#a well-established medical practice in medieval europe

[jaratedeguadalupe]

Ok but au where remus has gotten banned from every grocery store in a 30-mile radius for drastically different reasons and makes it his life mission to get banned from every single one 

[jameelamassagecenter]

The Ancient Evolution of Massage Therapy

Massage Ajman therapy is a timeless practice that has evolved over thousands of years, transcending cultures, civilizations, and healing traditions. From its humble beginnings as a form of manual therapy in ancient civilizations to its modern-day status as a respected wellness practice, massage therapy has undergone a remarkable evolution. In this article, we’ll take a journey through the history of massage therapy, exploring its origins, development, and transformation into the multifaceted healing modality it is today.

Ancient Origins: The Birth of Massage spa ajman Therapy Massage therapy traces its roots back to ancient civilizations where it was regarded as a sacred healing art practiced by wise healers and shamans. In ancient Egypt, for example, hieroglyphic inscriptions depict scenes of massage being used to alleviate pain, promote healing, and restore vitality. Similarly, ancient Chinese texts dating back thousands of years document the use of massage techniques as part of traditional medicine to treat various ailments and balance the body’s energy flow.

Greek Influence: From Gymnasia to Medical Practice The ancient Greeks also made significant contributions to the development of Sharjah massage center therapy. The Greek physician Hippocrates, often referred to as the “father of medicine,” advocated for the therapeutic benefits of massage in promoting health and well-being. He believed that massage could aid in the treatment of injuries, relieve pain, and improve circulation. Greek athletes incorporated massage into their training regimen, utilizing it to enhance performance, prevent injuries, and promote recovery. As Greek culture spread throughout the Mediterranean region, so too did the practice of massage therapy, influencing healing traditions across Europe and beyond.

Middle Ages to Renaissance: Massage in Medieval Medicine During the Middle Ages, massage therapy continued to play a role in medical practice, albeit with varying degrees of acceptance and legitimacy. In medieval Europe, massage was often practiced by barber surgeons and lay healers alongside other forms of manual therapy. However, with the rise of universities and formal medical education during the Renaissance, massage fell out of favor among the medical establishment, relegated to the realm of folk medicine and alternative healing.

Modern Revival: From Medical Treatment to Wellness Practice The 19th and 20th centuries saw a resurgence of interest in massage therapy as a legitimate medical treatment, thanks in part to the pioneering efforts of figures such as Per Henrik Ling and Johann Georg Mezger. Ling, a Swedish fencing master, developed a system of therapeutic Ajman massage known as Swedish massage, which incorporated principles of anatomy, physiology, and gymnastics. Mezger, a Dutch physician, further refined Ling’s techniques and introduced standardized terminology for massage strokes and techniques that are still used today.

In the 20th century, massage therapy gained recognition as a valuable adjunctive therapy in medical settings, particularly for the treatment of musculoskeletal conditions, rehabilitation, and pain management. As scientific research began to validate the therapeutic benefits of massage, its popularity grew, and it became increasingly integrated into mainstream healthcare systems.

Today, Sharjah Spa massage therapy has evolved into a diverse and dynamic field, encompassing a wide range of techniques, modalities, and applications. From Swedish massage to deep tissue therapy, Thai massage to aromatherapy, there is a massage style suited for every need and preference. Beyond its physical benefits, massage therapy is also recognized for its profound effects on mental and emotional well-being, offering a holistic approach to health and wellness that addresses the body, mind, and spirit.

Conclusion: The evolution of massage therapy is a testament to its enduring power as a healing modality that transcends time and culture. From its ancient origins to its modern-day incarnation, massage therapy continues to adapt and innovate, remaining a cornerstone of holistic health and wellness practices around the world. As we look to the future, the legacy of massage therapy reminds us of the innate capacity of human touch to heal, nurture, and restore balance to body, mind, and spirit.

[anarghyasingh]

Shift in perception

Now, understanding mental health has transformed significantly from historical times to today's era. Such a transformation indicates changes within the scientific realm, cultural expressions of attitudes, and the priorities of society. Historically, most mental health issues were misunderstood, stigmatized, and due to supernatural reasons. But today, people are more aware and of accepting nature. However, challenges stay constant.

Traditionally, mental health issues have been understood by religion, mysticism, and superstition. Psychosis or depression were explained in terms of divine punishment, demonic possession, or spiritual imbalance. All treatments varied; from exorcism and rituals, there were cruel practices such as isolating and punishing the mentally unfit. For example, people with mental illnesses living in medieval Europe were often in dungeons under very horrific conditions as a form of "treatment."

There was some progress when philosophers and early scientists started to question supernatural explanations. There was Philippe Pinel in the 18th century who argued for more humane treatment and placed compassion and care over punishment. The stigma, however, continued and hence these places remained confinement rather than opening healing institutions.

The 19th and early 20th century witnessed a significant shift in looking at mental health as a medical issue rather than a moral failing. Psychiatry emerged as a distinct field, and theories of Sigmund Freud and his psychoanalysis explored the inner workings of the mind.

Public opinion had not much changed at that point. Mental illness was considered a family shame. Many mentally ill people were secluded, leaving them in even greater isolation from society, leading to worsening their condition. The media did not help. People with mental illnesses were represented as dangerous or unstable.

The mid-20th century saw significant progress in understanding and treating mental health. The introduction of medications, such as antidepressants and antipsychotics, revolutionized treatment options. The general rise of psychology as a discipline helped in popularizing discourses on mental health, although many stereotypes and myths remained.

Today, mental health is understood as a necessary component of the entire spectrum of well-being.

Neurosciences and psychology have established a more extensive understanding of the biological, psychological, and social underpinnings of mental health. Syndromes such as depression, anxiety, and schizophrenia are no longer perceived as moral or personal failures but as complex, multifaceted disorders.

Events like World Mental Health Day, along with initiatives from the WHO and the website and campaigns from Mental Health America, have increased the global awareness. Celebrities, athletes, and influencers also came forward and revealed their struggles so that it made a normal conversation around mental health.

The new generation or Gen Z has adopted cultural changes regarding mental health awareness. Social networking sites have enabled the exchange of experiences, which has reduced isolation and promoted feelings of empathy. However, this era of connectivity has led to new challenges, including cyberbullying, which often leads to mental distress.

The graph regarding the awareness of mental health has gone up with time. However, there is still a lot of stigma surrounding the topic. People, even after being aware of the issue, don't want their peers or friends to know about their struggles and want to keep their healing process a secret.

[dwellordream]

“…Now, if people are taught anything at all about medieval history it often is English medieval history. People with absolutely no other frame of reference can often tell you when the Norman Conquest of England took place, or the date of the signing of Magna Carta even if they don’t know exactly why these things are important. (TBH Magna Carta isn’t important unless you were a very rich dude at the time, sooooo.) If you ask people to name a medieval book they’ll probably say Beowulf even if they’ve never read it.

Here’s the thing though – England was a total backwater in terms of the way medieval people thought and was not particularly important at the time. How much of a backwater? Well, when Anne of Bohemia, daughter of my man Holy Roman Emperor Charles IV (RIP, mate. Mourn ya til I join ya.) married King Richard II of England in the fourteenth century there was uproar in Prague. How could a Bohemian imperial princess be sent to London? How would she survive in the hinterlands? The answer was she was sent along with an entire cadre of Bohemian ladies in waiting to give her people with whom she could have a sophisticated conversation.

This ended up completely changing fashion in England. Anne is the girl who introduced those sweet horned headdresses you think of when you think of medieval ladies, riding side-saddle, and the word “coach” to England, (from the Hungairan Kocs, where the cart she arrived at court the first time came from). Sweetening her transition to English life was the fact that she didn’t have to pay a dowry to get married. Instead, the English were allowed to trade freely with Bohemia and the Holy Roman Empire and allowed to be around a Czech lady. That was reward enough as far as the Empire was concerned. That’s how much England was not a thing. (The English took this insult very badly, and hated Anne at first, but since she was a G they got over it. Don’t worry.)

If England was unimportant why do we know about English medieval history and nothing else? Same reason you’re reading this blog in English right now, homes. I’m not sure if you know this, but in the modern period, the English got super super good at going around the world an enslaving anyone they met. When you’re busy not thinking about German imperial atrocities in the nineteenth century it’s because you’re busy thinking about British imperial atrocities, you feel me? So we all speak English now and if we harken back to historical things it gives us a grandiose idea of English history.

Say, then, you are trying to establish a curriculum for schools that bigs up English history, as is our want. Ask yourself – are you gonna want to dwell on an era where England was so unimportant that Czechs were flexing on it? Answer: no. You gonna gloss right over that and skip to the early modern era and the Tudors who I am absolutely sure you know all the fuck about. The second colonial-imperialist reason for not learning about medieval history is that medieval history doesn’t exactly aggrandise the colonial-imperialist system.

Yes, there are empires in medieval Europe. In addition to the Holy Roman Empire there’s the Eastern Roman Empire, aka the Byzantine Empire, whose downfall is often pointed to as one of several possible bookends to the medieval period. You also have opportunists like the Venetians who set up colonies around the Adriatic and Mediterranean, or the Normans who defo jump in boats and take over, well, anything they could get their hands on.

Notably, when these dudes got where they were going, they didn’t end up enslaving a bunch of people, committing genocide, and then funnelling all resources back to a theoretical homeland. The Normans settled down where they were eventually creating distinctive court cultures, and the Venetian colonies enjoyed a seriously high level of trade and quality of life without major disruption to local customs. Force was certainly used to take over at the outset, but it wasn’t something that resulted in the complete subjugation and deaths of millions halfway around the world from where the aggressors started.

No, the European middle ages are a lot more about local areas muddling along with smaller systems of rule. That’s why you have distinctive areas like say, Burgundy or Sicily calling their own shots and developing their own styles and fashions. Hell, even within imperial systems like the Holy Roman Empire Bavarians or Bohemians saw themselves as very much distinct peoples within an imperial system, not necessarily imperial subjects first and foremost.

You know where you would go to find some history that justifies huge imperial systems that require constant conquest and an army of slaves to keep them afloat? Ancient Rome. Remember how you got taught how great Rome was? How it was a democracy? How they had wonderful technology and underfloor heating, and oh isn’t that temple beautiful? Yeah, that’s because you were being inculcated to think that the ends of imperial violence justifies mass enslavement and disenfranchisement.

In reality, Rome wasn’t some sort of grand free democracy. Only a tiny percentage of Romans could actually vote. Women of any station certainly could not, and even men who were lucky enough to be free weren’t necessarily Roman citizens. Freedom here is particularly important because by the 1 century BCE 35 – 40% of the population of the Italian peninsula were slaves. Woo yeah democracy. I love it. And that’s not even taking into account all those times when an Emperor would suspend voting altogether.

Those slaves were busy building all the grand buildings your high school history teacher was dry jacking it about, stuffing the dormice that the rich people were reclining to eat, and basically keeping the joint running. Those slaves also necessitated the ridiculously huge army that Rome kept going because you had to get slaves from somewhere after all, so warfare had to be continuous. How uplifting.

Eagle-eyed readers will notice that this Roman nonsense is pretty much exactly what was going on during the modern colonial imperial age. You can say whatever the fuck you want about how free and revolutionary America was, for example. That doesn’t change the fact that only a handful of white property owning men could vote, and that the entire project required the mass enslavement of Africans and the genocide of Native Americans. That’s why you’ve been taught Rome is great. It helps you sleep well at night on stolen land because, really, haven’t all great societies done this? I mean without a forever war against anyone you can find, how will you keep a society going?

Our imperialist ideas about history lead to some weird historical takes. People love to tell you that no one bathed in the medieval period when medieval people had pretty much exactly the same sort of bathing culture as Romans. People laugh at medieval people believing in medical humoral theory despite the fact that Romans believed exactly the same thing and get a total pass on that front. The Roman ban on dissection is often taught as a medieval ban, shifting Roman superstition onto the shoulders of medieval people.

On-going Roman warfare is reported in glowing terms with emphasis on the “brilliance” of Roman military technique, while inter-kingdom warfare in the medieval period is portrayed as barbaric and ignorant. The Roman people who were encouraged to worship emperors as literal gods are used as an example of theoretical religion-free logical thinking, while medieval Christians are cast as ignorant for believing in God even when they are studiously working on the same philosophical queries as their predecessors. None of this makes any fucking sense.

But here’s the thing – it doesn’t need to. In a colonial imperialist society we have positioned Rome as a guiding light no matter what it’s actual practices and that’s not a mistake. It’s a design that helps to justify our own society. Further, this mindset requires us to castigate the medieval period when rule was more localised and systems of slavery had taken a precipitous dive. If only there had been more slavery, you know? Things might have been so much better.

Historical narratives and who controls them are always in flux. That old adage “history is written by the winners” comes to mind here, but that’s not exactly true. What the winners do is decide which histories are promoted, taught, and broadcasted. You can write all the history you want and if no one reads it, then it doesn’t really matter. That’s the gap that medieval history has fallen into. Colonial imperialism hasn’t figured out how to weaponise it yet, so it’s ignored. You could write this off as a “so what”, of course. Sure, maybe teaching the Roman Empire as a goal is a negative, but is ignoring medieval history really that bad a thing? You will be unsurprised to learn that I definitely think it is a bad thing, yes.

Ignorance about the medieval period is one of the things that is allowing the current swelling ranks of fascists to claim medieval Europe as some sort of “pure” white ideal. Spoiler: it was not. However, if you don’t know anything about medieval society how are you gonna argue with some chinless douche with a fake viking rune tattoo?History is always political. We use it to understand our world, but more than that we also use it to justify our world. Ignoring it helps us prop up our worst impulses, so let’s not.”

- Eleanor Janega, “On colonialism, imperialism, and ignoring medieval history.”

