Sexual impotence has been a problem since at least the beginnings of recorded history and, since then, people have been striving to cure it. However, the cultural meanings of impotence, (why it matters) and even its definitions, vary wildly over time and space. In Sarah Handley-Cousins’s new book Bodies in […]
In spring 1931, Li Shui Tong met Magnus Hirschfeld when the latter was giving a public lecture in Shanghai. Li was a medical student with a deep–and vested–interest in the exciting new field of sexology. Hirschfeld’s work and ideas would go on to shape modern ideas about “homosexuality” in clear […]
During the Tang dynasty in the mid 8th century, a military leader named Li Baozhen was frustrated with his aging body. He had achieved much military glory and material wealth in his life, but he was aging and facing the fact that death was approaching. But he had also had […]
Written and spoken language are separate things. Languages that are connected to a written script change more slowly and last longer than those that don’t. Writing acts as an anchor to humans’ ever-changing speech sounds. But these two aspects of language (speech and writing) did not always go hand in […]
Tea, it turns out, is a bottomless commodity history. As historian Erika Rappaport notes, at various times over the last two thousand years, “In Asia, the Near East, Europe, and North America, tea was a powerful medicine, a dangerous drug, a religious and artistic practice, a status symbol, an aspect […]
The Fox sister’s story has been told hundreds of times, in autobiography, newspaper stories, biographies, histories of Spiritualism, Victorian entertainment, women’s rights movements, and many other contexts. Today we’re going to share some insights into Maggie and Kate Fox’s life, how their stories have been told, and why the way […]
Today we are exploring the close association of Spiritualism and the women’s rights movement of the nineteenth century. Transcription for: Ghosting the Patriarchy: Spiritualism and the Nineteenth-Century Women’s Rights Movement Elizabeth: In 1898 at the annual meeting of the National American Woman Suffrage Association in Washington, D.C. the suffrage movement […]
In the late 20th century, white Americans flocked to New Age spirituality, collecting crystals, hugging trees, and finding their places in the great Medicine Wheel. Many didn’t realize – or didn’t care – that much of this spirituality was based on the spiritual faiths and practices of Native American tribes. […]
Helen Duncan was charged under the 1735 Witchcraft Act, but her case was no eighteenth-century sensation: she was arrested, charged, and ultimately imprisoned in 1944. Of course, in 1944, Britain was at war, fighting fascism by day on the continent and hiding in air raid shelters by night at home. […]
The interplay between human and veterinary medicine was incredibly common by the second half of the 19th century. While human medicine and veterinary medicine were distinct professions, they were inextricably linked in the latest experimental turn. Not only were animals involved in the experiments that led to medical breakthroughs, they […]