Not-so-Great Courses

One of the Google alerts I have to notify me of anything new in my various fields of interest is on the word "Hippocrates". On 5 March 2021 it came up with a link to a page called 'The Foundations of Modern Medicine', which appears to be a short summary of a section of a…

The skull inside the doll…

Webster was much possessed by death And saw the skull beneath the skin... (T.S. Eliot, Whispers of Immortality) I was very excited when the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh (@RCPEHeritage) tweeted pictures today illustrating that they have been ‘X-raying two of our circa 18thc midwifery manikins (also known as ‘phantoms’) – to discover that…

The internet for historians?

Thanks to the wonders of Twitter as a way of asking academic questions and being pointed to research I didn't know existed, last week I was able to read Tim Hitchcock's superb 2013 article "Confronting the digital: or how academic history writing lost the plot". This is the first piece I've read which addresses in detail,…

Imaginary body parts

    I'm fascinated by imaginary body parts: things which people used to believe existed, but which we no longer accept. I've recently read Naomi Alderman's novel The Power, which is based on the notion of a new part, the 'skein', developing in women and allowing them to zap men. Back in 2012, the Queen’s…

Who Keeps Women’s Secrets?

“Do you want to know a secret?” Knowledge is power, but who knew what about women's bodies in the ancient world?