[astral-obscura]

a very, very basic introduction to medical astrology

Medicine was among the first and most popular applications of astrology until the 18th century. In its various forms, it was practiced widely across the Middle East, Western Asia and much of Europe. The medical astrology we know today follows mostly Indian, Egyptian, & Greek traditions and was further developed for modern use by Italian occultists and physicians of the 17th century who called it iatromathematics. Due to its origin at the intersection of ancient medicine & philosophy, medical astrology is one of the core defining bodies of knowledge which astrology as a whole is built upon.

Medical astrology was used to delineate an individual’s bodily constitution, strengths, vulnerabilities, and the nature of their physical reactivity to their environment. To analyze a birth chart from a medical perspective means to measure the potential biological effects of astrological arrangements with extreme precision and attention to detail; medical astrologers used every possible indicator to make concrete diagnoses, including the signs, their decans & terms, the planets, their declinations, dispositors, & trajectories, the houses & their lords, aspects, midpoints, and symbolic degrees. In order for this branch of astrology to be useful, such strict precision is absolutely necessary. When practitioners in the mid-1700s tried to over-simplify it, it became largely inaccurate & disreputable and fell out of common practice.

The principles of medical astrology originate within a conceptual system of congruence and essential similarity between all expressions of biology. The ancient Greeks characterized all natural phenomena using four fundamental qualities: hot, cold, wet, and dry. These qualities were a predominant influence on the formation of medical astrology (and astrology in general). Hot: warm, bright, changeable, rapid, expansive Cold: cool, dark, deliberate, constant, conservative Wet: moist, soft, malleable, formless, mixable Dry: parched, hard, brittle, well-defined, solid

The most dynamic measurement of the nature of these qualities is based on their combined actualization, established with Aristotle’s theory of “being and becoming” which followed a model of the four seasons. Hippocrates’ four humors were, in part, a version of those combinations applied to the body. The humors and classical elements developed alongside each other, and came to represent not only corporeal occurrences but also human temperaments.

Aristotle’s model: Spring: wet becoming hot Summer: hot becoming dry Autumn: dry becoming cold Winter: cold becoming wet

Humors | Elements | Temperaments, as informed by Aristotle’s model: Hot & dry: yellow bile (choler) | fire | choleric temperament Cold & dry: black bile (melancholy) | earth | melancholic temperament Hot & wet: blood (sanguis) | air | sanguine temperament Cold & wet: phlegm | water | phlegmatic temperament

This structure is the root of most medical associations in astrology. The body is understood through the lens of these qualities, and so are the planets and astrological signs; their correlations are a result of their congruent categorization, in addition to symbolism, mythology, chemistry, and general observation. A simple example of this would be blood -- a literally warm and wet substance, ruled by a hot/wet (air) sign, Aquarius. Bones, on the other hand, are literally dry, solid, well-defined, and long-lasting -- suited to the attitude of Saturn. The correspondences are much more complex than this, of course, but the basic idea is that there is an apparent alignment of physical reality with astrological energy. From there, astrologers developed a system of astro-physical rulerships.

*The sources I used for these rulerships drew from multiple separate practices ranging from traditional Vedic to medieval European, often presented through a contemporary perspective. I tried to narrow it down and stay consistent despite that, but some of the more specific associations are not broadly supported.

PHYSICAL RULERSHIPS:

ARIES: head, skull, cranium, brain, pineal gland, pituitary gland, face, eyes, nose, muscles, adrenal glands. TAURUS: ears, neck, throat, vocal cords, jaw, chin, mouth, lips, tonsils, tongue, thyroid gland, jugular nerve/vein, larynx, eustachian tubes. GEMINI: shoulders, arms, hands, fingers, nervous system, lungs, airways, bronchi, trachea, thymus gland. CANCER: chest, rib cage, breastbone, breasts, mammary glands, diaphragm, alimentary system, stomach, solar plexus, pancreas, ovaries, uterus. LEO: heart, spine (spinal cord, spinal column), upper back, circulation. VIRGO: hands, fingers, nails, nervous system, dorsal nerves, abdomen, pancreas, spleen, intestines, bowels, liver. LIBRA: equilibrium, bodily symmetry, lower back, loins, lumbar region, buttocks, kidneys, endocrine system, blood vessels, skin. SCORPIO: appendix, excretory system, urinary system, bladder, urethra, anus, colon, rectum, prostate, cervix, genitals. SAGITTARIUS: hips, thighs, sciatic nerve, liver, iliac arteries & veins. CAPRICORN: skeletal system, bones, teeth, knees, joints, structural & connective tissue, scar tissue, cartilage, skin, hair, gallbladder. AQUARIUS: calves, shins, ankles, joints, circulatory system, blood. PISCES: feet, toes, lymphatic system & lymph nodes, sweat glands, fat tissue.

SUN: vitality, heart, aorta, arteries & veins, blood, circulation, circulatory system, marrow, spine (spinal cord, spinal column), spinal fluid, cerebrovascular system, eyes, right eye of males, left eye of females. MOON: chest, chest cavity, rib cage & ribs, glandular tissue, mammary glands, breasts, breastbone, sweat glands, lymphatic glands, lymphatic system, lymph nodes, spleen, saliva & salivary glands, pineal gland, ovaries, uterus, pancreas, stomach, digestive system, nutrition, pregnancy & birth, infant & child growth, puberty, left eye of males, right eye of females. BOTH SUN & MOON rule the circadian rhythm; sun is associated with wakefulness & consciousness while the moon is associated with sleep. MERCURY: brain, nervous system, nerves, vagus nerve, shoulders, arms, hands, fingers, lungs, trachea, respiratory system, speech, senses, cognition. VENUS: ears, eustachian tubes, cheeks, chin, lips, gums, tongue, taste buds, neck, throat, esophagus, vocal cords, alimentary system, thyroid gland, thymus gland, kidneys, fat tissue, skin, pores, hair follicles, senses, female anatomy. MARS: sinuses, nose, gallbladder, bile, bile ducts, hair, nails, muscles, sinews, tendons, genitals, appendix, pelvis, male anatomy. JUPITER: right ear, cell growth, endocrine system, adrenal glands, pituitary gland, pineal gland, liver, pleura, sciatic nerve, legs, thighs, calves, feet, toes. SATURN: left ear, teeth, skin, structural & connective tissue, scar tissue, veins, bones, skull, skeleton, cartilage, joints, elbows, knees.

CARDINAL: short, intense, singular, and momentous illnesses. FIXED: chronic, persistent, prolonged, stable, and recurring illnesses. MUTABLE: volatile, inconsistent, rapid, and unpredictable illnesses.

Each sign & planet rules any illnesses related their respective physical rulerships (i.e. Aries governs brain abnormalities, the Moon governs stomach issues, Libra governs kidney complications, Saturn governs bone diseases, etc). The nature of an illness or injury often aligns with the energy of its astrological signification (i.e. Jupiter can denote mysterious diseases related to overgrowth & excess; Mars can denote intense, painful diseases related to high temperature & over-activity; the Moon can denote issues of fluid retention or over-sensitivity; Saturn can denote grave, burdensome long-term diseases related to contraction, blockages, or decline; Aries can denote fast-paced, acute illnesses; Taurus can denote illnesses related to over-indulgence, habit, or dependency; fire influence can denote inflammation and fevers; and so on).

The houses were not traditionally considered to rule bodily parts or processes, but were instead used to orient the condition of celestial influences on the body in a positive or negative sense, and to represent the circumstances surrounding an individual’s health. The houses also function as points of actualization, where celestial influences can be triggered to manifest. Generally, the first house & Ascendant represent an individual’s overall physique, vitality, stature, and the basic disposition of their health; the sixth, eighth, and twelfth houses are related to illness, disease, injury, and death; and the fifth & eleventh houses are related to remedies, healing, relief, and improvement.

In the birth chart, health is measured in terms of vitality, predisposition, and susceptibility. Transits may determine changes in these terms over time and throughout various dynamic circumstances. In conjunction with modern scientific medicine and the insight of genetics, medical astrology can be used in a nuanced, non-fatalistic way to guide lifestyles, inform treatments, and help predict potential illnesses -- if practiced with immense care & clarity. All significations which point to possible illnesses should be exact, precise to the minute, specific, detailed, and supported multiple times in a chart.

[phantomflower42]

Deciding The Technological Level of Your Setting

When writing a story, it is important to determine what level of technology your characters have access to.  That determines what tools or solutions a character may have to solve a problem.  It will also influence their hobbies.  Before going too far, consider what technology actually is.  It’s not all about electric gadgets.

What is Technology?

Technology is knowledge used to solve problems or create useful tools.  Phones and computers come immediately to mind, but there are others.  Roman aqueducts are an example of ancient technology helping to solve a problem.  Knives are another basic example.  Medical care is a very important technology.

Basic Factors When Deciding Technological Level

If your story is a fanfiction for another work, research what items wouldn’t look out of place in the setting.  Take a look to see what the characters use in the work when completing tasks or performing hobbies.  If the work takes place in a certain real year or time period, look up that period’s available items such as radios or printing presses, and head off from there.

Sometimes, the development level isn’t the same for all areas in a work or for all types of technology.  This is okay.  There are many reasons why this may happen.  Some areas are more studied than others.  Rural areas take longer than cities to adopt now inventions.

The Legend of Korra is set in an analogue of the 1920′s.  Characters drive cars, ride trains, listen to the sport of pro-bending on the radio, and have sepia/black and white photos.  But when Korra and her companions visit the Earth Kingdom in season three, it is heavily undeveloped compared to the other settings.  It is hinted the Earth Queen’s corruption stimmed its growth.

In Naruto and its sequel series Boruto, they do not have cars, tanks, modern firearms, or many modern style shoes.  But, the setting has TVs, refrigerators, wireless radios, batteries, satellites, color photographs, and eventually phones and laptops.  They explore the advancement of the setting in several of the Naruto light novels, especially the first one (Kakashi Hiden: Lightning in the Icy Sky).  In Kakashi Hiden, it is mentioned that the invention of an airship will cause many people to lose their jobs.   

If your work is an original fiction, first decide whether it has its own timeline or is based in the real world.  If it takes place in a real world place and time period, please look up what people in that area used.  If a particular field of science or theory is more advanced in your work than in that actual time period, determine how it would influence the technology in the story, study in related fields, and the social classes interacting with each other.

Should the tale be based in its own world, you have free reign.  How advanced of a setting do you want?  Is it set in the beginning of time, in a medieval era, in your setting’s equivalent of the Victorian or Edwardian era, in modern day, in the far off future, or even at the end of the world?  

Are certain types of technology more advanced than others?  Which kinds are banned or discouraged?  Are certain parts of the world more developed than others?  Are supplies of certain items limited and/or nonreplaceable? How does this affect the average person’s lifestyle? You decide.

Making Original Technology For Your Story

Sometimes, the technology shown in an existing work isn’t helpful for dealing with a certain task.  Maybe your original story needs a special tool for issues specific to the setting or an equivalent item for a modern gadget that doesn’t exist in your world. Sit down, and ask yourself a few questions.

Why is this item needed?  Does your character need a way to store cold food?  Are their culture’s medical techniques different from the norm?  Do your characters need a way to stay in contact while split up on a quest?  Need is the mother of innovation.

What does it look like?  What materials is it made of?  Is it bulky or sleek?  How large is it?  What color is it?  How is it shaped?  Is it expandable?  It is the item’s first version, or an improved model?  How well does it perform?

What situations are this item used in?  Who invented it?  Has it been made in bulk?  If so, how does it affect trade, medical care, communication, hobbies, or travel?  How common is it?  How expensive is it?  

Besides the benefits, consider the item’s weaknesses.  Does it run out of its power source in a certain period of time?  Does it need a long time to recharge?  Is the item fragile?  Is it prone to malfunctions?  Is it too bulky to be hauled everywhere?  Is your setting’s equivalent of cell service patchy?  Does relying on the item for too long cause health problems for people using it?

Technology and Magic

If the story is one where magic also exists, consider how the two interact.  It may depend on the individual setting.  Remember that magic can be considered a scientific field.  If in a world where magical and non-magicals live separately, magic users may use their power to invent versions of modern tech.

Oftentimes, magic is presented as incompatible with modern technology, or at least electronic devices.  In the book series The Dresden Files, the main character Harry Dresden is shown to short out any inventions past the 1950s.  He actually has to leave modern hospitals as soon as he’s mobile after injuries, in fear of his magic shorting out another patient’s life support.  This issue also forces him to drive an old-school car, use an ice box to store cold food, and go without a lot of modern conveniences like heated water or air conditioning.

In Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, it’s stated that technology fails around large amounts of magic or largely magical areas.  However, the limits are not clearly established.  Harry Potter uses a watch until it’s destroyed in the Triwizard Tournament’s second task in the Black Lake.  He continues wearing it out of habit afterwards.  Those usually require batteries.  

Certain technology can run off magic instead of electricity, such as the Weasleys’ car or Colin Creevey’s camera.  Diagon Alley is in the middle of London, yet there’s no fuss about random blackouts in the area or the local security cameras shorting out.   

In other situations, magic may coexist alongside regular technology.  They can even enhance one another.  In Sailor Moon, the Sailor Guardians protected the Moon Kingdom before its destruction, and gain magical abilities while transformed.  Yet, the Moon Kingdom and later Crystal Tokyo are depicted as  high-technology societies; the Moon Kingdom had an artificial climate dome around it, and an advanced computer.

Consider what approach you want, and the consequences there of.  Settings where magic is supposed to be hidden have the risk of ‘outing’ magicals to non-magicals if electronics like phones or crosswalks fizzle out whenever they’re in public.  Modifying items with magic may be a special scientific field.  Imagine a person with a pacemaker or insulin pump wandering into a highly magical area, only for their medical device to fail on them.  Even a few bigoted magical folks would hate that they’re unintentionally causing harm.

