We are regularly urged to take 10,000 steps a day. However, it turns out 10,000 isn’t exactly a number anchored in science. Rather, it’s a product of marketing. According to a Harvard medical website, that figure goes back to “1965, when a Japanese company made a device named Manpo-kei, which translates to ’10,000 steps meter.’ ” 10,000 likely sounded better than a more precise number. And so it began.
So this raises the question: what’s the ideal number of steps according to science? Dr. I‑Min Lee, a professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School, focused on that question and determined that mortality rates decline when women increase their steps from lower levels (e.g., 2,000 steps) to 4,400 steps per day, with gains increasing until they reach 7,500 steps. From there, the gains level out. (Read the JAMA study here.) Meanwhile, a European study, which monitored 226,000 participants, found that people who walked more than 2,337 steps daily could start lowering their risk of dying from heart disease. And people who walked more than 3,867 steps daily could start reducing their risk of dying from any cause overall. However, unlike the Harvard study, the European study found that adding more steps continues to lower mortality rates, with gains accruing past 7,500 steps, and perhaps beyond 20,000 steps. What’s the exact sweet spot? We’ll need more research to figure that out. Until then, the existing research suggests that it pays to spend time with your walking shoes.
The new video above come from TED-Ed.
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There may be as many doors into Alcoholics Anonymous in the 21st century as there are people who walk through them—from every world religion to no religion. The “international mutual-aid fellowship” has had “a significant and long-term effect on the culture of the United States,” writes Worcester State University professor of psychology Charles Fox at Aeon. Indeed, its influence is global. From its inception in 1935, A.A. has represented an “enormously popular therapy, and a testament to the interdisciplinary nature of health and wellness.”
A.A. has also represented, at least culturally, a remarkable synthesis of behavioral science and spirituality that translates into scores of different languages, beliefs, and practices. Or at least that’s the way it can appear from browsing the scores of books on A.A.’s 12-Steps and Buddhism, Yoga, Catholicism, Judaism, Indigenous faith traditions, shamanist practices, Stoicism, secular humanism, and, of course, psychology.
Historically, and often in practice, however, the (non)organization of worldwide fellowships has represented a much narrower tradition, inherited from the evangelical (small “e”) Christian Oxford Group, or as A.A. founder Bill Wilson called them, “the ‘O.G.’” Wilson credits the Oxford Group for the methodology of A.A.: “their large emphasis upon the principles of self-survey, confession, restitution, and the giving of oneself in service to others.”
The Oxford Group’s theology, though qualified and tempered, also made its way into many of A.A.’s basic principles. But for the recovery group’s genesis, Wilson cites a more secular authority, Carl Jung. The famous Swiss psychiatrist took a keen interest in alcoholism in the 1920s. Wilson wrote to Jung in 1961 to express his “great appreciation” for his efforts. “A certain conversation you once had with one of your patients, a Mr. Rowland H. back in the early 1930’s,” Wilson explains, “did play a critical role in the founding of our Fellowship.”
Jung may not have known his influence on the recovery movement, Wilson says, although alcoholics had accounted for “about 13 percent of all admissions” in his practice, notes Fox. One of his patients, Rowland H.—or Rowland Hazard, “investment banker and former state senator from Rhode Island”—came to Jung in desperation, saw him daily for a period of several months, stopped drinking, then relapsed. Brought back to Jung by his cousin, Hazard was told that his case was hopeless short of a religious conversion. As Wilson puts it in his letter:
[Y]ou frankly told him of his hopelessness, so far as any further medical or psychiatric treatment might be concerned. This candid and humble statement of yours was beyond doubt the first foundation stone upon which our Society has since been built.
Jung also told Hazard that conversion experiences were incredibly rare and recommended that he “place himself in a religious atmosphere and hope for the best,” as Wilson remembers. But he did not specify any particular religion. Hazard discovered the Oxford Group. He might, as far as Jung was concerned, have met God as he understood it anywhere. “His craving for alcohol was the equivalent,” wrote the psychiatrist in a reply to Wilson, “on a low level, of the spiritual thirst of our being for wholeness, expressed in medieval language: the union with God.”
