History as She is Learned: Some of my Students' Greatest Hits

"Visits to Bedlam Lunatic Hospital by prominent socialites and political figures (such as the Prince of Whales) increased the popularity of these visits throughout the general public."

(Image: George, Prince of Wales, by James Gillray)

"The Haitian Revolutionaries defeated the French due to gorilla warfare."

“Thomas Wolsey was born a pheasant and grew up to be a cardinal.”

"The Flagellants flatulated themselves for religion, believing the plaque was the work of God."

"Voltaire argued that forcing people to believe in a particular religion produced hippocrates."

"The Battle of the Nile provided the impotence for Great Britain to exercise a greater hold on their colonies".

"If not for his role in finding Livingstone, Henry Stanley would not have sat on Parliament."

See if you can find Stanley in this picture.

THE END (is near).

Art of the First World War: The Nash Brothers

The brothers John and Paul Nash were two of the major British artist-soldiers of World War I, renowned for their surrealistic yet realistic portrayals of the battlefields of the Western front. Here are some of their works:

Paul Nash, "We Are Making a New World" 1918

Paul Nash, "The Ypres Salient at Night" 1918

Paul Nash, "Wire" c. 1918

Paul Nash, "Spring in the Trenches, 1917" -- a less than ideal spring.

John Nash, "Over the Top, 1917" This painting commemorates an attack by the Artists' Rifles, in which most of the men, writers, painters, musicians, were killed or wounded.

John Nash, "Oppy Wood," 1917, showing the destruction of the landscape by artillery barrages.

Photo of Oppy Wood.

Paul Nash, "The Menin Road, 1917"

Photo of the Menin Road.

Art of the First World War: Otto Dix

Otto Dix (1891-1969) was one of the great artists of the early 20th century, renowned for his harsh modernist, yet realistic depictions of the First World War and postwar German society under the Weimar Republic.

Dix volunteered for military service when war broke out in 1914. An enthusiastic soldier at first, he painted himself as a ferocious "Nietzschean Warrior."

As time went by Dix's enthusiasm for the war dimmed and was replaced by a sense of abject horror, reflected in his "Self-Portrait as Target," with the buttons on his hat reminiscent of the bullseye on a paper target.

Dix's war paintings are among the most ghastly and ghostly done by any artist, reminiscent of Goya's paintings of the Spanish war of liberation against Napoleonic France. One example is the apocalyptic "War." This is part of a larger triptych.

Two versions of "The Wounded Soldier" convey the haunting madness and futility of the war, as does the memento mori "The Skull."

Dix's postwar paintings of Weimar German society often emphasized the horrendous price paid by the nation's military personnel, as in "War Cripples.".

Dix juxtaposed those who had done well out the war and those who endured untold suffering in woks like "Prague Street" with the woman rushing past cripples and its hints of a rising antisemitism.

The triptych "Metropolis" features contrast the suffering of the veterans with the degenerate revelry of  the wealthy, uncaring bourgeoisie.

The Nazis hated Dix's paintings as counter-productive to their militaristic and nationalistic goals. They destroyed many of them after exhibiting them in an exhibition called "Degenerate Art."

Art of the First World War

The First World War, which ended a century ago, killed at least 10 million soldiers and millions more civilians, led to the Russian Revolution, the Great Depression, the rise of fascism and Nazism, and World War II.  The guns fell silent at the 11th hour of the 11th day, of the 11th month. Clearly, the armistice makers had a sense of history. WWI was not the first war to be photographed or filmed, but none had ever produced so many images in those media. The war also produced a huge body of painting and art, most by those who fought. Here are a few examples, in realistic and more modernist styles.

    

C.R.W. Nevinson, "Paths of Glory" 1917. "Dulce et Decorum Est, Pro Patria Mori."

Nevinson, "Harvest of Battle" 1919. Blind leading the blind.

Nevinson, "Machine Gun," 1915. French soldiers.

Frank Branwyn, "Tank in Action" (1925) Painted for a public building in Britain. Rejected as "unacceptably morbid." In other words, too accurate.

Henri de Groux, "Gas Masks" (1916). French soldiers. Note resemblance to pigs. Asphyxiation by gas was perhaps the most horrible way of dying.

George Leroux, "L'Enfer" ("Hell") 1917, Suitably named. Artillery killed more men than any other weapon.

William Orpen, "Dead Germans in a Trench" 1918

Paul Nash, "The Menin Road" 1919

Nevinson, "Taube" 1916. Child killed by German aerial bombing. Total War.

London's Dirty Dissector: Joshua Brookes

Joshua Brookes (1761-1833) was an unusual British anatomist. Another anatomist called him "the dirtiest professional person I have ever met. ... I really know no dirty thing with which he could compare -- all and every part of him was dirt."

Brookes doesn't look too filthy in this portrait. Perhaps we should take the quotation with a grain of salt. But even if true, I suppose the bodies he dissected didn't mind a bit of dirt. He couldn't kill them, though perhaps some of the resurrection men who supplied his "subjects" might have. Burke and Hare were not unique.

Brookes studied under several eminent teachers, among them William Hunter and his more famous brother, John Hunter. He was also an innovator in preserving cadavers. He injected them with a nitrogen compound, potassium nitrate. The injections preserved them for a long time even in hot weather, allowing him to keep his school open in the summer, unlike rival schools. It was said his school stank of rotten meat, but then none of the anatomy schools can have been especially fragrant.