Technology and Magic Subsection: Harry Potter

As Harry Potter fanfictions are very common, it’s important to address the series and its approach to magic and technology interacting.  As mentioned above, technology blacks out around high amounts of magic or highly magical communities, but limits on what is affected and what isn’t weren’t clearly established.  Battery-run items like Harry’s watch seem to work fine, but phones and bugging devices do not.  

In post-Deathly Hallows works, think of how jarring it may be for muggleborns or muggle-raised wizards to go from being able to text friends in a moment to having to mail letters to family members by owl.  New Hogwarts students despairing over not having Facebook anymore makes for a good joke, but consider practical problems.  

Say a girl with cerebral palsy has magic.  She uses an electric wheelchair because her limbs don’t work well.  She receives a letter from a wizarding school.  Let’s hope the girl’s parents and the school’s representative talk it over and find a solution to her dilemma before she sets foot in Diagon Alley.  She will otherwise be unable to move under her own power in a magical environment. 

Wizards are portrayed as ignorant to modern trends.  Arthur Weasley goes crazy over various gadgets.  He even wonders what people use rubber ducks for.  It’s implied that Harry Potter misidentified his cousin Dudley Dursley’s broken video game console as a Playstation One in 1994 when writing to Sirius Black.  The Playstation One was not released in Europe until September 1995.  Multiple wizards are shown fascinated with the Dursleys’ microwave when they visit at different times.  It is stated that pureblooded wizards resist adopting muggle tech unless there is no choice.   

That is not to say wizards are a technological blackhole.  Many items like radios, cars, and others can be enchanted to work off magic.  A lot of wizards enchant or create their own magical items.  Sirius Black and James Potter used a set of two-way mirrors during their school days, with the device acting similar to a cell phone.  They and their friends Remus Lupin and Peter Pettigrew eventually created the Maruaders’ Map, which showed nearly everyone on Hogwarts’ grounds and most of the castle.  The Weasley twins come up with Skiving Snackboxes so students buying them can skip class without too much trouble.     

Maybe Professor McGonagall goes soul-searching after the final battle, and tries finding ways to make the school more non-magical friendly.  She would have ample reason to do so; she would not want the Carrows’ days of cruelty to return in any form.  She may modify the wizarding wireless radios to cast local muggle stations or keep an enchanted phone in her office so non-magical families of her students can contact her in emergencies.          

Keep in mind that a wizard OC can’t sneak their modern video games into Hogwarts or Beauxbatons, but watches, certain cameras, radios, and handheld games with non-rechargable batteries could make it in.  Non-electric devices like notebooks, pencils, pens, paints, or board games have no restrictions.   

How Technology Affects Living Conditions

How advanced society is affects how housing and chores are handled.  Many modern perks like clean water, heating, air conditioning, refrigeration, and fast travel are taken for granted.  If the characters in your setting lack certain conveniences, think of how they will tackle different problems that usually require them.

For instance, a lot of people use electric washers and dryers to take care of their clothes.  Getting them cleaned, dried, and sorted is easy.  But, what if your world doesn’t have these items?  Do the local people scrub them by hand in a river or on a board?  How are stains dealt with?  Are herbs mixed with the clothes to freshen their scent?  Are they dried on a clothesline?  If it’s raining or snowing, what is done instead?

Think along similar lines for various issues.  Water might be boiled for safety, or mixed with alcohol.  Shades will be pulled if too hot.  A lot of food may be canned, cured, or otherwise stored in a root cellar when fresh cannot be bought.  Preparations for any trips may take a long while.  People will sleep under mountains of blankets to retain heat.  

Conversely, works set in the future may find all of this child’s play.  Think of how a lot of appliances can be activated now with a smartphone application.  Do robots grocery shop on the characters’ behalf?  Are clothes dried and sorted in one machine in a few minutes?  Can a room’s windows be programmed to show a certain background, like in the Hunger Games film?  Are fingerprint scanners used so characters may access restricted areas?

Think long and hard how the technology of your world will influence daily life.

In Conclusion

Technology is a powerful force.  Sometimes characters may solve problems too easily with it, but all time periods have some level of it.  It’s important to know what the limits of inventions in your setting are.  Otherwise, someone may complain ‘how did they end up with this issue when so-and-so gadget could have solved the problem?’, or ‘why is the ninja watching television?’.

Have a nice day.

[chsamuseum]

The Sick Men of the World: Assessing Yan Fu’s Metaphor

1895 was not a good year for China. China had just lost the first Sino-Japanese War, the latest in a century of humiliation at the hands of foreigners. Amidst this chaos, Chinese scholar and later reformist Yan Fu described China as “the sick man of Asia.” In his article “On Strength,” he compared the country to a sick man in dire need of help. Traditional government, opium, and foot-binding were the maladies which were killing China. Overtime, Westerners would adopt his phrase as a metric to measure Chinese progress. The current COVID-19 pandemic has shed light on several maladies which plague both Western and Chinese societies. Rather than work together, both sides have elected to pursue tit-for-tat spats which have placed millions of lives in harm’s way and make both sides the sick men of the world. Understanding this history is the first step to combating the stereotypes that are being spouted by leaders in both the U.S. and China.

The “sick man of Asia” phrase was first applied by the West during a century-long outbreak of bubonic plague in China. Between 1894 and 1950, 15 million people died in the pandemic, decimating China’s dense population. Efforts to stop the virus were limited to local charities with minimal oversight from the imperial government. Western commentators believed that the reason why China suffered so dramatically at the hands of the plague was due to the country’s poor sanitation practices. Who was to blame for the poor sanitation? Who else but the Qing government, they argued. The government’s inability to provide for adequate sanitation was proof of China’s deteriorating health. Westerners therefore built off Yan Fu’s idea in order to develop an interesting metric which would be used throughout history to gauge China’s progress in modernization: China’s ability to respond to pandemics. 

To be fair, the West’s assessment was pretty accurate. Ironically, during the Black Death in the 14th century, China could say the same thing of medieval Europe, whose utter lack of clean drinking water and sanitation poisoned the country. While the plague was a global event, Europe was its epicenter, losing an estimated one third of its population.  While China was damaged by the plague, it did not suffer losses nearly as catastrophic. This has been largely attributed to the much more organized government and public sanitation practices of the much richer and much more powerful China. 

But late 19th century China was not as clean or as powerful. It was at the bottom of the international food chain. With the new view of China as unsanitized and inadequate, propaganda began to be spread within Western countries portraying Chinese immigrants as unclean and unfit for citizenship. Posters depicting Chinese living in decrepit conditions popularized the media. New Chinese arrivals at Angel Island were given rigorous health screenings; even a common cold could send one back to China. American society began doing everything it could to keep the Chinese out, and in 1882, passed the infamous Chinese Exclusion Act. Chinese in America? No! No! No!

In the 20th century, China awakened and recognized its dire need to modernize. With the fall of the Qing dynasty, the period between 1911 and 1949 was marked by economic, press, and social freedoms.  In the spirit of Yan Fu’s metaphor, the country was beginning to self-medicate. This change was distinctly felt in the health sector, which saw Chinese participation at international health meetings, expansion of medical schools, and new opportunities for women to enter the health profession. It also saw the creation of the Ministry of Health in 1928. China’s modernization efforts captured the attention of the Western countries. On a trip to China during the 1910s, one Western diplomat remarked that he had never seen a nation so promising and full of potential.

Then Mao came along. 

In 1949, Mao’s Chinese Communist Party (CCP) took control of China. While the CCP did care about public health, it came second to political considerations. This mindset was put on display during the period immediately preceding the Cultural Revolution and during the Cultural Revolution. In 1964, Mao began an attack on the Ministry of Health, arguing that it represented elitism and bourgeois thought. During the Cultural Revolution, doctors and scientists were targeted; as a result, hospitals dried up. The Revolution itself also spread infectious diseases. In 1966, at the very start of the Cultural Revolution, there was an outbreak of meningitis in Beijing. Students who championed Mao’s revolutionary cause spread it across the country. No one stopped them either, because political considerations came first. Stop the students, and you’d stop the revolution. The death toll was 160,000. 

Mao’s death in 1976 began a period of reform. China’s new relatively liberalized economy was put to the test with an outbreak of HIV/AIDS in the 1990s. Unfortunately, the outbreak exposed the awkward relationship between the country’s underregulated markets and overregulated government. The 1990 HIV/AIDS pandemic established the response to future pandemics: rumors of a public health crisis, government attempts to cover up, whistleblower, reluctant admittance, and draconian remedies. This pattern would appear again in the early 2000s with the outbreak of the SARS virus, COVID-19’s predecessor. When SARS (2002) was first discovered in Guangdong, the government initially downplayed the problem, trying to make sure that no foreign country would discover the true extent of the outbreak. However, Jiang Yanyong, a Beijing physician, leaked the full extent of the pandemic to the West. The international panic triggered a highly-publicized effort to fight the virus by Beijing. SARS 2002 greatly jeopardized China’s newly found status on the world stage, having just joined the WTO the previous year and scheduled to host the 2008 Olympics. The entire world watched in suspense to see whether the modernizing nation could handle a pandemic, as well as handle its new status as a world power.

This brings us to COVID-19. Not surprisingly, many comparisons have been made between COVID-19 and SARS 2002. For starters, China’s initial reaction to COVID-19 was very similar to 2002. Local officials in Wuhan attempted to keep a lid on the outbreak, but were exposed by doctor Li Wenliang, who later died of the disease, which triggered a reversal of Beijing’s policies. However, China has matured greatly since 2002. While China’s initial reaction was not the greatest, it was still very fast at sharing the genetic information of the novel virus to health centers around the globe, a much-needed headstart for the world to get working on a cure/vaccine. Chinese officials also shared as much information as was available for best practices to handle the spread of the virus, including quarantine, mask-wearing, and social-distancing, practices we are all more than familiar with. 

Moreover, it is not only China who has a reputation for covering up the effects of the virus. United States officials, since the outbreak started, have elected to use racially-charged language and a wide array of diversion tactics to draw attention away from the ballooning COVID situation in the United States. Racially-charged language has resurfaced Sino-phobia and xenophobia among many Americans, which has led to a drastic increase in the number of hate crimes being committed against Asian, specifically Chinese Americans. Meanwhile, the United States leads the world in new infections (assuming China’s numbers are actually true). Many American politicians have placed politics over lives, placing a much larger emphasis on economic recovery rather than the need to prevent new infections. Despite these theories being largely rebuked by Sweden’s situation (a country which elected to keep everything open as an experiment and is now suffering huge infection rates without any noticeable benefit to the economy), many in Washington continue to downplay COVID. Both Washington and Beijing have elected to instead lock out each others’ news organizations in an endless tit-for-tat political spat that has placed millions of lives in harm's way. Both countries exhibit a high degree of immaturity, choosing to fight each other rather than work together as the world’s dominant superpowers. They are both sick, and need to seIf-medicate. 

COVID-19 has left the world in strange, and dare I say it, unprecedented times. Unfortunately, the pandemic is far from over. Not only will COVID-19 never truly be eradicated (it will continue to exist just as Ebola and smallpox do), the problems it has exposed in our world will remain as blueprints for future generations to solve. Many of those problems lie in how governments respond to global disasters in an increasingly globalized world. In addition to keeping each other safe, we must also be informed by learning the history and misinterpretations of the past in order to strive for a better future and not be dictated by the politics of sick men.

Submitted by CHSA’s Summer Education and Research Chris Ying. Chris is a sophomore at UC Berkeley where he is majoring in History and Mathematics. His writing is based on his research and lectures from his history class.

[oh-my-god-maurice-the-ladybug]

GUys

So I wrote this fan theory in class a couple days ago, for MHA.

It’s a ligit (?) essay, and also my first one. As it is my first, I might not have worded or phrased or sentenced it correctly, so if it doesn’t make sense I apalogise.

Also, it’s just a theory, so please don’t claim it’s cannon unless it’s a headcannon or something 

Tagging @imasleepdeprivedtransboy because yeah. If you want to be tagged in the future (?) for things like this please ask, I won’t know unless you do.

(pssst, it’s under the blue line)

In the universe of MHA, quirks are theorized to have been caused by a virus caused by mice, causing some sort of reaction within human DNA to cause a mutation, leading to superpower-like abilities. This, while an entirely fictional event for a fictional universe, is strikingly similar to the 1350 even known as the Black Plague, which was spread by ship rats, who carried fleas that held the deadly virus, which could have likely caused a similar event earlier in the MHA timeline. While this is a completely pointless and unproductive endeavor, in this essay I will prove to you that the event that kickstarted quirks was not the first of its kind in the MHA universe.

First, we must establish the timeline of events that I am working off of to establish my theory, the timeline starting in 1348, at the start of the Black Plague’s outbreak. The Plague is known to have spread along trade routes from China, ending up in southern England, reaching northern England in 1350. During the rapid spread of this plague, 4 million people died. The plague also resurfaced again, the dates being 1361 through 1363, 1369 (nice) through 1371, 1374 through 1375, 1390, and 1400. This gives enough time for a gene to develop, or perhaps resurface, which could contribute to superhuman powers. However, in 1450, we have the start of the “witch hunts” (which lasted through 1750 with quite a bit of buildup before this), caused by a number of factors, including poverty, a lack of education, social crisis of the time, and various epidemics. During this time, around 40,000-50,000 people died, although the actual number was probably never documented. Many gruesome practices emerged during these witch hunts, including, but not at all limited too, Sleep Deprivation, Water Torture, Pricking and Scratching, and Pressing. There were also people who profited off the witch hunts, doing things like charging for exorcisms and selling the body parts of the deceased (gross, I know). Then we go on, with a couple more outbreaks of the plague documented in various places, spanning until the start of the series, of which the exact date is not disclosed.