In his reply letter to Wilson, Jung uses religious language allegorically. AA took the idea of conversion more literally. Though it wrestled with the plight of the agnostic, the Big Book concluded that such people must eventually see the light. Jung, on the other hand, seems very careful to avoid a strictly religious interpretation of his advice to Hazard, who started the first small group that would convert Wilson to sobriety and to Oxford Group methods.
“How could one formulate such an insight that is not misunderstood in our days?” Jung asks. “The only right and legitimate way to such an experience is that it happens to you in reality and it can only happen to you when you walk on a path which leads you to a higher understanding.” Sobriety could be achieved through “a higher education of the mind beyond the confines of mere rationalism”—through an enlightenment or conversion experience, that is. It might also occur through “an act of grace or through a personal and honest contact with friends.”
Though most founding members of AA fought for the stricter interpretation of Jung’s prescription, Wilson always entertained the idea that multiple paths might bring alcoholics to the same goal, even including modern medicine. He drew on the medical opinions of Dr. William D. Silkworth, who theorized that alcoholism was in part a physical disease, “a sort of metabolism difficulty which he then called an allergy.” Even after his own conversion experience, which Silkworth, like Jung, recommended he pursue, Wilson experimented with vitamin therapies, through the influence of Aldous Huxley.
His search to understand his mystical “white light” moment in a New York detox room also led Wilson to William James’ Varieties of Religious Experience. The book “gave me the realization,” he wrote to Jung, “that most conversion experiences, whatever their variety, do have a common denominator of ego collapse at depth.” He even thought that LSD could act as such a “temporary ego-reducer” after he took the drug under supervision of British psychiatrist Humphrey Osmond. (Jung likely would have opposed what he called “short cuts” like psychedelic drugs.)
In the letters between Wilson and Jung, as Ian McCabe argues in Carl Jung and Alcoholics Anonymous, we see mutual admiration between the two, as well as mutual influence. “Bill Wilson,” writes McCabe’s publisher, “was encouraged by Jung’s writings to promote the spiritual aspect of recovery,” an aspect that took on a particularly religious character in Alcoholics Anonymous. For his part, Jung, “influenced by A.A.’s success… gave ‘complete and detailed instructions’ on how the A.A. group format could be developed further and used by ‘general neurotics.’” And so it has, though more on the Oxford Group model than the more mystical Jungian. It might well have been otherwise.
Read more about Jung’s influence on AA over atAeon.
Note: Note: An earlier version of this post appeared on our site in 2019.
Marcel Proust wrote Remembrance of Things Past (À la recherche du temps perdu) over many years. The first volume, Swann’s Way(Du côté de chez Swann), came out in 1913, and the last volume, Time Regained (Le Temps retrouvé), was published posthumously in 1927. A monumental exploration of memory, time, and human experience, the seven-volume novel consists of 1,267,069 words. That doubles those in Tolstoy’s War and Peace, making it one of the longest novels ever written.
Above, you can hear Alain de Botton (author of How Proust Can Change Your Life) read the opening lines of Swann’s Way, with the goal of … well… putting you to sleep. His YouTube channel writes: Proust’s novel “is very beautiful — and in a way a little boring too. This is for all those among us who suffer from insomnia — to send you into the best kind of sleep.” Make sure you add this 26-minute recording to your sleep/ASMR playlist. For de Botton’s introduction to the literary philosophy of Marcel Proust, watch this video here.
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According to NPR, “Caffeine is the most widely consumed drug in the world. Here in the U.S., according to a 2022 survey, more than 93% of adults consume caffeine, and of those, 75% consume caffeine at least once a day.” Given the prevalence of coffee worldwide, it pays to ask a simple question: Is coffee good for you? Above, James Hoffmann, the author of The World Atlas of Coffee, provides an overview of research examining the relationship between coffee and various dimensions of health, including the gut/microbiome, sleep, cancer, cognition, mortality and more. If you want to explore this subject more deeply, Hoffmann has created a list of the research papers reviewed here.
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The Hippocratic Oath is popularly imagined as beginning with, or at least involving, the command “First, do no harm.” In fact, nothing like it appears among the original Greek words attributed to Hippocrates; the Latin phrase primum non nocere seems to have been added in the seventh century. But the principle makes a highly suitable starting point for Dominic Walliman’s video tour above of his new Comprehensive Map of Medicine. A physicist and science writer, Walliman has previously been featured many times here on Open Culture for his Youtube channel Domain of Science and his maps of other fields, from physics, chemistry, and biology to mathematics, engineering, and computer science.
