Help a Library Transcribe Magical Manuscripts & Recover the Charms, Potions & Witchcraft That Flourished in Early Modern Europe and America
Magic is real—hear me out. No, you can’t solve life’s problems with a wand and made-up Latin. But there are academic departments of magic, only they go by different names now. A few hundred years ago the difference between chemistry and alchemy was nil. Witchcraft involved as much botany as spellwork. A lot of fun bits of magic got weeded out when gentlemen in powdered wigs purged weird sisters and gnostic heretics from the field. Did the old spells work? Maybe, maybe not. Science has become pretty reliable, I guess. Standardized classification systems and measurements are okay, but yawn… don’t we long for some witching and wizarding? A well-placed hex might work wonders.
Say no more, we’ve got you covered: you, yes you, can learn charms and potions, demonology and other assorted dark arts. How? For a onetime fee of absolutely nothing, you can enter magical books from the Early Modern Period.
T’was a veritable golden age of magic, when wizarding scientists like John Dee—Queen Elizabeth’s soothsaying astrologer and revealer of the language of the angels—burned brightly just before they were extinguished, or run underground, by orthodoxies of all sorts. The Newberry, “Chicago’s Independent Research Library Since 1887,” has reached out to the crowds to help “unlock the mysteries” of rare manuscripts and bring the diversity of the time alive.
The library’s Transcribing Faith initiative gives users a chance to connect with texts like The Book of Magical Charms (above), by transcribing and/or translating the contents therein. Like software engineer Joseph Peterson—founder of the Esoteric Archives, which contains a large collection of John Dee’s work—you can volunteer to help the Newberry’s project “Religious Change, 1450–1700.” The Newberry aims to educate the general public on a period of immense upheaval. “The Reformation and the Scientific Revolution are very big, capital letter concepts,” project coordinator Christopher Fletcher tells Smithsonian.com, “we lose sight of the fact that these were real events that happened to real people.”
By aiming to return these texts to “real people” on the internet, the Newberry hopes to demystify, so to speak, key moments in European history. “You don’t need a Ph.D. to transcribe,” Fletcher points out. Atlas Obscura describes the process as “much like updating a Wikipedia page,” only “anyone can start transcribing and translating and they don’t need to sign up to do so.” Check out some transcriptions of The Book of Magical Charms—written by various anonymous authors in the seventeenth century—here. The book, writes the Newberry, describes “everything from speaking with spirits to cheating at dice to curing a toothache.”
Need to call up a spirit for some dirty work? Just follow the instructions below:
Call their names Orimoth, Belmoth Limoc and Say thus. I conjure you by the neims of the Angels + Sator and Azamor that yee intend to me in this Aore, and Send unto me a Spirite called Sagrigid that doe fullfill my comandng and desire and that can also undarstand my words for one or 2 yuares; or as long as I will.
Seems simple enough, but of course this business did not sit well with some powerful people, including one Increase Mather, father of Cotton, president of Harvard, best known from his work on the Salem Witch Trials. Increase defended the prosecutions in a manuscript titled Cases of Conscience Concerning Evil Spirits, a page from which you can see further up. The text reads, in part:
an Evidence Supposed to be in the Testimony
which is throwly to be Weighed, & if it doe
not infallibly prove the Crime against the
person accused, it ought not to determine
him Guilty of it for So righteous may
be condemned unjustly.
Mather did not consider these to be show trials or “witchhunts” but rather the fair and judicious application of due process, for whatever that’s worth. Elsewhere in the text he famously wrote, “It were better that Ten Suspected Witches should escape, than that one Innocent Person should be Condemned.” Cold comfort to those condemned as guilty for likely practicing some mix of religion and early science.
These texts are written in English and concern themselves with magical and spiritual matters expressly. Other manuscripts in the project’s archive roam more broadly across topics and languages, and “shed light on the entwined practices of religion and reading.” One “commonplace book,” for example (above), from sometime between 1590 and 1620, contains sermons by John Donne as well as “religious, political, and practical texts, including a Middle English lyric,” all carefully written out by an English scribe named Henry Feilde in order to practice his calligraphy.
Another such text, largely in Latin, “may have been started as early as the 16th century, but continued to be used and added to well into the 19th century. Its compilers expressed interest in a wide range of topics, from religious and moral questions to the liberal arts to strange events.” Books like these “reflected the reading habits of early modern people, who tended not to read books from beginning to end, but instead to dip in and out of them,” extracting bits and bobs of wisdom, quotations, recipes, prayers, and even the odd spell or two.
