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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Julius Caesar was criticized for his loosely belted toga. “Beware the badly belted boy,” said Sulla; Cicero sneered at Caesar’s habit of “trailing the fringe of the toga on the ground like an effeminate.” His political rival Cato the Younger made a point of wearing a short toga with no tunic underneath, as was considered masculine. But a decade later it was common for young Roman men to grow goatees, wear flowing togas, and use “loosely belted” as a catchphrase.
DNA tests determined in 2017 that Egyptian noblemen Khnum-Nakht and Nakht-Ankh, two brothers whose four-thousand-year-old mummies were excavated in 1907, had the same mother but different fathers.
In An Inquiry into the Effects of Ardent Spirits upon the Human Body and Mind, published in 1785, physician and Founding Father Benjamin Rush wrote that drunkenness, an “odious disease (for by that name it should be called),” appeared with, among other symptoms, “unusual garrulity…unusual silence…a disposition to quarrel…uncommon good humor and an insipid simpering or laugh…disclosure of their own or other people’s secrets…a rude disposition to tell those persons in company whom they know, their faults…certain extravagant acts which indicate a temporary fit of madness.”
On November 22, 1963, Aldous Huxley, bedridden and dying, requested on a writing tablet that his wife Laura give him a 100 microgram dose of LSD. As she went to get the drug from the medicine cabinet, Laura was perplexed to see the doctor and nurses watching TV. She gave him a second dose a few hours later, and by 5:20 p.m. he had died. Laura later learned that the TV had been showing coverage of the assassination of John F. Kennedy, who had been pronounced dead at 1:00 p.m. that day.
The city of Baltimore has a history of election riots, but the rise of the Know-Nothing Party in the 1850s further exacerbated election violence. One affiliated gang, the Blood Tubs, took barrels of blood from butchers, threw Germans and Irishmen into them, and then chased the bloodied victims down the street. By 1856 Know-Nothings had won local, state, and national contests.
Emily and Charlotte Brontë, insomniacs both, would walk together in circles around the dining room table until they were tired enough to sleep. When Emily died and Charlotte suffered alone, her insomnia worsened; she added to her route, often wandering down neighborhood streets and into the cemetery until daybreak.
Color film in the 1950s barely registered dark skin tones; Kodak had developed the product to measure images against the white skin of a model known as Shirley. The company eventually modified its film emulsion, responding to complaints from advertisers promoting wood furniture and chocolate.
Animal cognition researcher Irene Pepperberg wrote in her study of the African gray parrot Alex that the intelligent bird often became restless when asked to focus on a single task: “He will cease to work, begin to preen, or interrupt with many successive requests.” In 1996 Alex appeared on the television show Turning Point to demonstrate that he could name the colors, shapes, sizes, and materials of different objects. In the middle of this exercise, he began to respond to Pepperberg’s questions with remarks like “Want to go back” and “Want to go eat dinner.”
In 2013 a picture taken by the Planck telescope of fluctuations in the cosmic microwave background—radiation generated by the Big Bang—resulted in the estimation that the universe is 13.82 billion years old.
“When I was young I walked all over this country, east and west,” said the Apache leader Cochise, “and saw no other people than the Apaches. After many summers I walked again and found another race of people had come to take it.”
“We are nothing but what we derive from the air we breathe, the climate we inhabit,” wrote J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur in his Letters from an American Farmer (1782). “Those who live near the sea, feed more on fish than on flesh, and often encounter that boisterous element. This renders them more bold and compromising.”
A French tale from 1615 contains a rare early modern mention of a married woman considering birth control. Her method: pressing a bead of perfume on “that artery that the vulgar calls the pulse” during intercourse. The procedure fails—not due to its own inadequacies, the reader is told, but because the woman, so taken by her activity, neglects to apply the perfume.
One of the earliest known instances of wild carnivores being held in captivity in Mesoamerica dates to around the second century in Teotihuacán; excavations starting in the late 1990s uncovered the remains of almost two hundred animals—including wolves, eagles, and jaguars—in the Pyramids of the Sun and the Moon. The skeletons showed bone breaks, bone fusion, and abnormal growths, as well as indications of a human-controlled diet.
“Why is life a perpetual preparation for something that never happens?” W.B. Yeats asked in his journal, September 16, 1909.