Now, it’s known that humans do have the ability to mutate, and there are two major types of mutations, Hereditary, or mutations that are received from the parent and are present throughout the entirety of a person’s life and body, and Acquired, or mutations that appear some time during a person’s lifetime and are only present in certain cells of the body. Although there will be some focus on Acquired mutations, we will mostly be focusing on Hereditary, as it is more relevant to my point here today. Hereditary mutations, also known as germline mutations, are created when a mutation occurs while both the parent’s DNA are mixing, causing a mutation in the unborn child, which remains present in each of their cells. Examples of this include hemochromatosis, a hereditary disorder in which iron salts are deposited in the tissues, leading to liver damage, severe diabetes, and bronze discoloration of the skin, and cystic fibrosis, a disease caused by viscous mucus clogging up pancreatic ducts and bronchi. While these may not seem like really great examples of this type of mutation, please remember that these are only two examples and that they were at the top of my google search page, so there could be good ones out there if I had bothered to do ten more minutes of research.

So, if we take this into consideration, a Hereditary gene mutation that passes down from parent to child doesn’t seem that far off, because it’s already a reality for those of us who live in the real, actual world. Since MHA is very science fictional with how it goes about it’s hero-ing and plot in general, I am going to safely assume right here and now that it would be very, very easy to apply this real, actual layer of fact to an otherwise fictional universe.

Anyway, the rest of this theory will revolve on the idea that quirks are a type of hereditary mutation, which matches up with the in-text context clues given, being that quirks apparently are passed down in a family, that quirks are different from person to person (like genes, with a few exceptions), and that they seem to mix under certain circumstances. They can act like Acquired genes, for sure, but they still count as hereditary because, even if they pop up later in life, they are still inherited by the parents as dormant genes.

So, going back to the Black Plague, we can see the parallels between it and the unnamed illness that is credited with kickstarting quirks in MHA. First off, the two were both spread by a member of the Rodentia order, as both mice and rats are classified in this category, and, although we don’t know what the illness was or how it spread, we can probably assume the order in MHA started out with fleas or ticks and was spread by some form of bite, as we see in the Plague, which was spread by the fleas on the infected rats. They also, even though this is a stretch, probably killed a lot of people, and in the case of the Black Plague actually killed a lot of people, because no one would really notice a “plague” or “new illness” or even try and research it unless there was some danger involved. (Even if the danger is somewhat small-- See: Coronavirus.)

Now, believe that, in the MHA universe at least, that, while very rare and probably not well understood, that there is a possibility of developing a quirk later in life. I say this because I believe Midoriya said something about “suddenly mutating a quirk” to his mother at some point, although I couldn’t find it on the wiki so I could be wrong about that. Even so, it would be impossible to deny the lack of suspicion placed on Midoriya at the beginning (except by Bakugou, but that was more of a “that bastard lied to me” sort of reaction), and even when he does get suspicion placed on him, it’s not because he was quirkless, but because his quirk is very similar to All Might’s. It’s not even touched on by any higher ups, even in the hero coalition (I believe that’s what they’re called), so there has to be some probability of this happening for this to be ignored throughout the series, especially once Midoriya starts doing things that could potentially cause people to look at him with more scrutiny.

Using this information, it can be very easily understood that there is some sort of gene that controls if you get a quirk or not, separate from the actual quirk gene, which could potentially be activated under extreme circumstances and/or stress.

Now, having established all the background information, we can safely say that, while probably not as pronounced as a fucking glowing baby would be, the stress of the plague could have probably caused some babies and adults to have an active “quirk gene”, causing them to have what, at the time, would have been called magical abilities. People wouldn’t have really noticed or cared at first, because things like necromancy and paganism had been around for centuries at this point and had been integrated into the culture. It was the norm, after all, before people started going ham with cristianity, because a lot of Europe had been at least partially touched by Rome at some point, and even before that there were still paganistic beliefs dating back very, very far into human history. People would not really have cared back when there were, you know, bigger problems to attend to. Like illness, and death, and other things like that.

Over time, however, just as those with power grew alongside those without, the church got more involved, it got more controlling, and thus just a little, just a smidge, just a teensy bit biased towards those members of the population that had powers. They were never directly the cause of anything, but they sure as hell influenced it. Religion has always been a big player in culture, and culture a big part of religion, after all, this goes back far, far into the past, especially around the 1400s, where clergymen, nobility, and the children of the rich were the mostly only ones getting an education. There were even laws banning serfs from getting an education in some places. Once the witch hysteria took hold, and publications such as the Summis Desiderantes Affectibus (1484) and the Malleus Maleficarum (1487) were circulated around, it was basically inevitable that those who had developed powers over the past 4 and a half generations (about as many generations as the amount that had passed in MHA, if you remember, although the population of “quirk-having” people wouldn’t be nearly as big due to lots of factors such as child and infant mortality, illness, lack of food, the amount of people dying young before they had any kids, and medical practices at the time, and also because I see most of the people who had “quirks” as being among the lower class at the time) would be the first ones to take the hit. They were, after all, different from the “normal”, non-power-having humans, so, in the minds of a medieval person, they were obviously up to some shady shit and were in cahoots with the devil, which was seen as a bad and terrible thing at the time, a common thing to be accused of.

This decimated the population of empowered people, due to the 300 years of continuous hunting by people who just didn’t understand what was going on. Most of the people who would have otherwise not done any harm were hung, burned, and drowned, and those few families who did survive must have hid what they were, mostly out of fear for what would happen if the authorities found out. Hell, even people who were “quirkless” could have been wrongfully accused, but no one would have seen the difference. Genetics wasn’t a thing back then, so it really wouldn’t have mattered to anyone at the time, not that they would have checked people even if it did.

Afterward, those families would have passed down fear throughout the generations, from parent to child, even as witch hunts faded into history. It’s part of their history, the reason they don’t share their power with anyone, the reason they hide. After all, fear is one of the best motivators, anyone could tell you that. Some families do inevitably die out over time, that fact is inevitable, but there will be some that persevere, through normal, healthy means or otherwise. Even when “quirks” finally surface as the MHA characters know it in universe, they are still so scared to come out, so scared to admit what they are due to both the immediate fallout of such a thing coming out and what they were most likely told all their lives. Even years later this fear is felt, because it would still be fresh 4 generations later, that’s not that long a time when you’re comparing to the time they would have spent in hiding.

It just makes sense, and all the reasoning provided above gives reasons as to why this wouldn’t have been stated in cannon. If your family has lived in and passed down fear over the generations, probably getting worse as the years went by if it was straight word-of-mouth, you would be less likely to share what they were afraid of with the world, even years after others had come out with the very thing your family was afraid of. It’s not like all that fear, built up over years and years, would evaporate instantaneously.

Even so, we can take this idea a bit further. We know that there were plagues before this (not really even all the Black Plague in particular). Going back farther, to my good old fallback Ancient Greece, we see that there was a plague in Athens at around 429-426 BC, and that’s just one example of the probable thousands of illnesses that were most likely running around at that period of history. And you know what else those Ancient Greeks had? Demigods. Oracles. Demigods who were stronger than everyone else, Demigods who had cool and unique abilities, Demigods who were nearly impervious, Oracles and people who divinated one’s future. Move forward a bit to the Romans, and what did they have? Stories of people with very proto-quirk-esque powers, doing very, very superhuman feats, much like we see in MHA. These, however are just two examples of the thousands of stories of humans with superhuman abilities, used throughout history. Hell, even supernatural entities could be explained within the 

MHA universe by using this “proto-quirk” theory, because it’s stated in cannon that sometimes quirks can affect you physically. I have no way to prove this part though.

Anyways, this is just a theory (an ANIME theory) so please don’t take it too seriously, and thanks for coming to my TEDTalk. If you have any questions, ask them, I guess. Remember to Like and Subscribe, and to Ring That Bell for notifications.

Peace out.

Sources (In No Particular Order):

https://ghr.nlm.nih.gov/primer/mutationsanddisorders/genemutation

https://www.google.com/search?q=how+many+died+in+England+between+1348+and+1350&safe=active&ssui=on

https://www.britannica.com/event/Black-Death

http://www.theoccultmuseum.com/fire-5-real-torture-methods-tell-witch/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_people_executed_for_witchcraft

https://bokunoheroacademia.fandom.com/wiki/Quirk

https://www.medicinenet.com/genetic_disease/article.htm

https://www.dictionary.com/browse/hemochromatosis?s=t

https://www.dictionary.com/browse/cystic-fibrosis#

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rodent

https://bokunoheroacademia.fandom.com/wiki/Izuku_Midoriya/Synopsis

https://study.com/academy/lesson/how-religion-contributes-to-cultural-change.html

https://spartacus-educational.com/YALDeducation.htm

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Summis_desiderantes_affectibus

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malleus_Maleficarum

https://www.bl.uk/the-middle-ages/articles/medicine-diagnosis-and-treatment-in-the-middle-ages

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medieval_medicine_of_Western_Europe

https://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/medm/hd_medm.htm

https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/323533

https://www.thoughtco.com/medieval-child-surviving-infancy-1789124

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_epidemics 

[soliair]

What is Unani Medicine?

"Unani medicine is a system of alternative medicine that originated in ancient Greece but is now practiced primarily in India. Involving the use of herbal remedies, dietary practices, and alternative therapies, Unani medicine addresses the prevention and treatment of disease." 

Unani (UNANI TIBB - Greco-Arabic Medicine) is the Arabic word for Ionian, or Greek. Greece's Islamic neighbors call Greece Yunanistan, or the Land of the Unanis. While Western Europe was in the Dark Ages, Greek Medicine and other branches of classical science and learning found a safe haven in Islamic lands. But Greek Medicine didn't remain static or unchanging; it continued to grow and evelve as Muslim scholars and physicians continued to make important discoveries and contributions of their own.

In the process, Greek Medicine was "Islamicized" into Unani-Tibb, or Greco-Arabic Medicine. This transformation proved that Greek Medicine was flexible, resilient and adaptable enough to absorb and incorporate new developments and influences. Within a few short centuries after its birth, the Islamic world had expanded to stretch from the Atlantic ocean in the west to the Indian ocean in the east, from Moorish Spain to the plains of Hindustan.

Everywhere the Muslims went, their Unani physicians went with them, adapting themselves to the local conditions and resources. In the words of Unani medical historians, Unani Tibb enriched itself by imbibing new medicines, techniques and treatments from the various cultures and medical systems with which it came into contact, which included Indian Ayurveda and Oriental Medicine.

Around the time of the Crusades, the Islamic world produced a few very prominent and influential physicians and medical scholars. Their names were Latinized, and their medical treatises were imported into Europe and translated into Latin, to serve as texts and reference manuals in the medical schools that were just starting to spring up in Medieval Europe. Ibn Rushd, or Averroes (1120 - 1198) was a physician and Islamic scholar and philosopher in Moorish Spain.

He wrote a five volume treatise on medicine called Al-Culliyat (The Fundamentals), or Colliget. Al-Razi, or Rhazes (865 - 924) was a Persian physician, chemist and alchemist. He wrote a vast medical encyclopedia called Continens, with many excerpts from Hindu and Greek medical sources.

But the greatest of these was undoubtedly "Hakim Ibn Sina", or "Avicenna". He wrote a five volume treatise called The Canon of Medicine, which became a standard textbook in European medical schools. Today, it serves as the basic handbook for all practitioners of Unani Medicine.

Unani Medicine found fertile soil in India. The Delhi Sultanate and later the Moghul emperors were great patrons of medicine. Many eminent physicians from Persia and Central Asia came to India not only to seek fame and fortune, but also to find a safe haven from the wars and strife devastating their homelands.

Under British rule, all forms of healing except conventional allopathic medicine were discouraged. But Unani Medicine survived, due to its popularity with the masses, and the safe, gentle yet effective nature of its treatments. Hakim Ajmal Khan (1864 - 1927) was an Unani physician, and also an Indian patriot and freedom fighter in the struggle for independence. He was also a great advocate and champion of the indigenous systems of Ayurvedic and Unani Medicine, and pioneered scientific research into their treatments.

Relationship Between Tabiyat and Asbab-e-Sittah Zarooriah

In the Unani system of medicine, tabiyat is an individual’s internal power or capacity to withstand or combat disease and to perform normal physiological functions. Believing that it is only tabiyat that is engaged in actually curing a disease, Unani hakims hold that they only assist from “outside” by prescribing therapeutic relief. If not adversely affected, tabiyat can eradicate most infections without medical treatment, using what may be thought of as the natural defense system of the mind and body.

Unani medicine recognizes six physical, or external, factors, called asbab-e-sittah-zarooriah, which are essential in establishing a synchronized biological rhythm and thus living a balanced existence. 

The Six Asbab-e-Sittah-Zarooriah Are:

1. Hawa (air), in which the quality of the air a person breathes is thought to have a direct effect on his or her temperament and, thus, health.

2. Makool-wo-mashroob (food and drink), in which the nutritional value and the quality and quantity of one’sfood and drink are believed to ensure physical fitness by strengthening tabiyat.

3. Harkat-wo-sakoon-e-jismiah (bodily exercise and repose), which emphasizes the positive effects of balanced physical exercise on an individual’s internal resistance and tabiyat.

4. Harkat-o-sakoon nafsaniah (mental work and rest), which emphasizes the simultaneous engagement of the human mind in numerous emotional and intellectual activities. Just as the body needs systematic and planned exercise and rest, Unani medicine holds that the human mind and brain need adequate stimulation and proper relaxation as well.

5. Naum-o-yaqzah (sleep and wakefulness), in which an individual’s health and alertness are understood as being dependent on a specific amount of sound sleep in the course of a 24-hour (circadian) cycle.

