Pythagoras, Beans, and Murder

From the never-ending and often satisfyingly strange vaults of Wikipedia:

"Some authors mentioned a "Pythagorean diet", the abstention from eating meat, beans, or fish. Firenze debated the Pythagorean diet in 1743.[22]
 Some stories of Pythagoras' murder revolve around his aversion to beans. According to legend, enemies of the Pythagoreans set fire to Pythagoras' house, sending the elderly man running toward a bean field, where he halted, declaring that he would rather die than enter the field – whereupon his pursuers slit his throat.[23] It has been suggested that the prohibition of beans was to avoid favism; susceptible people may develop hemolytic anemia as a result of eating beans, or even of walking through a field where bean plants are in flower.[24] It is more likely to have been for magico-religious reasons,[25] perhaps because beans obviously demonstrate the potential for life, perhaps because they resemble the kidneys and genitalia.[26] There was a belief that beans and human beings were created from the same material.[27]
 According to accounts from Diogenes Laertius, and or Eustathius, it is thought that the fava bean was particularly sacred to the Pythagoreans; this is because fava beans have hollow stems, and it was believed that souls of the deceased would travel through the ground, up the hollow stems, into the beans where they would reside.[28]
 Callimachus is quoted: Keep your hands from beans, a painful food: As Pythagoras enjoined, I too urge.And Empedocles, is quoted: Wretches, utter wretches, keep your hands from beans.[29]"

"Consumptive Chic"

See the Smithsonain Mag Story "How Tuberculosis Shaped Victorian Fashion"

Marie Duplessis, painted by Édouard Viénot

And an interesting quote from a story specifically about her:

In 1847, shortly before 23-year-old Marie Duplessis, one of 19th-century Paris’s most celebrated courtesans, died of consumption, she told her maid, “I’ve always felt that I’ll come back to life.” Her prophecy came true: she found enduring fame in the work of a former conquest, Alexandre Dumas fils, “La Dame aux Camélias” (there’s a newly translated version by Liesl Schillinger, a regular contributor to the Book Review), as well as in “La Traviata,” the opera Verdi based on Dumas’s novel and play.

Elizabeth Hughes and the Discovery of Insulin

This lecture notice reminded me that I should look up more about Elizabeth Hughes.

On Free Association

From Elizabeth Sears, "The Life and Work of William S. Heckscher,"

Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte, 53. Bd., H. 1 (1990), pp. 107-133

Madam Tussaud and Wax Anatomical Women

"In 1802, a 42-year-old Frenchwoman named Marie Gresholtz arrived in London, with her four-year-old son and three wax statues. The son was the product of a short-lived marriage to one François Tussaud; the three Sleeping Beauties were part of her inheritance, left by her guardian Philippe Curtius, stormer of the Bastille and sculptor extraordinaire.
 The woman, who would become known as Madame Tussaud, had lived in the company of wax since she was six. Apprenticed to Curtius, she was summoned to Versailles to teach Louis XVI’s sister how to make wax flowers and medallions. Soon she found herself producing effigies of the royal family’s decapitated heads."

Venus Endormie, 1874 CREDIT: MARC DANTAN COURTESY OF THAMES & HUDSON

Story here

Some Quotes, and Some Criticism, of a Medieval Medicine Review

Excerpts from the book in the review:

Mount cites several of these strange remedies in the book, like this one to cure whooping cough:

Take a caterpillar, wrap it in a small bag of muslin, and hang the bag around the neck of the affected child. The caterpillar will die and the child will be cured. Or pour a bowl of milk and get a ferret to lap from the bowl. After the child drinks the rest of the milk, she will recover.

Here is a remedy for menstrual cramps:

A remedy for women who suffered from dysmenorrhoea (painful periods) required taking a cat, cutting off its head, removing its innards and laying the still warm body of the feline on the painful belly (from the Fifteenth-century Leechbook, recipe 238, p. 89).

And to cure gout:

Boil a red-haired dog alive in oil until it falls apart. Then add worms, hog’s marrow and herbs. Apply the mixture to the a effected parts. Or take a frog when neither sun nor moon is shining. Cut off its hind legs and wrap them in deer skin. Apply the right to the right and the left to the left foot of the gouty person and without doubt he will be healed.

These are, of course, the types of things that can be expected from some of the reaches of medieval medicine. The author of the review has a somewhat crass, "what were they thinking?" sort of attitude toward these bits and bobs, but oh well. 

"for months [I] had been dealing with cadavers of all sexes and all ages - I could even eat my lunch sitting with the dead limbs." 

- W.S. Heckscher, art historian

from The Life and Work of W. S. Heckscher