The final work in need of transcription/translation is also the only printed text, or texts, rather, a collection of Italian religious broadsides, advertising “public celebrations and commemorations of Catholic feast days and other religious occasions.” Hardly summoning spirits, though some may beg to differ. If you’re so inclined to take part in opening the secrets of these rare books for lay readers everywhere, visit Transcribing Faith here and get to work.
via Smithsonian/ Atlas Obscura
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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness
Read More...Stream 47 Hours of Classic Sci-Fi Novels & Stories: Asimov, Wells, Orwell, Verne, Lovecraft & More
The pronouncements of French theorist Jean Baudrillard could sound a bit silly in the early 1990s, when the internet was still in its infancy, a slow, clunky technology whose promises far exceeded what it could deliver. We hoped for the cyberpunk spaces of William Gibson, and got the beep-boop tedium of dial-up. Even so, in his 1991 essay “Simulacra and Science Fiction,” Baudrillard contended that the real and the imaginary were no longer distinguishable, and that the collapse of the distance between them meant that “there is no more fiction.” Or, conversely, he suggested, that there is no more reality.
What seemed a far-fetched claim about the totality of “cybernetics and hyperreality” in the age of AOL and Netscape now sounds far more plausible. After all, it will soon be possible, if it is not so already, to convincingly simulate events that never occurred, and to make millions of people believe they had, not only through fake tweets, “fake news,” and age-old propaganda, but through sophisticated manipulation of video and audio, through augmented reality and the onset of “reality apathy,” a psychological fatigue that overwhelms our abilities to distinguish true and false when everything appears as a cartoonish parody of itself.
Technologist Aviv Ovadya has tried since 2016 to warn anyone who would listen that such a collapse of reality was fast upon us—an “Infocalypse,” he calls it. If this is so, according to Baudrillard, “both traditional SF and theory are destined to the same fate: flux and imprecision are putting an end to them as specific genres.” In an apocalyptic prediction, he declaimed, “fiction will never again be a mirror held to the future, but rather a desperate rehallucinating of the past.” The “collective marketplace” of globalization and the Borgesian condition in which “the map covers all the territory” have left “no room any more for the imaginary.” Companies set up shop expressly to simulate and falsify reality. Pained irony, pastiche, and cheap nostalgia are all that remain.
It’s a bleak scenario, but perhaps he was right after all, though it may not yet be time to despair—to give up on reality or the role of imagination. After all, sci-fi writers like Gibson, Philip K. Dick, and J.G. Ballard grasped long before most of us the condition Baudrillard described. The subject proved for them and many other late-20th century sci-fi authors a rich vein for fiction. And perhaps, rather than a great disruption—to use the language of a start-up culture intent on breaking things—there remains some continuity with the naïve confidence of past paradigms, just as Newtonian physics still holds true, only in a far more limited way than once believed.
Isaac Asimov’s short essay “The Relativity of Wrong” is instructive on this last point. Maybe the theory of “hyperreality” is right, in some fashion, but also incomplete: a future remains for the most visionary creative minds to discover, as it did for Asimov’s “psychohistorian” Hari Seldon in The Foundation Trilogy. You can hear a BBC dramatization of that groundbreaking fifties masterwork in the 47-hour science fiction playlist above, along with readings of classic stories—like Orson Welles’ infamous radio broadcast of H.G. Wells’ War of the Worlds (and an audiobook of the same read by English actor Maxwell Caulfield). From Jules Verne to H.P. Lovecraft to George Orwell; from the mid-fifties time travel fiction of Andre Norton to the 21st-century time-travel fiction of Ruth Boswell….
We’ve even got a late entry from theatrical prog rock mastermind Rick Wakeman, who followed up his musical adaptation of Journey to the Centre of the Earth with a sequel he penned himself, recorded in 1974, and released in 1999, called Return to the Centre of the Earth, with narration by Patrick Stewart and guest appearances by Ozzy Osbourne, Bonnie Tyler, and the Moody Blues’ Justin Hayward. Does revisiting sci-fi, “weird fiction,” and operatic concept albums of the past constitute a “desperate rehallucinating” of a bygone “lost object,” as Baudrillard believed? Or does it provide the raw material for today’s psychohistorians? I suppose it remains to be seen; the future—and the future of science fiction—may be wide open.
