There’s the heartbreaking news from Palmyra, of course. Despite the unfortunate title (why does it have to be either/or?), Julian Battini’s take in The Guardian is especially sensitive. But there was some good news, too. One tantalizingly brief article describes a find that is very close to my heart (or at least my dissertation), a marble block from Laodicea inscribed…
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New(ish) article: How Victorian London almost ended up with a Roman sewer
In case you missed it, I wrote a thing about Victorian pipe dreams (sorry) over at the Appendix.
The more things change: Popular medicine movements in early America and ancient Rome
Lately I’ve been reading Joan Burbick’s Healing the Republic: The Language of Health and the Culture of Nationalism in Nineteenth-Century America, which I picked up for a few bucks at the local used bookstore. I’ve found Burbick’s methodology very useful for my own research (no surprise), but I’ve also been enjoying tracking down and flipping through some of the primary…
#plagueposter
Alison Atkin’s comic strip-style poster on attritional mortality is lots of fun. Exciting research, clear presentation, and stick figures galore (via Atkin’s blog).
Healing Augustus, healing the empire
This past Monday marked the 2000th anniversary of Augustus’ death, as you likely already know from the #aug2k hashtag, the massive exhibition about the guy in Rome, or from just being great at remembering dates. Whatever you think of his methods, it’s indisputable that Augustus had a stabilizing effect on the Roman empire: before he took control, Rome had endured over a…
Lamarck’s revenge
This is a clear little writeup about current research on inherited acquired traits. I think this is one of the most exciting (and frustrating) frontiers in the science of the past. We’ll never be able to quantify the effects of, for example, the dozens of famines reported in Livy on the health of Republican Roman farmers — but each individual famine may have…
Trusting doctors, past and present
The New York Times reports some troubling news from Guinea: Health workers here say they are now battling two enemies: the unprecedented Ebola epidemic, which has killed more than 660 people in four countries since it was first detected in March, and fear, which has produced growing hostility toward outside help. On Friday alone, health authorities in Guinea confirmed 14 new…
A note on Roman demography and transdisciplinary envy
I recently spent quite a lot of time looking at this 1898 infographic over at CityLab, which was making the rounds on the internet last week. Because I hail from the Northeast and spend a lot of time gawking at old architecture, it gave me a sense of completely unearned pride to see the names of now-quaint cities I know…
A note on the Vienna Dioscorides
The cover image above is an illustration of mugwort (Artemisia vulgaris) from a 6th century AD manuscript commonly known as the Vienna Dioscorides. Created for Juliana Anicia, daughter of the Western Roman emperor Anicius Olybrius, the manuscript consists of a copy of Pedanius Dioscorides’ pharmacological text De materia medica (On medical substances) as well as a copy of Rufus’ Carmen de herbis (Poem about plants), both of…