6. Ihtebas and istifragh (retention and excretion), which considers the metabolism of food and liquid as both affecting and being regulated by tabiyat. According to Unani medicine, the assimilation of food andliquid facilitates the elimination from the body of excessive and noxious substances. Therefore, to maintain a harmonic and synchronized tabiyat, certain beneficial end-products of kaun-o-fasad (genesis and lysis) are retained in the body while harmful ones are expelled.

These six factors are believed by Unani practitioners to directly affect the harmony of the human mind and body. Socioeconomic, geographic, and environmental factors are considered secondary factors (asbab-e-ghair -zarooriah) in the Unani system and therefore indirectly influence tabiyat. However, both the primary and the secondary factors must be closely considered in the Unani process of treatment.

Modes Of Treatment

The initial approach to treatment in the Unani system entails the establishment of a regimen to normalize and balance the external factors (e.g., air, water, and food) involved in ailments and diseases. If this proves inadequate, then other means, such as treatment with natural medicines, may be recommended. Any Unani treatment prescribed by a hakim acts as an outside agent to help boost the patient’s tabiyat and thus restore good health and a sense of well-being.

There are various therapeutic approaches available to the hakim. Ilaj-bi-ghiza, or diet therapy, involves recommending a specific diet, which is the simplest and most natural course of treatment by a hakim. For fever, for example, Unani medicine stresses a nutrient-rich, low-roughage diet that might include dalia (porridge) and kheer (a milk broth). Both the amount and quality of food are taken into consideration. Relatively infrequent in modern Unani Therapy is ilaj-bi-misla, or organotherapy, a mode of treatment that involves healing a diseased organ with the use of tissue extracts from the same organ of a healthy animal.

Ilaj-bi-dawa, or pharmacotherapy, is the use of medicines by Unani hakims. This treatment method is considered by hakims to be natural, eco-friendly, and less intrusive and more effective than many other methods. The Unani system’s pharmacopoeia is vast, enriched with more than 2,000 medicines derived from various herbal, mineral, and animal sources. Unani medications are often processed by classical methods of preparation as originally described in Greco-Arabic medicine. Unani medicines are used singly or are compounded with other substances to achieve synergistic, antagonistic, or detoxifying effects or simply as bases for effective ingestion and assimilation.

In the 1920′s Indian physician Ajmal Khan revolutionized Unani medicine by advocating that research be conducted on various natural products that were claimed by ancient physicians to effect miraculous cures. In the 1930′s Indian-born scientist Salimuzzaman Siddiqui, who specialized in phytochemistry (the chemistry of plants), isolated potent constituents from a plant known in India as chhota chand (Rauwolfia serpentina). Subsequent pharmacological research determined that the plant was the source of a bio-active substance known as reserpine, which found use in Western medicine as a tranquilizer and as an anti hypertensive agent (lowering abnormally high blood pressure). Those uses supported some of the medical applications that had been described by hakims. Siddiqui named the derived medicines, which included ajmaline and ajmalicine, for Khan as a tribute to his groundbreaking research efforts.

Having gained recognition from the World Health Organization (WHO) in 1976, the Unani system became increasingly accepted internationally as a system of traditional medicine. In India several institutions engaged in Unani teaching and research. The Central Council for Research in Unani Medicine (CCRUM), an undertaking of the Indian government, for instance, facilitated the translation of classical heritage, the organization of clinical trials, the improvement of drug standardization, and the investigation of toxicological and phytopharmacological properties of natural products that had long been used by hakims.

Classical Unani medicine recommended established “regimental” therapies (tadabeer) in the treatment of various chronic and acute diseases. Those therapies include dalak (massage), hammam (bath and sauna), karat (exercise), fasd (venesection, or opening a vein to let out blood), hijamat (cupping, a process of drawing blood to the surface of the body by using a glass cup or tube), and amat-e-kai (leeching, or bleeding a person by using leeches). The essential function of all those regimens is to remove impure blood or impurities from the body.Surgical interventions, or ilaj-bil-yad, are a last resort. Their practice generally is beyond the realm of the hakim’s expertise.

Obstacles In Unani Medicine

Although a complete system of treatment, the Unani system, similar to other systems of medicine, has drawbacks in terms of application and effectiveness. The vast materia medica, from herbal and animal to mineral sources, as described in ancient Unani textbooks, is sometimes so vague that authenticity must be established by modern pharmacognostic assessments (by means of a basic, descriptive pharmacology) before medicines can be put to use. In addition, the use in Unani medicine of precious stones and minerals, the chief ingredients of many polyformulations (medicines containing multiple ingredients), is expensive. Those items often are unavailable as well, thereby hindering effective treatment.

Intense research is important for the use of kushta, the incinerated finely powdered substance prepared from known toxic metals, such as seemab (mercury), sam al-far (arsenic), sangraf (mercuric chloride), and khubs al-hadid (iron rust). Medicines made with those minerals, when used with caution and expertise, may be effective, but they have significant toxic side effects.

Today, the Indian government supports and subsidizes both Ayurvedic and Unani medical colleges and hospitals. But whereas Ayurveda has enjoyed a phenomenal surge in popularity, Unani Medicine still lags behind in recognition, perhaps due to its minority Islamic associations.

The SOLIAIR™ company regularly developed various blends and plant extracts that show promise and positive healing results in treating many illnesses and medical symptoms from a wide variety of diseases that are currently existing in this world. The SOLIAIR™ Food supplements are patented and are regularly been used by doctors, pharmacists and patients in Israel and around the world! - Please Contact Us for a professional advice and treatment!

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[rschmidth]

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Acts of Care: Recovering Women in Late Medieval Health - Sara Margaret Ritchey

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[tipsycad147]

Witchcraft

Witchcraft is the practice of what the practitioner ("witch") believes to be supernatural skills and abilities, such as the casting of spells and the performance of magical rituals. Witchcraft is a broad term that varies culturally and societally, and thus can be difficult to define with precision  Historically, the most common meaning is the use of supernatural means to cause harm to the innocent; this remains the meaning in most traditional cultures worldwide, notably the Indigenous cultures of Africa and the African diaspora, Asia, Latin America, and Indigenous Nations in the Americas

In the Philippines, as in many of these cultures, witches are viewed as those opposed to the sacred. In contrast, anthropologists writing about the healers in Indigenous Philippine folk religions either use the traditional terminology of these cultures, or broad anthropological terms like "shaman".

Belief in witchcraft is often present within societies and groups whose cultural framework includes a magical world view.

In the modern era, some may use "witchcraft" to refer to benign, positive, or neutral metaphysical practices, such as divination, meditation, or self-help techniques found in the modern Pagan and New Age movements  But this reversal in nomenclature is primarily a modern, Western, and pop culture phenomenon, most prevalent among Western youth and adherents of modern Pagan traditions like Wicca.

Concept

Two of the Pendle witches , tried at Lancaster in 1612, in an illustration from William Harrison Ainsworth 's 1849 novel The Lancashire Witches The Magic Circle by John William Waterhouse

The Magic Circle by John William Waterhouse , 1886

Concept

The concept of witchcraft and the belief in its existence have persisted throughout recorded history. They have been present or central at various times and in many diverse forms among cultures and religions worldwide, including both primitive and highly advanced cultures,[2][12] and continue to have an important role in many cultures today.[13]

Historically, the predominant concept of witchcraft in the Western world derives from Old Testament laws against witchcraft, and entered the mainstream when belief in witchcraft gained Church approval in the Early Modern Period. It is a theosophical conflict between good and evil, where witchcraft was generally evil and often associated with the Devil and Devil worship. This culminated in deaths, torture and scapegoating (casting blame for misfortune),[14][15] and many years of large scale witch-trials and witch hunts, especially in Protestant Europe, before largely ceasing during the European Age of Enlightenment. Christian views in the modern day are diverse and cover the gamut of views from intense belief and opposition (especially by Christian fundamentalists) to non-belief, and even approval in some churches. From the mid-20th century, witchcraft – sometimes called contemporary witchcraft to clearly distinguish it from older beliefs – became the name of a branch of modern Paganism. It is most notably practiced in the Wiccan and modern witchcraft traditions, and it is no longer practiced in secrecy.[16]

The Western mainstream Christian view is far from the only societal perspective about witchcraft. Many cultures worldwide continue to have widespread practices and cultural beliefs that are loosely translated into English as "witchcraft", although the English translation masks a very great diversity in their forms, magical beliefs, practices, and place in their societies. During the Age of Colonialism, many cultures across the globe were exposed to the modern Western world via colonialism, usually accompanied and often preceded by intensive Christian missionary activity (see "Christianization"). In these cultures beliefs that were related to witchcraft and magic were influenced by the prevailing Western concepts of the time. Witch-hunts, scapegoating, and the killing or shunning of suspected witches still occur in the modern era.[17]

Suspicion of modern medicine due to beliefs about illness being due to witchcraft also continues in many countries to this day, with serious healthcare consequences. HIV/AIDS[6] and Ebola virus disease[18] are two examples of often-lethal infectious disease epidemics whose medical care and containment has been severely hampered by regional beliefs in witchcraft. Other severe medical conditions whose treatment is hampered in this way include tuberculosis, leprosy, epilepsy and the common severe bacterial Buruli ulcer.[19][20]

Etymology and definitions

The word is over a thousand years old: Old English formed the compound wiccecræft from "wicce" ("witch") and "cræft" ("craft").[21] The word witch was also spelled "wicca" or "wycca" in Old English, and was originally masculine.[22]Folk etymologies link witchcraft "to the English words wit, wise, wisdom [Germanic root *weit-, *wait-, *wit-; Indo-European root *weid-, *woid-, *wid-]", so "craft of the wise."

In anthropological terminology, witches differ from sorcerers in that they don't use physical tools or actions to curse; their maleficium is perceived as extending from some intangible inner quality, and one may be unaware of being a witch, or may have been convinced of their nature by the suggestion of others. This definition was pioneered in a study of central African magical beliefs by E. E. Evans-Pritchard, who cautioned that it might not correspond with normal English usage.

Historians of European witchcraft have found the anthropological definition difficult to apply to European witchcraft, where witches could equally use (or be accused of using) physical techniques, as well as some who really had attempted to cause harm by thought alone. European witchcraft is seen by historians and anthropologists as an ideology for explaining misfortune; however, this ideology has manifested in diverse ways, as described below.

A Witch by Edward Robert Hughes, 1902

Overview

Professor Norman Gevitz wrote, that:

It is argued here that the medical arts played a significant and sometimes pivotal role in the witchcraft controversies of seventeenth-century New England. Not only were physicians and surgeons the principal professional arbiters for determining natural versus preternatural signs and symptoms of disease, they occupied key legislative, judicial, and ministerial roles relating to witchcraft proceedings. Forty six male physicians, surgeons, and apothecaries are named in court transcripts or other contemporary source materials relating to New England witchcraft. These practitioners served on coroners' inquests, performed autopsies, took testimony, issued writs, wrote letters, or committed people to prison, in addition to diagnosing and treating patients. Some practitioners are simply mentioned in passing.[27]

Where belief in malicious magic practices exists, such practitioners are typically forbidden by law as well as hated and feared by the general populace, while beneficial magic is tolerated or even accepted wholesale by the people—even if the orthodox establishment opposes it

Spell casting

Probably the most widely known characteristic of a witch was the ability to cast a spell, "spell" being the word used to signify the means employed to carry out a magical action. A spell could consist of a set of words, a formula or verse, or a ritual action, or any combination of these. Spells traditionally were cast by many methods, such as by the inscription of runes or sigils on an object to give that object magical powers; by the immolation or binding of a wax or clay image (poppet) of a person to affect them magically; by the recitation of incantations; by the performance of physical rituals; by the employment of magical herbs as amulets or potions; by gazing at mirrors, swords or other specula (scrying) for purposes of divination; and by many other means

Necromancy (conjuring the dead)

Strictly speaking, "necromancy" is the practice of conjuring the spirits of the dead for divination or prophecy, although the term has also been applied to raising the dead for other purposes. The biblical Witch of Endor performed it (1 Sam. 28), and it is among the witchcraft practices condemned by Ælfric of Eynsham "Witches still go to cross-roads and to heathen burials with their delusive magic and call to the devil; and he comes to them in the likeness of the man that is buried there, as if he arise from death."

Demonology

In Christianity and Islam , sorcery came to be associated with heresy and apostasy and to be viewed as evil. Among the Catholics, Protestants, and secular leadership of the European Late Medieval/Early Modern period, fears about witchcraft rose to fever pitch and sometimes led to large-scale witch-hunts. The key century was the fifteenth, which saw a dramatic rise in awareness and terror of witchcraft, culminating in the publication of the Malleus Maleficarum but prepared by such fanatical popular preachers as Bernardino of Siena  In total, tens or hundreds of thousands of people were executed, and others were imprisoned, tortured, banished, and had lands and possessions confiscated. The majority of those accused were women, though in some regions the majority were men.In early modern Scots, the word warlock came to be used as the male equivalent of witch (which can be male or female, but is used predominantly for females).

The Malleus Maleficarum, (Latin for "Hammer of The Witches") was a witch-hunting manual written in 1486 by two German monks, Heinrich Kramer and Jacob Sprenger. It was used by both Catholics and Protestants  for several hundred years, outlining how to identify a witch, what makes a woman more likely than a man to be a witch, how to put a witch on trial, and how to punish a witch. The book defines a witch as evil and typically female. The book became the handbook for secular courts throughout Renaissance Europe, but was not used by the Inquisition, which even cautioned against relying on The Work.