Brookes often got into scrapes with his suppliers, the body snatchers or resurrection men, presumably over prices. One gang left two decomposing corpses on his front steps, leading to a local mob action against Brookes. On another occasion, they delivered an unconscious man. Brookes only discovered the ruse when he rolled the body down the cellar stairs. Or kicked it down the stairs. He once let slip that he had done that in one case, so it my have been common practice. In this case, the man awoke, jumped up, and fled in terror. Brookes called the resurrection men "the most iniquitous set of villains who ever lived." But he did business with them, as did all the successful anatomists. (Image: "Death in the Dissection Room" by Thomas Rowlandson)

Brookes' other claim to fame was the museum of comparative anatomy he established in his house and school on Great Marlborough Street. Like his preceptor John Hunter, he also kept a menagerie of live animals on the grounds of his house. As his health and income declined in the late 1820s, Brookes sold off the anatomical collection piecemeal. (Image: Brookes' Museum, House, and School)

Further Reading: 
Ruth Richardson, Death, Dissection, and the Destitute
Sarah Wise, The Italian Boy

Moonlight, Magnolias, and Madness

The incredible story of the treatment of the mentally ill in a Deep South state, which produced one of the first state mental hospitals in the US and also the Civil War. A state which one of its brightest men, James Louis Petigru, said was "too small to be a republic and too big to be a lunatic asylum."

The First Vaccine Eliminated History's Greatest Killer, Smallpox

Perhaps the greatest weapon human beings possess against infectious disease is vaccines. They are also one of the most cost-effective, because they prevent disease and costly hospital and medical procedures. 

This lesson needs to be hammered home repeatedly, because humans have short memories and short attention spans. Vaccines have saved hundreds of millions of lives in our lifetimes alone. 

The vaccines for Covid-19 are now promising to release us from our lockdowns as well. They may be the only hope beyond herd immunity, whic wll cost many millions of lives. 

The terms "vaccine" and "vaccination" derive from the Latin "vacca" for cow. The reason is that the first effective vaccine used pus from a mild skin disease, the so-called cowpox, to immunize people against the deadly smallpox. 

"Cowpox" was in fact horse-pox, which sometimes infected cows. Most people who got it worked with cows or horses.

The cartoon below by James Gillray, c. 1800, shows Edward Jenner, usually given credit for the procedure, vaccinating people, who are turning into cows. Although satire, the cartoon shows the fears the procedure aroused in many people. 

The use of the vaccine derived from observations that people who worked with cows and got "cowpox" never got smallpox. Jenner was not the first to use the procedure. A farmer, Benjamin Jesty, pictured below, had employed it about twenty years before.

Jenner (below) was the first to publicize it and get credit, a knighthood, and a ton of money from Parliament.

Before the use of "vaccine" an immunization using actual smallpox pus from human cases had been in use, in some places for centuries. Inoculation, or variolation, as it was called, was intended to induce a mild case of the disease and lifelong immunity. It was not always mild. It had a mortality rate of about 1% inoculated and it sometimes left ugly scars. Image below compares inoculation and vaccination effects on arms.

The natural disease, however, often killed 20% or more of the infected, which explains the attraction of inoculation, especially during epidemics. Its use had become widespread by the time Jenner popularized vaccination. 

Vaccination was much safer than inoculation, but it was soon discovered that it did not provide lifelong immunity. Once that was understood, periodic re-vaccination became standard in the later 19th century. (Image below shows people being vaccinated in the US in 1870s.)

Public resistance to vaccination remained high in many countries for a long time. But access to it was a bigger problem, often because of cost or lack of health care infrastructure. 

By 1979, a global vaccination campaign headed by WHO had eradicated smallpox, the greatest killer disease known to mankind. Its success had also led to the development of many other "vaccines." The polio vaccine has nearly eliminated that disease. Vaccines have many other diseases on the run. 

The lesson: Get your jab!

The Middle of Nowhere, Nevada

Looking for a romantic, exotic holiday in the Middle of Nowhere? Drive, or better yet, walk across Nevada, preferably along US Highway 50, the road that LIFE magazine in 1986 dubbed "the Loneliest Road in America."

If the Middle of Nowhere exists, I think it is somewhere on this road between Ely in the east and Virginia City in the west of the state. At first, I decided the Middle of Nowhere must be at Austin, the town closest to the geographic center of the state, population, 192. I was astounded to discover that it has an "International Hotel." 

One of Austin's great claims to fame (or infamy) is that Jeremy Clarkson and the Top Gear gang once did a show from there. Amazingly, they didn't get kicked out of town. Neither did we.

Austin is truly isolated, 70 miles from Eureka to the East and 110 from Fallon (of Top Gun Fame) to the West, with little but sagebrush, jack rabbits, snakes, and lizards in between. Well, to be accurate, there is another candidate for Middle of Nowhere: Middlegate Station, population 18, oops, 17.

Middlegate is too small to have a Wikipedia entry, but it does have a restaurant offering humongous hamburgers. My son Alastair tried to finish one. He managed to walk across the US, and he is a big guy, but somehow he failed this test. Had he finished the burger, he could have won a Middlegate Station t-shirt. Alas, he had to forego that treasure.

Middlegate actually claims to be the Middle of Nowhere (see photo above hamburger). It's a compelling claim, but I think it is too close to Fallon, however, a bustling metropolis of 8000 or so, to be the true Middle of Nowhere. 

To complicate matters, I later discovered that another town to the north, on I-80, Battle Mountain, claims, on a huge billboard, that it is “Halfway to Everywhere.” As advertisements never lie, especially in America, I guess that must be the Middle of Nowhere.