Along with its usual fare — ethnography and anthropology about the peoples of the Western Hemisphere — Paris’s Journal de la Société des Américanistes devoted part of its 1909 issue(*) to a sort of review article summarizing all known extremely tall people of the Americas. These were mostly modern cases of acromegaly who died before […]
About: Amboceptor
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Posts by Amboceptor:
Trading typhoid with your towels
* * * We’ve probably all wondered, when drying our hands… this is supposedly a net transfer of germs from us to the towel, but at what point does the towel become so filth-riddled that we are now transferring germs from the towel to us? An early investigation of this was done in the American […]
Novel Mode of Capturing a Heron (1866)
Hardwicke’s Science-Gossip was a monthly publication that brought science (mostly botany, zoology and geology) to the masses. Science-Gossip provided short summaries of scientific studies (mostly botany and zoology); advice to the hobbyist on raising reptiles, catching rare butterflies, building a microscope, etc; and most interesting, pages and pages of correspondence, answering readers’ questions and reprinting […]
The Rouen Institute for Human Enlargement: a dream unfulfilled
From the Canada Lancet (June 1901), vol. XXXIV, no. 9, p. 550: An eccentric millionaire, whose amiable fad would have met with the cordial approval of Frederick the Great, has recently died and bequeathed to the municipality of Rouen an annual sum of 100,000 francs, for the purpose of providing a dowry to a couple of […]