In the Ivory Coast, dead birds were hung as a warning of smallpox

from HERE

The History of Condoms

HERE is a succinct timeline. There is more on WIKIPEDIA.

According to the OED, the name is thought to have come from an 18th-century physician.

It also offers this early quote: "Happy the Man, who in his Pocket keeps, Whether with Green or Scarlet Ribband bound, A well made C——." (W. Kennett in W. Pattison Cupid's Metamorphoses 307, 1728)

Replica sheepgut condom from HERE

"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.

Ebola and epidemics of the past

This article has a short summary of medical progress and its relation to our current medical quandary.

Some excerpts:

Though the vaccine for smallpox was discovered by the British doctor Edward Jenner in the 1790s, it didn’t trigger a revolution in medical thinking. Until well into the 1850s, the onset of disease was still attributed to foul-smelling clouds of decomposed matter known as “miasmas,” and the most common remedy was to purge ill patients of supposed impurities until the body’s equilibrium was restored.

… Thirty-two ounces were drawn by lancet, while blisters were applied “to the extremities.” (A person giving eight ounces of blood today must wait two months before donating again.) The man finally told his doctors to stop. “Let me go quietly,” George Washington pleaded, and he did.

As Mark Twain said, "Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; Truth isn't."

So let's all just go back and read The Andromeda Strain.

Reading too much about Ebola?

Here are some other CONTAGIONS to diversify your reading.

Another One Bites the Dust, After He Reads It

I highly recommend reading the obituary of George J. Armelagos who, admittedly, I had not heard of until his obituary was published. But obituaries are always surprisingly interesting, revealing things that you may have missed years or decades earlier. I had the same phenomenon with Clyde Snow's obituary earlier this year.

Both were anthropologists, reading and deciphering history from bones. Great stuff, right?

And a few excerpts:

"Based on their examination of New World skeletons that displayed the bone scarring characteristic of syphilitic infection, they concluded that a progenitor of the syphilis bacterium was already present in pre-Columbian America, where it was manifest as the skin disease yaws."

...

"Still other findings are anachronistically astonishing, like the discovery by Professor Armelagos and associates of traces of the antibiotic tetracycline in 1,400-year-old Nubian skeletons from what is now Sudan. The drug was not introduced commercially until the 1940s.

"The Nubians were master brewers, and the tetracycline — born of a bacterium found in soil — was a spontaneous byproduct of their beer-making process, the researchers concluded."

...

"He remains best known to a general readership for “Consuming Passions,” which chronicled, among other things, the use throughout history of a spate of curious ingredients — including potatoes and hippopotamus snouts — thought to be endowed with aphrodisiac powers.

"In Elizabethan times, the book reveals, prunes were considered aphrodisiacs. Visitors to brothels of the period, Professor Armelagos took delight in disclosing in interviews, received a free prune with every purchase."

Diseases America Forgot

It all starts with this article: Where are they now? Diseases That Killed You In Oregon Trail. In its adolescence, America's population was constantly struggling with viral and bacterial plagues that are now largely under control in the US due to vaccinations and antibiotics. (That's right, anti-vaccine celebrities).

Along with the near-eradication of these diseases, we can also see how the places that once treated the sick were abandoned to the wilderness. North Brother Island is one such place, eerily close to the Bronx. It was a home to lepers as well as the famous Typhoid Mary. Recently, Ian Ference decided to photograph its remains.

Slowly, some of these areas are being reused, such as the site of the White Haven Sanitorium, which was once used to quarantine and treat consumptives (i.e. tuberculosis patients) and is now the Powerhouse Eatery.

But if you're just into abandoned hospitals, look only slightly further than a Google search.