White witches

Throughout the early modern period in England, the English term "witch" was usually negative in meaning, unless modified in some way to distinguish it from cunning folk. Alan McFarlane writes, "There were a number of interchangeable terms for these practitioners, 'white', 'good', or 'unbinding' witches, blessers, wizards, sorcerers, however 'cunning-man' and 'wise-man' were the most frequent." In 1584, Englishman and Member of Parliament, Reginald Scot wrote, "At this day it is indifferent to say in the English tongue, 'she is a witch' or 'she is a wise woman'". Folk magicians throughout Europe were often viewed ambivalently by communities, and were considered as capable of harming as of healing, which could lead to their being accused as "witches" in the negative sense. Many English "witches" convicted of consorting with demons may have been cunning folk whose fairy familiars had been demonised; many French devins-guerisseurs ("diviner-healers") were accused of witchcraft, and over one half the accused witches in Hungary seem to have been healers. Some of those who described themselves as contacting fairies described out-of-body experiences and travelling through the realms of an "other-world".

Macbeth and the Witches by Sir Joshua Reynolds, depicts the Three Witches conjuring up apparitions for Macbeth

Accusations of witchcraft

Éva Pócs states that reasons for accusations of witchcraft fall into four general categories:

A person was caught in the act of positive or negative sorcery

A well-meaning sorcerer or healer lost their clients' or the authorities' trust

A person did nothing more than gain the enmity of their neighbours

A person was reputed to be a witch and surrounded with an aura of witch-beliefs or Occultism

She identifies three varieties of witch in popular belief:[26]

The "neighbourhood witch" or "social witch": a witch who curses a neighbour following some conflict.

The "magical" or "sorcerer" witch: either a professional healer, sorcerer, seer or midwife, or a person who has through magic increased her fortune to the perceived detriment of a neighbouring household; due to neighbourly or community rivalries and the ambiguity between positive and negative magic, such individuals can become labelled as witches.

The "supernatural" or "night" witch: portrayed in court narratives as a demon appearing in visions and dreams.

"Neighbourhood witches" are the product of neighbourhood tensions, and are found only in self-sufficient serf village communities where the inhabitants largely rely on each other. Such accusations follow the breaking of some social norm, such as the failure to return a borrowed item, and any person part of the normal social exchange could potentially fall under suspicion. Claims of "sorcerer" witches and "supernatural" witches could arise out of social tensions, but not exclusively; the supernatural witch in particular often had nothing to do with communal conflict, but expressed tensions between the human and supernatural worlds; and in Eastern and Southeastern Europe such supernatural witches became an ideology explaining calamities that befell entire communities.

Violence related to accusations

Belief in witchcraft continues to be present today in some societies and accusations of witchcraft are the trigger for serious forms of violence, including murder. Such incidents are common in countries such as Burkina Faso, Ghana, India, Kenya, Malawi, Nepal and Tanzania. Accusations of witchcraft are sometimes linked to personal disputes, jealousy, and conflicts between neighbors or family members over land or inheritance. Witchcraft-related violence is often discussed as a serious issue in the broader context of violence against women.

In Tanzania, about 500 old women are murdered each year following accusations of witchcraft or accusations of being a witch. Apart from extrajudicial violence, state-sanctioned violence also occurs in some jurisdictions. For instance, in Saudi Arabia practicing witchcraft and sorcery is a crime punishable by death and the country has executed people for this crime in 2011, 2012 and 2014.

Children who live in some regions of the world, such as parts of Africa, are also vulnerable to violence that is related to witchcraft accusations. Such incidents have also occurred in immigrant communities in the UK, including the much publicized case of the murder of Victoria Climbié.

https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Witchcraft

[qqueenofhades]

I have a somewhat historical question I guess that I was wondering if you knew anything about. A common trope I see in any media taking place in any time period before early to mid 20th century is the mother dying in childbirth thing? And I was just wondering (even just in regards to the time period of your expertise) what we're the mortality rates for women in childbirth?

Heh. Well. (This is probably going to be way more than you wanted to know, but I believe in being thorough.)

First, childbirth has always been risky (women still die from it in modern countries in modern hospitals with all of 21st century medicine behind them, and it’s still a major health concern for countries in the developing world – Sierra Leone in Africa has the worst maternal mortality rate in the world, with up to 1,360 deaths per 100,000 births, or a 1 in 17 chance). So childbirth in the pre-modern era, without possibility of surgical intervention (unless to save the baby and kill the mother), painkillers, modern hygiene, X-ray/ultrasound equipment, and sterilized hospital settings, was dangerous. Ignaz Semmelweis and Alexander Gordon, two 18th/19th-century obstetricians who investigated the causes of puerperal fever or childbed fever, and concluded that it could often be prevented by the doctor just vigorously washing his hands between deliveries (and not, you know, performing an autopsy on a dead body and going straight to deliver a baby) were treated with complete ridicule by the scientific establishment and branded as charlatans. (This, as you may notice, will become a theme.) Modern germ theory and sterile instruments weren’t established until the late 19th century. So yes, the risk was very real, and noble and common women alike died in childbirth. We obviously don’t have anything resembling detailed demographic information, but we can conclude the rate would be similar to a developing country today.

However, this is very far from saying that no kind of maternal or prenatal care or practice existed. This is once again where we discover how terrible the late medieval/Renaissance era was for women’s rights/education/professional liberty/basically everything (seriously, Renaissance, your art is nice, but otherwise you can fuck off). In the eleventh and twelfth centuries, the famed medical university at Salerno, in Italy, fairly freely accepted female students and professors, and their most famous professor and scholar on women’s health was Trota of Salerno, who gave her name and a good deal of her own experience to the three texts known as the “Trotula.” These were each written by a different author under Trota’s supervision and authority, and the first two books, “Book on the Conditions of Women” and “On Treatment of Women” represent a detailed gynecological handbook with advice on all kinds of pregnancy/childbirth-related ailments – uterine prolapse, perineum tears, medicines, and other solutions from a practitioner who, unlike her male counterparts, could actually touch and study her patients’ bodies. Trota is referred to as a “magistra” (the female form of Latin magistro or master) and her work was widely circulated and read in England and Normandy as well as Sicily (which was under Norman rule itself from about the mid-eleventh century). So she was a famous doctor and scholar in her own day (until, of course, she was obscured/changed to male/ignored/nearly forgotten until the twentieth century). Another “magistra”, Hersend of France, accompanied Louis IX on crusade in the thirteenth century and treated both the king himself and the female members of the crusade contingent. 

Of course, ordinary women would not have had access to these highly trained female physicians, and most midwives had no special or formal training aside from their own practical experience. As well, almost everyone writing medical texts was (shockingly!) a man, making it nearly impossible to know much about these actual practitioners. Since pregnancy was, of course, a result of sex, the church had plenty of opinions on it as well. The suffering of childbirth was supposed to be the proper punishment for original sin, so anything that dulled the pain was frowned on, and when actual training of midwives was instituted in the later medieval era, the concern was mostly on whether they knew how to perform an emergency baptism for the child’s sake, rather than any care of the mother. (Wow…. this sounds… awfully familiar, doesn’t it?) Nonetheless, there are literally dozens of texts from antiquity to the Renaissance, representing folk/informal recipes and methods for contraception and abortion. We don’t know how well any of these worked, if at all, and they were usually (again) written by men trying to tell women what to avoid (but having the effect of also giving them the information if they wanted it). But there was a vast and probably at least somewhat effective corpus of traditions/medicines/rudimentary contraceptive methods available and transmitted through female practitioners.

None of this was ever taught to men, naturally, and the universities, as they became more established, did their damndest to stamp out “unlicensed” practitioners, which really meant women. The 1322 trial of Jacoba Felicie, a female doctor in Paris, is basically representative of the later medieval pushback against women practitioners. Jacoba’s patients, both male and female, testified that she was a highly skilled doctor and they had gotten better after visiting her – but the court’s judgment was that since she was a woman, she couldn’t possibly be as good a doctor as a man, and she was barred from practice. (If this post was Misogyny, Take a Shot, I think we would all be hammered by now.) That decision also led to legislation to keep women out of universities/medical school in France (in 1421, Henry V also banned them in England). So once again: You Suck, Renaissance!

This also involves questions of medieval sexuality, religion, and general hygiene/attitudes toward cleanliness and medical care. First, aside from the texts mentioned above that discuss folk remedies for contraception, a medieval woman had various strategies to space her children that didn’t just rely on hoping her husband didn’t rape her too much (as I have ranted about before). Also, it’s worth pointing out that children were a natural and expected part of medieval marriage, and most couples would be more interested in ensuring they had children, rather than preventing them – limiting family size to the average 2.5 children is a modern conceit once more linked to capitalism and the de-coupling of marriage/family/household from its function as a unit of economic production, as I wrote about here. Children were valuable as heirs to noble families or working members of a lower-class family, and with likewise high infant/child mortality, you could sometimes have a number of children and hope that one or two of them made it to adulthood. 

However, that didn’t mean that all medieval women just pumped out babies until they couldn’t have any more. The third-century Roman physician Galen’s theory of female orgasm being necessary to conceive was considerably well-known in the medieval era. While this backfired on rape victims, as it was figured they couldn’t have gotten pregnant if they didn’t enjoy it (paging Todd Akin… wow, this is depressing, isn’t it?), it also meant that your average medieval married couple would have believed that the woman, not just the man, experiencing pleasure was necessary to have children. Cue the church clutching its pearls in the background, but the official Catholic theology and teaching of sexuality was, again, mutable. The thirteenth-century sect of the Cathars viewed all sex, married or otherwise, as evil, so in response and opposition to them, the Catholic church began glorifying marital sex to some degree. There was a recognition that both spouses owed each other sexual availability and pleasure, and marriages could be dissolved if this wasn’t upheld on either end.

As well, since close to half the days of the year (Wednesdays, Fridays, Sundays, Lent, Advent, holy days, six weeks after childbirth, etc) were regarded as impermissible for sexual activity, that meant couples (if they were religiously observant, or if they just wanted to avoid the possibility) had the option of spacing out procreative sexual activity. There wasn’t any institutional or official acceptance of sex outside marriage (though oh boy, it happened – up to 30% of brides were pregnant at their wedding), but there was also a lot of argument about what constituted marriage. It could just be as simple as saying “I take you as my wife/husband” without any church framework or institution whatsoever, and then having intercourse. (See chapter three, “Sex and Marriage,” in Sexuality in Medieval Europe.) The church viewed these couples as fornicators if they hadn’t been married formally, but what we would consider cohabiting unmarried couples (similar to a couple living together before actual marriage today) were fairly common. Noblewomen in particular were expected to give their husbands heirs, but after that, if they didn’t like each other much, he would have mistresses and she could be excused from it. The noble couples we know of with a high number of children seem to have been the ones who genuinely liked each other/had happy marriages anyway, and thus continued having sex even after the succession was secured. 

Plus, the ideal of chastity, both inside and outside of marriage, was very socially influential. The late medieval English mystic Margery Kempe managed (after having fourteen children with her husband) to get him to agree to a chaste marriage (we have him sadly asking her if she would prefer to kill him with a hatchet rather than letting them have sex again – which, after fourteen kids, she might). Women who chose to be virgins or abbesses or nuns were also excused from childbirth, although they sometimes faced pressure from their families to marry and continue the line. But chastity was admired in both men and women, and considered a prerequisite for holiness, so it was a way to avoid sexual activity (and thus more children) as well as getting in the church’s good books.

Lastly, there’s the general idea that people in the medieval era were filthy, dirty, foul-smelling, had rotten teeth, etc. Medieval people probably had structurally better teeth than we did (though obviously without modern dentistry/orthodontics) albeit worn down from grit/particles, because processed sugar wasn’t part of their diet. Next, while obviously they did not know about germs/the root causes of illnesses, they logically associated filth and bad smells with disease. Most cities had ordinances about where you could dump your waste and strict punishment for litterbugs. Full-body bathing was rarer than today, because of how much time and effort it would take to fill a whole tub, but they washed hair, hands, faces, etc regularly, and bathhouses were a part of medieval town culture. They prized sweet smells and perfumed/fragrant herbs, so while they would obviously have more body odor than we do with daily showers/soap/deodorant/etc, they wouldn’t be some strange shit-smeared, rotten-toothed rustic barely one step above a caveperson. In the 1400s, we find the Hotel-Dieu, the major hospital in Paris, believing that pregnant/postnatal women should have three baths a week and their linen washed regularly (that whole article is worth a read – said hospital was also entirely staffed by women/religious sisters).

Since this has gotten super long (as I said, more than you want to know), allow me to summarize. Midwifery/women’s health care has (surprise!) a very long history and was intentionally destroyed/excluded from male-dominated university curriculums, medieval women giving birth did die but not outlandishly/without any treatment at all, and the presence of women in medical school/practice was increasingly restricted up to and around the Renaissance. (It’s a subject of debate how many midwives were targeted in witch hunts, but some of them definitely were.) This also connected to medieval attitudes about sexuality, procreation, religion, and women, and the options that medieval women had for controlling the number of children they had or didn’t have, and their relationships with their husbands and what was expected of them as a result.

I will also note in closing that the “dying in childbirth” thing in historical fiction is a way to easily invoke the ever-present Dead Mother trope in a historically plausible, if rather lazy, way. Since everyone knows women did die (and do die) in childbirth, it becomes an easy way to kill off the protagonist’s mother or to make some point about The Dangers Of Women’s Lives Back Then (whether in-universe or intended for the modern audience). All of which is absolutely the case, but which ignores, as usual, the complexity of the ways in which premodern medicine for women, and women themselves, created a corpus of knowledge and treatment that remains unacknowledged, overlooked, dismissed, or otherwise intentionally destroyed by a patriarchal, misogynistic system.

/takes a bunch of shots

/falls over

[ashfaqqahmad]

Can religion be logical 7

Click here to read the previous part of this article

Theory of development of the embryo

Well now let’s get to the development of the embryo. According to Moore it was not possible for anyone to have this information at that time, but was it really right for Moore to think so? Use your brain here and think of ancient times, two thousand to five thousand years ago.

