tend to forget the ways in which that isn’t the case.”

…continue reading ‘Historians Expose Early Scientists’ Debt to the Slave Trade’

Image: Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=35195

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Science

The Surprising (and Long) Story of the First Use of Ether in Surgery

March 28, 2019

In the small town of Jefferson, Georgia, about 20 miles from the University of Georgia in Athens, a 26-year-old physician named Crawford Williamson Long removed a tumor from the neck of a man named James Venable while Venable was anesthesized with ether. The date was March 30, 1842

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Whose History?

March 8, 2019

Scholars and students attempt to correct years of archival neglect at Johns Hopkins. After securing funding from the Berman Institute of Bioethics’ Exploration of Practical Ethics program, they reached out to existing organizations at the university, like the Black Faculty and Staff Association, to get their feedback

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How Mosquitoes Changed Everything

How Mosquitoes Changed Everything

The Surgeon Had a Dilemma Only a Nazi Medical Text Could Resolve.

The Surgeon Had a Dilemma Only a Nazi Medical Text Could Resolve.

In a Colombian Family’s Dementia, a Journey Through Race and History

In a Colombian Family’s Dementia, a Journey Through Race and History

The Lucrative Black Market in Human Fat

The Lucrative Black Market in Human Fat

America’s Long History With the Anti-Vaccination Movement

America’s Long History With the Anti-Vaccination Movement

Historians Expose Early Scientists’ Debt to the Slave Trade

Historians Expose Early Scientists’ Debt to the Slave Trade

The Surprising (and Long) Story of the First Use of Ether in Surgery

The Surprising (and Long) Story of the First Use of Ether in Surgery

Whose History?

Whose History?

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