This new map marks a return after what, to Walliman’s fans, felt like a long hiatus indeed. The prolonged absence speaks to the ambition of the project, whose subject demands the integration of a large number of fields and sub-fields both theoretical and practical.
For medicine existed long before science — science as we know it today, at least— and two and a half millennia after the time of Hippocrates, the connections and interactions between the realm of medicine presided over by doctors and that presided over by scientists are complex and not easily understood by the public. Hence the importance of Walliman’s clarity of visual explanation, as it has evolved throughout his scientific map-making career, as well as his clarity of verbal explanation, on display through all 50 minutes of this video.
As Walliman emphasizes right at the outset, he isn’t a medical doctor — but he is a “doctor” in the sense that he has a PhD, and intellectually, he comes more than well-placed to understand how each part of medicine relates to the others. This is especially true of a lesser-known area of study like medical physics, whose fruits include imaging techniques like X‑ray, MRI, CT, and ultrasound, with which many of us have first-hand experience as patients. Few non-specialists will ever be directly involved in the practice of, say, biology or engineering, but in the twenty-first century, it’s the rare human being indeed who never encounters the reality of medicine. The next time you find yourself in treatment, it certainly couldn’t do any harm to orient yourself on its map.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities, the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
If you went to the doctor in late medieval Europe hoping to get a health complaint checked out, you could be sure of one thing: you’d have to hand over a urine sample. Though it dates back at least as far as the fourth millennium BC, the practice of uroscopy, as it’s called, seems to have been regarded as a near-universal diagnostic tool by the thirteenth century. At Medievalists.net, you can read excerpts of the then-definitive text On Urines, written about that time by French royal physician Gilles de Corbeil.
When a skilled physician examines a patient’s urine, de Corbeil explains, “health or illness, strength or debility, deficiency, excess, or balance, are determined with certainty.” Urine “darkened by a black cloudiness, and muddied with sediment, if produced on a critical day of an illness, and accompanied by poor hearing and insomnia, portends a flux of blood from the nose”; depending on other factors, “the patient will die or recover.”
Urine that looks livid near the surface could indicate a variety of conditions: “a mild form of hemitriteus fever; falling sickness; ascites; synochal fever; the rupture of a vein; catarrh, strangury; an ailment of the womb; a flux; a defect of the lungs; pain in the joints; consumptive phithisis; the extinction of natural heat.”
White urine could be a signal of everything from dropsy to lipothymia to hemorrhoids; wine-colored urine “means danger to health when it accompanies a continued fever; it is less to be feared if there is no fever.”
We may feel tempted, 800 years later, to discard all of this as pre-scientific nonsense. But compared with other diagnostic methods in the Middle Ages, uroscopy had a decent track record. “Urine was a particularly useful tool for diagnosing leprosy,” writes the Public Domain Review’s Katherine Harvey, “because the immediate physiological cause was thought to be a malfunctioning liver — an organ which was central to the digestive process, and thus any problems would be visible in the urine.” Indeed, “new forms of urine analysis have developed from these ancient traditions, and our present-day medical landscape is awash with urine samples.”
That’s certainly a vivid image, and so are the “urine wheels” that accompany Harvey’s piece: elaborate illustrations designed to help doctors identify the particular hue of a given sample, each one colored with the best pigmentation techniques of the time. But “there was no standardization,” notes Atlas Obscura’s Sarah Laskow, “and while some book publishers created detailed coloring instructions, the artisans who did the work didn’t always conform to those specifications.” As much prestige as these volumes surely exuded on the bookshelf, it was as true then as it is now that you become a good doctor not by reading manuals, but by getting your hands dirty.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities, the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
Outdoor enthusiasts of a non-vegetarian stripe, do you weary of garden variety energy bars and trail mix?
Perhaps you’re feeling adventurous enough to make your own pemmican, variously described by Tasting History’s Max Miller, above, as “history’s Power Bar” and “a meaty version of a survival food that has a shelf life not measured in months but in decades, just like hard tack.”
Perhaps you’re already well acquainted with this low-carb, ketogenic portable provision, a culinary staple of the upper half of North America long before the first European traders set foot on the land. Many indigenous communities across North America are still producing pemmican for both personal and ceremonial consumption.