The 47-hour science fiction playlist above will be added to our collection of 900 Free Audio Books.
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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness
Read More...A Young Steve Jobs Teaches a Class at MIT (1992)
Asking whether there will ever be another Steve Jobs seems to me like asking whether there’ll ever be another Muhammad Ali. While there may be little comparison between their respective domains, both unique individuals mastered their chosen pursuits, fought like hell to keep their titles, and “thought different” than everyone around them. Also Jobs, like Ali, didn’t hesitate to speak his mind, as in the clip above, in which he declares Microsoft’s Windows “the worst development environment that’s ever been invented.” It ain’t politic, but it’s maybe… kinda true? I don’t know…
My opinions on the matter aren’t worth much—I wouldn’t know the backend of an operating system from the backend of a tractor-trailer. But Jobs didn’t attain tech guru status just for the sleekness and simplicity of Apple’s designs, but for his keen insights into the refinement of consumer computing technology and his ability to convey them with the unpretentious directness of a black turtleneck and dad jeans. The clips here are of a young-ish Jobs teaching at MIT circa 1992, when he was 37 and running his company NeXT, founded in 1985 after he was originally forced out of Apple.
He stayed plenty busy during his Apple interregnum, helping to launch a little computer graphics division that would become Pixar and developing the technology and designs that revolutionized Apple when it bought NeXT in 1997—and when Jobs retook his empire through proprietary ruthlessness.
Here, five years away from that fateful event, we see him explaining his philosophy of innovation to students who may or may not have foreseen the breakthroughs to come. Just above, he describes how “you can use the concept of technology of windows opening, and then eventually closing,” referring not, this time, to Bill Gates’ hated OS.
Rather, Jobs talks of a situation in which “enough technology, usually from fairly diverse places, comes together, and makes something that’s a quantum leap forward possible.” One of Jobs’ many leaps forward in consumer technology might reasonably be summed up in one word: portability, as in, the ability to carry an entire library of music or a cell phone/music player/personal computer in your pocket. Just above, he discusses “the enemy of portability,” namely such market demands as processing speed, storage space, and high-speed networking. And in the clip below, he talks about a subject near and dear to every tech executive’s heart—poaching talent from competitors such as, well, Microsoft.
The uniform of turtleneck tucked into jeans, the deliberate pacing back and forth, the expressive hand gestures and genuine comfort and confidence in front of a crowd: all of the mannerisms we remember from those hotly anticipated launch events are there in a shaggier form.
Through the various applications of his technological acumen, Jobs remained always himself. The “next Steve Jobs,” or rather those aspiring to his level of relevance should take note—he did it by insisting on doing it his way.
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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness
Read More...Behold 3,000 Digitized Manuscripts from the Bibliotheca Palatina: The Mother of All Medieval Libraries Is Getting Reconstructed Online
The internet, one occasionally hears, has overtaken the function of the library. In terms of storing and making accessible all of human knowledge, the ways in which the capacities of the internet match or exceed those of even the most enormous library seem obvious. In theory, digital libraries don’t burn down, at least when properly set up, nor, with their ability to exist above national boundaries, do they get sacked by invading armies. Even so, as Google recently proved when its years-long book-digitization effort Project Ocean came up against legal obstacles, the physical realm hasn’t quite ceded to the online one.
“When the library at Alexandria burned it was said to be an ‘international catastrophe,’ ” writes The Atlantic’s James Somers in a piece on the ambitious, troubled project. When the court ruled against Google’s version, though, fewer tears were shed.
At least when Heidelberg’s Bibliotheca Palatina, the most important library of the Germain Renaissance, became a piece of booty in the Thirty Years’ War in 1622, its 5,000 printed books and 3,524 manuscripts remained, in some sense, available — albeit split, from then on, between Heidelberg and the Vatican’s Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana.