At that time, civilizations were flourishing in three formats – tribals living in forests, villagers doing agriculture and animal husbandry, and third, living in cities, who used to buy and sell food and other things necessary for sustenance.

In these cities, prostitution was an acceptable and respected occupation available for entertainment. Even the Bible mentions prostitution, according to the Mahabharata, there were thousands of prostitutes in Hastinapur. Cyprus, Sicily, Kingdom of Pontus, Cappadocia were the main centres of prostitution in Greek civilization.

How did humans start their journey on earth

In India, the nagarvadhus were prepared for this, in Nepal, there was a ritual for prostituting girls named deuki, in Jerusalem there used to be a temple for erotic activities, in Greek civilization, it was named as ’holy sex.’

When Pompeii, which was destroyed in Mount Vesuvius explosion 2000 years ago, was dug up in 1748, a brothel was also found with the city, with ten rooms and paintings depicting coitus. It is said that it started with the union of the king of Sumeria and the goddess of love Inanna in the Sumerian civilisation. Then sex was not a taboo in any civilization. Rati was the goddess of sex in India, whereas in Greek civilization Aphrodite was respected for it.

Most of the big cities were inhabited on the seaside, where outsiders used to come for business and these brothels strengthened the economy of the state. Now use your brain that the women who had chosen prostitution would not have gone to that profession for reproduction and the measures of contraception were also not prevalent at that time.

There were no contraceptive measures at that time

And whatever little were there were strange and dangerous. Egyptian documents show that one and a half thousand years ago, they used to fill crocodile faeces, honey, sodium bicarbonate solution to prevent the entry of sperm into the female vagina. In the medieval period, the ovary and a bone of the animal named Vezal were tied on the thigh of the woman. In China, they used to make a solution of lead and mercury in some way and used to drink it, which was life-threatening. In Greece, the woman was given the water in which the blacksmiths used to cool their tools.  

what possibilities are there in the universe outside our planet

Obviously, all these measures were dangerous, unsafe and uncertain so the women would get pregnant. Now if you think that medical practices were negligible at that time, then you are wrong. In the Indian territory and Unani system of medicine in Central Asia and Europe, Ayurveda is very old. In 2600 BC there was Imhotep in Egypt, whom Sir William Osler called the real father of medicine.

So when women used to conceive, measures were also taken to abort it. It is a matter of fact that even today, in rural society, many native methods of abortion are in vogue.  

Now bypassing Mr Moore, use your wisdom that if an embryo from a week to a foetus, three to four or five months is being aborted, would it not be noticed or seen by people (at least by the woman who is pregnant)?

When they stopped menstruating, could they not know about their pregnancy and then different stages of the foetus through abortion that it first takes a leech-like appearance and what forms it takes further?

If God is there then how can it be from the point of view of science

Apart from this, there is miscarriage which has been there as a normal process since the time of existence of women. Do you believe that before the eighth century there was no miscarriage and they were not aware of the different conditions of the foetus in the womb?

Understand these things in such a way that there were no flush toilets then, to flush away the foetus rather most people would go in the open for excretion or to throw such undeveloped (early stage) embryo. so it was nothing like unknown or unique that nobody knew before mentioned in the Quran in the eighth century.

It is worth noting here that the Quran itself asks to understand such things and does not claim these to be real. But ever since people like Zakir Naik have started finding science in religious books, such common things are also being proclaimed as a miracle.

Is it really a miracle that two oceans do not mix

Another miracle most talked about in the Quran is related to Surah Rahman‘s verses 19-20, referring to the meeting of two seas which do not mix with each other. This miracle has two categories – one is its state and the other is how this miracle on the ground was revealed.

First, understand the scientific reason for it not being mingled. This unique union happening at a very familiar place (propagated by Muslims) is the Gulf of Alaska, where cold, freshwater melts from the glaciers and meets the saltwater of the Pacific ocean. Now since the density, temperature, etc. of the water on both sides are different, they do not meet with each other and at its junction, the foam wall is formed.

The truth is that it does not occur in only place. In other places, where freshwater (clean) of the rivers comes into the saltwater of the sea, it maintains its own existence, but it happens on a small scale so it is not discussed. You can see it at the merging of Ganges and Yamuna. In Uttarakhand, you can see such scenes in many places. If you watch the Factomania program on BBC Earth, then you can also do such experiments at home. The other truth is that this combination is not permanent and gradually the water melts.

This occurs due to the different densities of water

This happens because of the density of water and you can take an example of the Dead Sea between Jordan and Israel where the density of water is so high that you can never drown in it. Since it is natural and the believers believe that nature is created by God, then they can say that God did it. Else there is nothing like a miracle in it and if it is a miracle then everything associated with nature is a miracle and every invention is a miracle.

what are the possibilities for new writers

Now come to another aspect that how this incident was recorded in the Quran? How the writer came to know and about it? For this, you have to go back to the past again.

Stories of mystery and adventure have always been the centre of human interest. Today, we can see ‘Pirates of the Caribbean‘, ‘Mysterious Island‘, ‘Gulliver‘ type films made on those sea voyages, but in earlier times all these stories were written and people would read them with great enthusiasm. ’Gulliver’ and ‘Sindbad‘ are perfect examples of this.  

If you are above forty, you must be remembering the stories you heard from your grandmother in your childhood, because then there were limited means of entertainment and storytelling was an ancient and important art, which has been going on since the early days of civilization.

Storytelling was a common art in those days  

It was the practice of this storytelling that created the folk tails, the most important of which were the stories of the ships. You can take Sindbad the sailor as an example. In those times, when there were very limited means of entertainment, people who had long sea voyages by ships were full of hundreds of stories. Some of which were based on their imagination (Arabian Nights type), some on personal experiences and some might be folk tales of other countries or simply, the exchange of cultures.

How to write a book in Microsoft word  

They used to narrate those stories in gatherings, in taverns, in hotels and in private get-togethers and thus the stories from distant countries, seas and islands used to reach people. Nine and a half hundred years before Christ, there were some harbour cities in Israel which were established by King Solomon’s (Sulayman), due to which they had commercial contacts with a large terrain.

So there can be two kinds of possibilities. First, a sailor might have seen this sight and then described it to others, other that it is not even mandatory in the context of the Gulf of Alaska, might have been seen elsewhere.

Along with this, there is a fact that Muhammed saheb had gone with his uncle to Sham (Syria) in his childhood, for business and in Sham also, harbour cities were the main trading centre. Do the rest calculation by yourself.

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इस लेख को हिंदी में पढ़ने के लिये यहाँ क्लिक करें

[goingmedieval]

On Medieval Health Care and American Barbarism

As I’ve noted several times, I generally try to ignore whatever is currently passing for ‘governance’ in America at the moment, cuz I just ain’t got the patience, or ability to do all that emotional labour. However, they will keep on doing things that call back to the medieval period, so we’re gonna have to talk about it.

So currently in America, which is defo a first world country and for sure very prosperous and a good place to live, there is some debate about whether or not sick people should be driven into bankruptcy, given the audacity of their instance on being ill. (Have they tried not getting ill? IDK.) 

Some Americans, who are for sure good Christians and well into Jesus, need you to know that no one should be obligated to help sick people pay for medical care. To whit:

How charming.

This idea – that health care is something that requires a) payment, and b) is an individual, not a community, concern is what we’re going to talk about today.

Now, as you may be aware, European medicine was underpinned by the idea of humorism which was central to Hippocratic medicine. Hippocratic medicine itself was developed from the tradition of Greek natural philosophy. Hippocrates, obviously, gave his name to the discipline, but the Hippocratic Corpus – a series of sixty some essays on medicine – was developed by several authors and compiled around 250 BCE. Galen then came along sometime around 129 AD and updated the ideas slightly, and notably had some influence on theories of anatomy and pharmacology, but was still a stan for humor theory.

As the theory went – the body held four humors: blood, yellow bile, black bile, and phlegm. These humors, in turn corresponded to the four seasons, the four elements, four temperaments, and four stages of the life cycle like so…

More or less, the idea was that if your humours were balanced you would remain healthy. If something got out of whack, you got sick. To get better you needed to get those humors back into balance. A lot of this idea was based on observation. If you were so sick to your stomach you were vomiting bile it sure did look like you had too much and your body was trying to rid itself of it. Bad cold? Same thing with phlegm.

Medieval medicine took this classical basis and ran with it. Classical medical texts were copied and edited in monasteries and monks also wrote their own works on herbal medicine and botany based off their own observations. As groups of devout Christian men with access to medical knowledge, monks considered it to be their religious obligation to provide medical care for members of their communities. 

As a result, most monasteries ended up having a sort of informal hospital. Because they were actual fucking Christians.

There were a lot of other groups practicing medicine in the medieval period however. Barber surgeons, famously, did a lot of medical work that involved cutting people. Basically if you were able to keep a razor sharp enough to shave someone, odds were it was sharp enough to do minor surgery. Homeboys would do stuff like blood letting, dentistry, looking after soldiers during and after battle, and also keeping your cut fresh AF.

Barbers were medical professionals and for sure got paid. However, the medical services they provided were generally in reach of your average (read: peasant) medieval person. There was also something for the ladiez to do medically – that is look after other ladiez. (Did you know that half of all people in the medieval period were actually women? No for real. I’m serious.)  Midwifery was some real shit, and basically one of very few professional options for individual women at the time. (Fuck yeah the other option was sex work – shout out to my girls.)

Midwives were typically apprenticed at a young age in order to learn the trade, and had to have a reference from their parish priest as to their good character in order to do so. They then learned all about assisting the labour process. Labour was an exclusively female medical event – with men being excluded from the birth chamber. Midwives were certainly professionals, but the great majority of people (again, peasants) could still afford their services.

There were also straight up apothecaries who were sort of like modern day chemists/pharmacists who made drugs and medicines. By the thirteenth century they had their own guilds, and they often worked alongside other medical practitioners in order to establish what drugs should be made or  

There were, of course, also dedicated physicians in the medieval period. There were several schools that taught medicine, including the much-celebrated Salerno, and later Montpellier, which is still in operation.

These institutions trained doctors including the famous Rogerius who wrote a killer book called The Practice of Surgery (Practica Chirurgiae) round about 1180, and also came up with the term ‘lupus’ and Giles de Corbeil who wrote a series of influential medical poems on the urinary tract and pulsology. The university system was making some pretty good advances in medicine, if slowly. People started doing more work with human dissection and learned more about anatomy. (Fun fact – high medieval Europe did not totally ban human dissection, but Pagan Rome did. Bring that up when people say the medieval period was backwards.)

The medical schools were drivers of medical thought and research and the people who trained in them often ended up working for the elite. You had to go to school for years to be licensed, and it wasn’t cheap, so you charged.

That’s where the trouble started.

After the Black Death showed up, people were not too enthused about medical practitioners. If they knew so much, why couldn’t they stop the plague?

 People began cracking down on non-licensed medical practitioners. If these people were actually skilled in terms of medicine then for real, why TF was everyone dying on the regular? Soon laws began to propagate stating that only licensed, i.e. university educated physicians could practice medicine. This fucked shit up.

Suddenly a lot of people who had been offering health care services couldn’t. The barber who pulled out your rotten teeth? Not licensed. Apothecaries who knew everything about how to create drugs? Part of a guild that learned through apprenticeship, not university. The monks who had killer medical libraries, actual running hospitals, and gardens full of medicinal herbs at their disposal? Only educated in the cloister.

It was even worse for women who could not go to university. In the medieval period all students had to take holy orders in order to join university, meaning that they were clergy members, if only for their time in school. Women couldn’t do that. That meant that there was no legal way for midwives to practice, despite the fact that only women were supposed to be involved in the birth of children.

So the ranks of people who could legally provide medical care suddenly dropped. Meanwhile, the only people who could legally provide it needed to see that cash money in order to provide medical care because they made a huge investment of time and money to get where they were. 

In some instances, where you lived also determined whether or not you could get medical care. A trained physician would want to stay where the greatest number of potential (wealthy) clients lived. They, therefore, tended to stay in cities, or revolve around courts where their educational investments paid off. No one was going out to the country side to see to the peasants, you feel me? Moreover, the peasants couldn’t drag themselves off to a monastery for help when they got sick anymore, because monks weren’t supposed to be practicing medicine. There just wasn’t anywhere to go for help. By the early modern period, then, the poor had been stripped of a lot of the options they could exercise before.

All of this helped to create the system that America is experiencing today. Healthcare became a luxury – something that the rich elite had recourse to, and which everyone else had to do without.  It is also a hugely modern ‘system’. No one is compelled by their religion to take care of the sick, despite the fact that America loves to call itself a Christian country. We compel bright young people who want to make money to go to med school, because there is a huge financial incentive. Being a medical doctor gets you paid. We do not tell them they have a responsibility to treat the sick when they are trained.

This health care system also routinely marginalises people who provide medical care but are not physicians, in particular those who are providing medical care in one of the traditionally ‘feminine’ roles. Nurses and midwives have much much more patient contact than doctors do, but are paid nowhere near as much. Hell, in America you might be paying out the nose for medical care and only ever see a nurse practitioner anyway, such are the vagaries of for-profit healthcare. So the nurse-practitioner ain’t getting paid, but you are still paying, and somehow all of this is fine and good.

None of this is to say that medical practitioners shouldn’t be paid for their services.  It’s a hard job. You have to learn a lot. In the UK we really treat our junior doctors terribly and they deserve so much more. In the medieval period people still managed to treat people at all levels of society and still make a good living. The people who could afford to give away free health care in the medieval period (monks) had really comfortable life styles. The lower-level practitioners like barbers and midwives made their living on volume. There were options for patients and practitioners to enhance their quality of life.