Back in 1743, Hudson’s Bay Company fur trader James Isham was one of the first to document pemmican production for an English readership:
[Meat] beat between two Stones, till some of itt is as small as Dust…when pounded they putt itt into a bag and will Keep for several Years, the Bones they also pound small and Boil them…to Reserve the fatt, which fatt is fine and sweet as any Butter…Reckon’d by some Very good food by the English as well as Natives.
A time may come when knowing how to make pemmican could give us a leg up on surviving, but for now, execution of this recipe is likely more of a curiosity satisfier.
To be fair, it’s not designed to be a delicacy, but rather an extremely long lasting source of calories, four times as nourishing as the same weight of fresh meat.
If you want to try it, lay in 2 pounds of meat — bison is historically the most popular and most documented, but deer, elk, moose, beef, fish, or fowl work well too.
You’ll also need an equal amount of suet, though heed Miller’s advice and add just enough to make things stick.
Bump the flavor up a notch with ground dried berries, sugar, or salt.
(Miller went the traditional route with chokeberries, procured in an extremely 21st-century manner.)
In terms of appliances, feel free to use such modern conveniences as your oven, your blender, and a small pan or mold.
(Please report back if you take the old school route with fire, direct sunlight, mortar, pestle, and a bag formed from undressed hide.)
Those still up for it should feel free to take their pemmican to the next level by boiling it with wild onions or the tops of parsnips, to produce a rubaboo or rechaud, as bushcrafter Mark Young does below.
You can also get a taste of pemmican by ordering the Tanka Bars that Oglala Lakota-owned small business produces on South Dakota’s Pine Ridge Reservation.
Watch more of Max Miller’s Tasting History videos here.
No matter where you may stand on herbal medicine as a viable 21st-century option, it’s not hard to imagine we’d have all been true believers back in the 15th-century.
In an article for Heart Views, cardiologist Rachel Hajar lists some common herbal treatments of the Middle Ages:
Headache and aching joints were treated with sweet-smelling herbs such as rose, lavender, sage, and hay. A mixture of henbane and hemlock was applied to aching joints. Coriander was used to reduce fever. Stomach pains and sickness were treated with wormwood, mint, and balm. Lung problems were treated with a medicine made of liquorice and comfrey. Cough syrups and drinks were prescribed for chest and head-colds and coughs.
If nothing else, such approaches sound rather more pleasant than bloodletting.
Monks were responsible for the study and cultivation of medicinal herbs.
You may recall how one of Friar Lawrence’s daily tasks in Romeo and Julietinvolved venturing into the monastery garden, to fill his basket full “baleful weeds and precious-juicèd flowers.”
(The powerful sleeping potion he concocted for the young lovers may have had disastrous consequences, but no one can claim it wasn’t effective.)
Monks preserved their herbal knowledge in illustrated books and manuscripts, many of which cleaved closely to works of classical antiquity such as Pliny the Elder’s Naturalis Historia and Dioscordes’ De Materia Medica.
These early medical texts can still be appreciated as art, particularly when they contain fantastical embellishments such as can be seen in Erbario, above, a handmade 15th-century herbal from northern Italy that was recently added to the University of Pennsylvania Library’s collection of rare books and manuscripts.
In addition to straightforward botanical illustrations, there are some roots, leaves, flowers and fruit (pardon the pronoun) of a decidedly anthropomorphic bent.
Fancying up drawings of plants with human faces and or dragon-shaped roots was a medieval convention.
Mandrake roots — prescribed as an anesthetic, an aphrodisiac, a fertility booster, and a sleep aid — were frequently rendered as humans.
Wired’s Matt Simon writes that mandrake roots “can look bizarrely like a human body and legend holds that it can even come in male and female form:”
It’s said to spring from the dripping fat and blood and semen of a hanged man. Dare pull it the from the earth and it lets out a monstrous scream, bestowing agony and death to all those within earshot.
Yikes! Can we get a spoonful of sugar to help that go down?
No wonder Juliet, preparing to quaff Friar Lawrence’s sleeping potion in the family tomb, fretted that it might wear off prematurely, leaving her subject to “loathsome smells” and “shrieks like mandrakes torn out of the earth.”
Methinks some chamomile might have calmed those nerves…
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