“At the beginning of the 17th century,” says Medievalists.net, the Bibliotheca Palatina “was known as ‘the greatest treasure of Germany’s learned.’ As a universal library, it contains not only theological, philological, philosophical, and historical works but also medical, natural history, and astronomical texts.” Now, its “core inventory” of approximately 3,000 manuscripts has become available free online at the Bibliotheca Palatina Digital. Since 2001, says its site, “Heidelberg University Library has been working on several projects that aim to digitize parts of this great collection, the final goal being a complete virtual reconstruction of the ‘mother of all libraries.’ ”
From there you can browse the Bibliotheca Palatina Digital’s Codices Palatini germanici, “the largest and oldest undivided collection of extant German-language manuscripts”; the Codices Palatini latini, where “you will eventually be able to access more than 2,000 Latin manuscripts”; and the Codices Palatini graeci, which houses “digital facsimiles of 29 Greek manuscripts which are now kept in Heidelberg University Library.” It also offers sections on the history of the Bibliotheca Palatina; on the Codex Manesse, “the world’s richest anthology of mediaeval German song”; and (for now in German only) on the manuscripts’ decorations and the insight they provide into “the thematically diverse art of mediaeval book-making.” And none of it subject to sacking — unless, of course, history has a particularly nasty surprise in store for us.
Enter the Digital Bibliotheca Palatina here.
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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities and culture. His projects include 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.
Read More...When David Bowie Became Nikola Tesla: Watch His Electric Performance in The Prestige (2006)
Only two major actors have played inventor Nikola Tesla in pop culture: one is John C. Reilly and the other is David Bowie. As much as I love this episode of Drunk History, let’s talk about the Starman himself, who Christopher Nolan cast as Tesla in his 2006 film The Prestige.
By 2005, Bowie was in seclusion. As elucidated in the recent BBC doc, The Last Five Years, the singer was recuperating from a heart attack on his Reality tour, a tour that would turn out to be his last.
Nolan begged Bowie to take the role:
Tesla was this other-worldly, ahead-of-his-time figure, and at some point it occurred to me he was the original Man Who Fell to Earth. As someone who was the biggest Bowie fan in the world, once I made that connection, he seemed to be the only actor capable of playing the part…It took me a while to convince him, though—he turned down the part the first time. It was the only time I can ever remember trying again with an actor who passed on me.
Bowie relented and above you can see his best moment in the film (or *the* best moment in the film)–where Tesla enters through a shower of electricity to greet Robert (Hugh Jackman) and Alley (Andy Serkis). It’s a rock star entrance, for sure.
Nolan continues:
The experience of having him on set was wonderful. Daunting, at first. He had a level of charisma beyond what you normally experience, and everyone really responded to it. I’ve never seen a crew respond to any movie star that way, no matter how big. But he was very gracious and understood the effect he had on people. Everyone has fond memories of getting to spend time with him or speak to him for a little bit. I only worked with him briefly—four or five days—but I did manage to sneak a couple moments to chat with him, which are very treasured memories of mine. Normally when you meet stars, no matter how starry they are, when you see them as people, some of that mystique goes away. But not with David Bowie. I came away from the experience being able to say I was still his biggest fan, and a fan who had the very miraculous opportunity to work with him for a moment. I loved the fact that after having worked with him, I had just the same fascination with his talent and his charisma. I thought that was quite magical.
Despite a very brief role in a film called August and an appearance around the same year on Ricky Gervais’ Extras, this would be Bowie’s last major film role, and really his last filmed appearance until 2013, when he shot promos for The Next Day.
A look at the YouTube comments suggest that many viewers watched The Prestige and had no idea who was playing Tesla. And that might have just tickled the man, playing a magician in recluse high up in the mountains, more in communication with the invisible gods than the mortals.
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Ted Mills is a freelance writer on the arts who currently hosts the artist interview-based FunkZone Podcast and is the producer of KCRW’s Curious Coast. You can also follow him on Twitter at @tedmills, read his other arts writing at tedmills.com and/or watch his films here.
Read More...How to Use the Rotary Dial Phone: A Primer from 1927
Most every piece of technology, no matter how simple, comes with a user manual of some sort. Even the seemingly straightforward rotary dial phone.
Although Alexander Graham Bell patented the first telephone in 1876, the first rotary dial phones didn’t make their way into American homes until 1919. Then came the obligatory tutorial. Created by AT&T in 1927 and originally shown in theatres in Fresno, California, the silent film above breaks down the process of dialing a call–from using a phone directory and finding a number, to picking up the receiver and listening for that steady humming sound called the “dial tone,” to turning and releasing the rotary dial multiple times, and so on. This primer would carry Americans through 1963 when the first push-button phones started to pop up. That advent of the push-button phone also came with a video, of course.
