The bark of Cinchona trees (from which quinine is obtained) was first described as a remedy for malaria by Jesuit missionaries in Peru. Protestant hostility toward Jesuits, however, led to a distrust of “Peruvian bark” in England. An apothecary’s apprentice named Robert Talbor warned patients to “beware of all palliative cures and especially that known by the name of Jesuits’ powder,” instead offering his own secret remedy. His treatment was highly effective, earning him a fortune. A year after his death, his “English remedy” was revealed to be an infusion of cinchona powder mixed with opium and wine.
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It’s considered bad luck in parts of Mississippi for mourners to call a coffin pretty.
Walter Kirke, British deputy head of military intelligence in France, noted in his diary in October 1915 that the chief (“C”) of the Secret Intelligence Service had come upon a solution for how to send secret messages: “Heard from C that the best invisible ink is semen,” Kirke wrote. The substance, it turned out, was hard to detect by the common revealing method of iodine vapor. The chief’s name: Mansfield Cumming.
Archaeologists in France discovered in 1865 a Stone Age human skull with a hole sawed in it. They believed it had served as a drinking vessel; one wrote the hole was “expressly made for the application of the lips.” But later study by an anatomist proved this to be incorrect: the skull was actually evidence of ancient brain surgery.
In January 1787 Catherine the Great embarked on a six-month survey of her empire, and Gregory Potemkin, former lover and governor general of Crimea, was among those in charge of the tour. Georg von Helbig, a critic of Potemkin, coined the term Potemkin villages to indict the governor general for falsifying his accomplishments, going so far as to claim that while Catherine sailed the Dnieper River, elaborate facades were set up, removed, and placed farther downriver so that she would see the same scenes five or six times.
In 1851 an Episcopal rector wondered why Nathaniel Hawthorne had selected the theme of adultery for his 1850 novel. “Is it, in short, because a running undertide of filth has become as requisite to a romance as death in the fifth act to a tragedy?” wrote the cleric. “We honestly believe that The Scarlet Letter has already done not a little to degrade our literature and to encourage social licentiousness.”
“Even if WDW [Walt Disney World] is the HPOE [Happiest Place on Earth], it is still part of Earth,” legal scholar Lauren A. Newell wrote in a 2012 paper. “Occupants of WDW are not immune from inclement weather, technical malfunctions, hunger, fatigue, or any other source of unpleasantness that exists in life.”
A fish seller in Kuwait began gluing googly eyes on rotting fishes’ eye sockets in August 2018 in an attempt to make his wares appear fresher; in response, a rival seller began marketing his own fresh fish as “without cosmetic surgery.” The story went viral online, bringing it to the attention of the Ministry of Commerce and Industry, which promptly shut the first shop down.
“My music is best understood by animals and children,” Igor Stravinsky said in 1961. Over two millennia earlier, Aristotle had counseled in The Politics that young men ought to attain a musical sophistication with “a capacity for enjoying noble melodies and rhythms and not merely that general effect of music which is enjoyed by some of the lower animals, as well as by a number of slaves and children.”
To promote malingering and desertion among German soldiers during World War II, the British Political Warfare Executive and Special Operations Executive produced innocuously titled German-language booklets, among them Exercise Protocol for War Marines, into which they inserted information on how to feign illness and escape service. The British then circulated such propaganda using various special-ops agents and balloon drops across Europe.
George Washington completed his second and final term as president in 1797 and moved back to Mount Vernon, where his farm manager, a Scotsman, convinced him to build a whiskey distillery to earn higher profits on his estate. “I make use of no barley in my distillery,” he wrote in 1798. “Rye chiefly and Indian corn in a certain proportion compose the materials from which the whiskey is made.” Having expanded operations by 1799, the year of his death, he owned five stills in a building of 2,250 square feet with a yearly yield of nearly 10,500 gallons. It is considered to have been one of the country’s largest distilleries at that time.
In November 1934 a team of American baseball stars, including Babe Ruth, toured Japan. When they arrived for a game in the town of Narashino, each man was presented with a horseshoe-shaped flower wreath. Ruth detested the gift; he later told a Japanese baseball magazine that he considered such wreaths bad luck and had never hit a home run after receiving one.
For Kid Nation, a reality show that aired in 2007, forty children went to stay in a New Mexico ghost town for forty days. They lived as laborers, cooks, merchants, or an upper class; many worked fourteen-hour days to earn buffalo nickels to spend on root beer. In the final episode, some participants raided the dry goods store. “It’s free,” said one kid, his mouth stuffed with gummy bears. Another raider was heard announcing, “There is a god.”
Ornithologists have found that hormones strongly determine aggression between sibling seabirds. Blue-footed boobies rarely attack a nest mate, while among Nazca boobies—born with androgen levels three times higher—the elder of two hatchlings unconditionally attacks and kills the younger one shortly after birth.
“I haven’t come here to settle down / I’ve come here to depart,” wrote the thirteenth-century Turkish Sufi mystic and itinerant bard Yunus Emre, who traveled throughout Anatolia preaching Islam by way of memorized couplets. “I didn’t come to create any problems / I’m only here to love…He is my teacher. I am His servant / I am a nightingale in His garden.”