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Read More...Herbie Hancock Explains the Big Lesson He Learned From Miles Davis: Every Mistake in Music, as in Life, Is an Opportunity
One thing they don’t teach you in parenting school is how to guide a young child into making fewer mistakes in her homework, while also communicating to her that mistakes are not “bad” but often “good” in that they can be conduits for creative thinking and intuitive pathways to progress. This lesson presents even more problems if your child has perfectionist tendencies. (If you have sound pedagogical methods, I’m all ears.)
The problem isn’t just that adults constantly telegraph binary “yes/no,” “good/bad” messages to everyone and everything around them, but that most adults are deeply uncomfortable with ambiguity, and thus deeply afraid of mistakes, as a result of imbibing so many binary messages themselves. Improvisation frightens trained and untrained musicians alike, for example, for this very reason. Who wants to screw up publicly and look like… well, a screw up?
We think that doing something well, and even “perfectly,” will win us the pat on the head/gold star/good report card we have been taught to crave all our lives. Surely there are excellent reasons to strive for excellence. But according to one who should know—the most excellent Miles Davis—excellence by nature obviates the idea of mistakes. How’s that, you ask? Let us attend to one of Davis’ former sidemen, Herbie Hancock, who tells one of his favorite stories about the man above.
Loose improvisation is integral to jazz, but we all know Miles Davis as a very exacting character. He could be mean, demanding, abrasive, cranky, hypercritical, and we might conclude, given these personal qualities, and the consistent excellence of his playing, that he was a perfectionist who couldn’t tolerate screw ups. Hancock gives us a very different impression, telling the tale of a “hot night” in Stuttgart, when the music was “tight, it was powerful, it was innovative, and fun.”
Making what anyone would reasonably call a mistake in the middle of one of Davis’ solos—hitting a noticeably wrong chord—Hancock reacted as most of us would, with dismay. “Miles paused for a second,” he says, “and then he played some notes that made my chord right… Miles was able to turn something that was wrong into something that was right.” Still, Hancock was so upset, he couldn’t play for about a minute, paralyzed by his own ideas about “right” and “wrong” notes.
What I realize now is that Miles didn’t hear it as a mistake. He heard it as something that happened. As an event. And so that was part of the reality of what was happening at that moment. And he dealt with it…. Since he didn’t hear it as a mistake, he thought it was his responsibility to find something that fit.
Hancock drew a musical lesson from the moment, yes, and he also drew a larger life lesson about growth, which requires, he says, “a mind that’s open enough… to be able to experience situations as they are and turn them into medicine… take whatever situation you have and make something constructive happen with it.”
This bit of wisdom reminds me not only of my favorite Radiohead lyric (“Be constructive with your blues”), but also of a story about a Japanese monk who visited a monastery in the U.S. and promised to give a demonstration in the fine art of Zen archery. After much solemn preparation and breathless anticipation, the monk led his hosts on a hike up the mountain, where he then blindly fired an arrow off a cliff and walked away, leaving the stunned spectators to conclude the target must be wherever the arrow happened to land.
What matters, Davis is quoted as saying, is how we respond to what’s happening around us: “When you hit a wrong note, it’s the next note that you play that determines if it’s good or bad.” Or, as he put it more simply and non-dualistically, “Do not fear mistakes. There are none.”
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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness
Read More...Stream a 144-Hour Discography of Classic Jazz Recordings from Blue Note Records: Miles Davis, Art Blakey, John Coltrane, Ornette Coleman & More
There have been many influential jazz record labels throughout the previous century and into the current one, but there is no more recognizable label than Blue Note Records. Blue Note is “unquestionably the most iconic jazz label there has ever been,” claims the site Udiscover Music in a post on the “50 Greatest” Blue Note albums. Indeed, “it may well be the most iconic record label of all time… a brand recognized the world over for the ‘finest in jazz.’”
Outside of the label identities in certain subcultures like punk and electronic music, no other name so instantly conjures up a fully-formed, distinctive look and sound. It is the monochrome look of dapper, too-cool musical giants in tailored suits and skinny ties, and the sound, primarily, of the Hard Bop era—of Art Blakey, Wayne Shorter, Sonny Rollins, Dexter Gordon, Bud Powell, McCoy Tyner, and, of course, Miles Davis, Thelonious Monk, and John Coltrane, artists who totally enlarged the boundaries of jazz. (See the trailer above for the Sophie Huber documentary Blue Note Records: Beyond the Notes.)
By design, Blue Note’s unforgettable 50s and 60s album covers—most created by artist Reid Miles and photographer Francis Wolff—suggest brimfuls of possibility. “Right from the beginning,” says producer and writer Michael Cuscuna in the video above, “they really took their covers seriously.”
But this would have meant little if they hadn’t taken the music just as seriously as the stylish artwork that adorns it. Founded in 1939 by Alfred Lion and Max Margulis, the label first served as a home for more traditional big band and swing, but in the late forties, Blue Note seemed to realize better than any other commercial entity that the future of jazz had arrived, thanks in part to saxophonist and talent scout Ike Quebec.
“Not really in the pantheon of Blue Note players of the 1960s,” writes Burning Ambulance (he died in early ’63), Quebec is still central to the label’s success. As an A&R man, he signed Monk and Bud Powell, and “it’s been said that he did a lot of uncredited arranging on other musicians’ sessions, too.” His later recordings fit right in with his more famous peers (check out his “Blue and Sentimental”). Quebec’s own work doesn’t come up in many Blue Note retrospectives, including the Spotify discography above, and that’s too bad. But it’s hard to complain when you’ve got so many incredible, iconic Blue Note recordings in one place.
Created by Junior Bonner, the Blue Notes Records Discography playlist is not “complete” in that it contains every album the label ever released—an impossible expectation, surely, especially since Blue Note is still going strong. But, with a run time of 144 hours, it more than sufficiently covers the roster of the label’s greatest players, including several many of us probably haven’t heard before in much depth. Hardcore audiophile record collectors should visit LondonJazzCollector and Jazzdisco.org to get the full Blue Note catalog of every Blue Note artist and release. But lovers of jazz who don’t mind digital streaming instead of precious vinyl and shellac will be thrilled with this impressive anthology.
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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness
Read More...The Illustrated Medicinal Plant Map of the United States of America (1932): Download It in High Resolution
Two years ago, we highlighted collector David Rumsey’s huge map archive, which he donated to Stanford University in April of 2016 and which now resides at Stanford’s David Rumsey Map Center. The opening of this physical collection was a pretty big deal, but the digital collection has been on the web, in some part, and available to the online public since 1996. Twenty years ago, however, though the internet was decidedly becoming an everyday feature of modern life, it was difficult for the average person to imagine the degree to which digital technology would completely overtake our lives, not to mention the almost unbelievable wealth and power tech companies would amass in such short time.
Similarly, when the above 1932 Medicinal Plant Map of the United States (see in a larger format here) first appeared—one of the tens of thousands of maps available in the digital Rumsey collection—few people other than Aldous Huxley could have foreseen the exponential advances, and the rise of wealth and power, to come in the pharmaceutical industry.
But the pharmacists had a clue. The map, produced by the National Wholesale Druggists’ Association, “was intended to boost the image of the profession,” writes Rebecca Onion at Slate, “at a time when companies were increasingly compounding new pharmaceuticals in labs,” thereby rendering much of the drug-making knowledge and skill of old-time druggists obsolete.
Although the commercial pharmaceutical industry began taking shape in the late 19th century, it didn’t fully come into its own until the so-called “golden era” of 1930–1960, when, says Onion, researchers developed “a flood of new antibiotics, psychotropics, antihistamines, and vaccines, increasingly relying on synthetic chemistry to do so.” Over-the-counter medications proliferated, and pharmacists became alarmed. They sought to persuade the public of their continued relevance by pointing out, as a short blurb at the bottom left corner of the map notes, that “few people realize the extent to which plants and minerals enter into the practice of pharmacy.”
The map appeared during “Pharmacy Week” in October, when “pharmacists in Anglo-Saxon countries” promote their services. Losing sight of those important services, the Druggists’ Association writes, will lead to suffering, should the traditional pharmacist’s function “be impaired or destroyed by commercial trends.” Thus we have this visual demonstration of competence. The map identifies important species—native or cultivated—in each region of the country. In Kentucky, we see Nicotina tabacum, whose cured leaves, you guessed it, “constitute tobacco.” Across the country in Nevada, we are introduced to Apocynum cannabinum, “native of U.S. and Southern Canada—the dried rhizome and roots constitute the drug apocynum or Canadian hemp.”
The better-known Cannibus sativa also appears, in one of the boxes around the map’s border that introduce plants from outside North America, including Erythroxylon coca, from Bolivia and Peru, and Papaver somniferum, from which opium derives. Many of the other medications will be less familiar to us—and belong to what we now call naturopathy, herbalism, or, more generally, “traditional medicine.” Though these medicinal practices are many thousands of years old, the druggists try to project a cutting-edge image, assuring the map’s readers that “intense scientific study, expert knowledge, extreme care and accuracy are applied by the pharmacist to medicinal plants.”
While pharmacists today are highly-trained professionals, the part of their jobs that involved the making of drugs from scratch has been ceded to massive corporations and their research laboratories. The druggists of 1932 saw this coming, and no amount of colorful public relations could stem the tide. But it may be the case, given changing laws, changing attitudes, the backlash against overmedication, and the devastating opioid epidemic, that their craft is more relevant than it has been in decades, though today’s “druggists” work in marijuana dispensaries and health food stores instead of national pharmacy chains.
View and download the map in a high resolution scan at the David Rumsey Map Collection, where you can zoom in to every plant on the map and read its description.
via Slate
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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness
Read More...Hidden Ancient Greek Medical Text Read for the First Time in a Thousand Years — with a Particle Accelerator
Image by Farrin Abbott/SLAC, via Flickr Commons
Long before humanity had paper to write on, we had papyrus. Made of the pith of the wetland plant Cyperus papyrus and first used in ancient Egypt, it made for quite a step up in terms of convenience from, say, the stone tablet. And not only could you write on it, you could rewrite on it. In that sense it was less the paper of its day than the first-generation video tape: given the expense of the stuff, it often made sense to erase the content already written on a piece of papyrus in order to record something more timely. But you couldn’t completely obliterate the previous layers of text, a fact that has long held out promise to scholars of ancient history looking to expand their field of primary sources.
The decidedly non-ancient solution: particle accelerators. Researchers at the Stanford Synchrotron Radiation Lightsource (SSRL) recently used one to find the hidden text in what’s now called the Syriac Galen Palimpsest. It contains, somewhere deep in its pages, “On the Mixtures and Powers of Simple Drugs,” an “important pharmaceutical text that would help educate fellow Greek-Roman doctors,” writes Amanda Solliday at the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory.
Originally composed by Galen of Pergamon, “an influential physician and a philosopher of early Western medicine,” the work made its way into the 6th-century Islamic world through a translation into a language between Greek and Arabic called Syriac.
Image by Farrin Abbott/SLAC, via Flickr Commons
Alas, “despite the physician’s fame, the most complete surviving version of the translated manuscript was erased and written over with hymns in the 11th century – a common practice at the time.” Palimpsest, the word coined to describe such texts written, erased, and written over on pre-paper materials like papyrus and parchment, has long since had a place in the lexicon as a metaphor for anything long-historied, multi-layered, and fully understandable only with effort. The Stanford team’s effort involved a technique called X‑ray fluorescence (XRF), whose rays “knock out electrons close to the nuclei of metal atoms, and these holes are filled with outer electrons resulting in characteristic X‑ray fluorescence that can be picked up by a sensitive detector.”
Those rays “penetrate through layers of text and calcium, and the hidden Galen text and the newer religious text fluoresce in slightly different ways because their inks contain different combinations of metals such as iron, zinc, mercury and copper.” Each of the leather-bound book’s 26 pages takes ten hours to scan, and the enormous amounts of new data collected will presumably occupy a variety of experts on the ancient world — on the Greek and Islamic civilizations, on their languages, on their medicine — for much longer thereafter. But you do have to wonder: what kind of unimaginably advanced technology will our descendants a millennium and a half years from now be using to read all of the stuff we thought we’d erased?
Related Content:
The Turin Erotic Papyrus: The Oldest Known Depiction of Human Sexuality (Circa 1150 B.C.E.)
Try the Oldest Known Recipe For Toothpaste: From Ancient Egypt, Circa the 4th Century BC
Learn Ancient Greek in 64 Free Lessons: A Free Course from Brandeis & Harvard
Introduction to Ancient Greek History: A Free Online Course from Yale
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities and culture. His projects include 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.
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