Overall, then, while medicine has moved on from the medieval period and is much more effective – the healthcare options that many people in America have are actually much worse in comparison to what was available seven hundred years ago.

Perhaps even more distressing for enthusiasts of using ‘medieval’ to mean bad (which you should never do), is that America is a less caring society than Europe in the year 1300. Medieval Europeans were subject to strict class systems, many were unfree, and most lived lives of grinding poverty and work. Most people weren’t allowed to move down the road if they wanted to - but they were still considered deserving of health care.

Tell me one more time who the barbarians are.

[tanadrin]

(Warning: talking about things I have no expertise of, or indeed any kind of comprehensive knowledge)

I’m interested in the way our perceptions of magic differ from actual magic, and in general, how different the pseudo-historical “ISO Standard Fantasy Setting” differs from the thing it supposedly imitates. What it actually imitates is, of course, a certain genre of Romantic literature recycled through D&D (or through Tolkien then D&D again, or Tolkien, his imitators, and D&D), and closely related works. The conventional tropes of modern high fantasy were established in a relatively short period, even compared to hard SF, in the middle of the 20th century. They don't much resemble either their immediate predecessors (Dunsany, for instance) or their supposed source material (actual medieval literature) except in very very superficial ways--knights on horseback, for instance, things called faeries.

Sometimes there's back-contamination, where our erroneous impression of the past as conveyed by pseudo-historical settings in fantasy literature (Medieval Tymes, if you like) color our perception of *actual* historical periods. The video game Crusader Kings 2, for instance, feels much more like an ISO Standard Fantasy Setting that happens to be set in Europe than it does the actual Middle Ages (and this is before they added the admittedly silly Monks and Mystics expansion, which adds a whole new level of tongue-in-cheekness to a game that already played around a lot with its source material). There's very little use of medieval art or architecture in CK2, or even direct imitations of it; even less medieval music. THere's a lot of imitation, though, of what we *think* the middle ages should look like based on fantasy literature and its derivatives--which is why the Elder Scrolls and Song of Ice and Fire mods work so well with the base game's style, since in a way they're truer to the spirit of CK2 than actual history is. Both those works--Martin's especially--are firmly embedded in pseudomedievalism, and built on the ISO Standard Fantasy Setting in different ways.

But let's talk about magic in particular, which is a mainstay of the fantasy genre outside high fantasy, but which I feel, as a reader, tends to be treated in common ways across very diverse works of genre fiction. Here I'll include video games like the Elder Scrolls, traditional games like Dungeons and Dragons, novels of low fantasy (The Dresden Files, Harry Potter) and novels of high (Chronicles of Amber, China Mieville's Bas-Lag books, Discworld, Codex Alera). Every one, I contend, against our intuitions on the subject, while formally fantasy resembles science fiction in its treatment of magic; that is to say, magic is treated as an element of the world, and bears far more relationship to our modern conception of the natural order and of the natural world than any traditional form of magic. Magic is gone; magic has been killed stone dead. With very, very few exceptions, anything we think of as "magic" in film, books, TV, comics, etc., is really a form of not-magic, a kind of exotic naturalism, and at some point between the Renaissance and the industrial revolution, our cultural understanding of the world shifted so much that we (read "the people reading this post, not every human alive") became unable to conceive of magic as it was traditionally understood.

First off: in anthropological and philological terms, magic is a broad and vague label for a huge variety of practices from various cultures in various times and places, founded more or less in common quirks of human psychology, and without a single coherent definition. It's a collection, not a system; "systems" of magic are modern inventions, though there are definitely various kinds of magical traditions from different cultures. If you pick up a book like "The Book of Magic: From Antiquity to the Enlightenment" (Penguin, 2016; ed. and trans. Brian Copenhaver), you can look at a nice cross-section of different references to and discussions of magic from Biblical, Classical, Persian, Medieval, and Renaissance sources. Obviously, there's a lot going on that's different in each text, but a couple common themes emerge, I think.

First of all, you can classify most forms of these "magics" into discrete categories: divination through randomness or omens (entrails, crows, smoke, dreams, the stars); theurgy, or appeals to higher powers like angels (or accusations of appeals to powers like demons), which is big in medieval magic; speaking with the dead or with spirits (e.g., necromancy); and medicine. None of these are distinct, and none of these are distinctly magic, by which I mean many or most of these categories blend into one another and to other activities like cooking, worship, healing, or scholarship, and a strong "natural" versus "supernatural" dichotomy does not seem evident, especially in ancient sources like Plato, Pliny, and the Old Testament.

I think it's important to remember that a systematized explanation for how the world works was lacking for most of human history; you might see salt dissolve in water and precipitate out again, and fire burn things and acid eat them away, but knowing nothing about atoms or chemical reactions or the various electromagnetic and atomic forces which govern most human-level behavior of particles (to say nothing of the gravitational forces which dominate the heavens), it makes perfect sense to speak of the material universe being sustained and governed on an ongoing basis by the direct intervention of God, or spirits, or gods, who act according to consistent principles; in these circumstances, a denial of free will and a statement of absolute Divine control of the physical world isn't just a philosophical position, it's a productive explanation of minute details of life that otherwise lack compelling ones. Even if, as Plato and Pliny, you are more systematic about things and posit that sympathy operates between objects and can produce effects at a distance, much as one musical instrument can be caused to resonate by another, absent understanding of sound (and air molecules) or light or the particles and fields which mediate the electromagnetic or graviational forces, you still need to posit things like daimons and spirits as the actors which actually transmit such connections; and there is inevitably a tendency to personalize such things, even if you're not entirely anthropomorphizing them.

(Likewise, if you notice study of the heavens is capable of predicting things like eclipses and the tides, you may reason that it's capable of predicting other things, like whether you're going to win this war--after all, the moon seems to have an effect on the tides, why shouldn't it have an effect on human beings? Astrology isn't just primitive astronomy; it blends with astronomy in a perfectly seamless fashion.)

*How* magic works is not distinct from *what you do to make it work*. The two are the same; the former does not exist as a separate concept. A spell is performative, not in the sense that it's fake, but in the sense that saying "I take you to be my husband" actually marries you to the person standing next to you if the circumstances are valid.

So substances might have inherent properties; how those properties interact with one another and with the body is going to belong to the same category of knowledge as how the planets affect individual persons or spells affect your neighbor's cow, i.e., the fundamental mechanisms remain mysteries. Thus, medicine blends seamlessly with other kinds of magic, with ritual and with religion. Praying for your son to get better and putting a salve on his forehead aren't entirely distinct actions; thus, medical treatments from the middle ages contain a mix of what seems to us like perfectly sensible actions (mash up this plant and eat it) and insanity that nobody could possibly believe helps (then bury the rest in a cornfield and say verses from the Bible over it). And because other kinds of magic can help or harm, and medicine can help or harm, medicine is prone to being viewed as a kind of malicious magic: it's no coincidence that our word "pharmacy, pharmeceutical" comes from the same Greek word used to translate "witch," as in "thou shalt not suffer a witch to live": pharmakeos, i.e., a poisoner. In fact, all the vocabulary around magic-users is a pile of confusion, a conflation of different kinds of action that don't fit neatly with modern notions of A Wizard. "Witch" is from a word originally meaning "diviner;" in the Middle Ages and early Modern period it seemed to be understood as one who invokes the power of supernatural beings to do evil things--note that the crime of witchcraft was because witches necessarily consorted with the *devil*, not because they used magic per se (presumably, power from God or the angels was OK--and indeed, grimoires like the Lesser Key of Solomon talk about magic from these sources, and emphasize the necessity of moral purity in order to get the spells to work). "Maleficium," in Latin, originally just meant "evildoer," however that evil was done; likewise, mekashefah, the word (originally feminine) which "witch" translates in the above Bible verse. The "witch" of Endor is not at all a crone; she's an apparently respectable woman capable of furnishing Saul and his men with a decent meal, and the term the Bible actually uses is "sho'el 'ov" - i.e., one who knows how to ask ghosts questions.

(With the exception of necromancy, little distinction is in fact made in the Old Testament between kinds of supernatural power; e.g., in Exodus the magic of the Egyptians is depicted as illegitemate, but no less efficacious for that. Magic plainly works, even if it's wrong.)

Charms, spells, and incantations are more often than not about invoking a specific power: gods, in Greek and Roman magic, God and his angels in Christian. (Pliny divides magic into medicine, astrology, and religion; the first two, he says, produce predictions which corroborate divination--as stated above, astrology is not entirely distinct from divination for obvious reasons.) Later, alchemy begins to produce actual theories of matter; but it's still not at all distinct from the kind of magic that involves invoking higher powers.

So what *isn't* magic? That's considerably easier to answer than what is: when you look at the kinds of things that look like magic to us moderns, it becomes easy to recognize the ways in which scientism has so preoccupied our way of viewing the world that it becomes inextricable even from our supposedly "magical" fantasy.

Magic isn't sufficiently advanced technology, for one, or a highly refined and subtle art (Tolkien; he knew this, obviously, and wasn't going for magic-qua-magic). Magic isn't *energy*, or a *force* or a *field*; these things are the language of *science,* of electromagnetics and gravity and atoms (contra Jim Butcher, Terry Pratchett, and every video game ever). It's not local variations in the natural law (as a distinction between natural law, human law, and especially moral law actually *isn't* that clear cut). It's not telekinesis or ESP, however those are caused! Remember, these are pseudo-*science*, they were invented in the scientific era. If you're an ancient using magic to make objects move, you're not "moving it with your mind." You might be invoking spirits to move it for you, but *you* are not doing it with some invisible arm. Magic isn't beams of light or deadly green lasers. It's also not some kind of metaphysical illusion. Sure, magicians have been denounced as tricksters and illusionists all throughout history, but if there's deception in magic, it is good old-fashioned sleight of hand--maybe your court magician replaced his staff with a snake when nobody was looking. It's not a ghost-snake you can put your hand through, though.

A fantasy story using traditional notions of magic would involve attitudes pretty alien and unsatisfying to a lot of modern fantasy readers: a close connection between the physical and moral world, little attention to *how* things worked, and more attention to what you *did* to make things work, nothing like a systematized, sciencified magic, and a blend so close between magic, religion, and nature that they are entirely indistinguishable.

None of this is to say that the traditional F&SF conception of magic is wrong or bad somehow; it fits our modern sensibilities quite nicely and makes for compelling stories. But don't make the mistake of confusing these functionally-distant reinterpretations of history for how people actually used to understand the world.

[mediumaevum]

List of medieval European scientists

Anthemius of Tralles (ca. 474 – ca. 534): a professor of geometry and architecture, authored many influential works on mathematics and was one of the architects of the famed Hagia Sophia, the largest building in the world at its time. His works were among the most important source texts in the Arab world and Western Europe for centuries after.

John Philoponus (ca. 490–ca. 570): also known as John the Grammarian, a Christian Byzantine philosopher, launched a revolution in the understanding of physics by critiquing and correcting the earlier works of Aristotle. In the process he proposed important concepts such as a rudimentary notion of inertia and the invariant acceleration of falling objects. Although his works were repressed at various times in the Byzantine Empire, because of religious controversy, they would nevertheless become important to the understanding of physics throughout Europe and the Arab world.

Paul of Aegina (ca. 625–ca. 690): considered by some to be the greatest Christian Byzantine surgeon, developed many novel surgical techniques and authored the medical encyclopedia Medical Compendium in Seven Books. The book on surgery in particular was the definitive treatise in Europe and the Islamic world for hundreds of years.

The Venerable Bede (ca. 672–735): a Christian monk of the monasteries of Wearmouth and Jarrow who wrote a work On the Nature of Things, several books on the mathematical / astronomical subject of computus, the most influential entitled On the Reckoning of Time. He made original discoveries concerning the nature of the tides and his works on computus became required elements of the training of clergy, and thus greatly influenced early medieval knowledge of the natural world.

Rabanus Maurus (c. 780 – 856): a Christian monk and teacher, later archbishop of Mainz, who wrote a treatise on Computus and the encyclopedic work De universo. His teaching earned him the accolade of "Praeceptor Germaniae," or "the teacher of Germany."

Abbas Ibn Firnas (810 – 887): a polymath and inventor in Muslim Spain, made contributions in a variety of fields and is most known for his contributions to glass-making and aviation. He developed novel ways of manufacturing and using glass. He broke his back at an unsuccessful attempt at flying a primitive hang glider in 875.

Pope Sylvester II (c. 946–1003): a Christian scholar, teacher, mathematician, and later pope, reintroduced the abacus and armillary sphere to Western Europe after they had been lost for centuries following the Greco-Roman era. He was also responsible in part for the spread of the Hindu-Arabic numeral system in Western Europe.

Maslamah al-Majriti (died 1008): a mathematician, astronomer, and chemist in Muslim Spain, made contributions in many areas, from new techniques for surveying to updating and improving the astronomical tables of al-Khwarizmi and inventing a process for producing mercury oxide.[citation needed] He is most famous, though, for having helped transmit knowledge of mathematics and astronomy to Muslim Spain and Christian Western Europe.

Abulcasis (936-1013): a physician and scientist in Muslim Spain, is considered to be the father of modern surgery. He wrote numerous medical texts, developed many innovative surgical instruments, and developed a variety of new surgical techniques and practices. His texts were considered the definitive works on surgery in Europe until the Renaissance.

Constantine the African (c. 1020&–1087): a Christian native of Carthage, is best known for his translating of ancient Greek and Roman medical texts from Arabic into Latin while working at the Schola Medica Salernitana in Salerno, Italy. Among the works he translated were those of Hippocrates and Galen.

Arzachel (1028–1087): the foremost astronomer of the early second millennium, lived in Muslim Spain and greatly expanded the understanding and accuracy of planetary models and terrestrial measurements used for navigation. He developed key technologies including the equatorium and universal latitude-independent astrolabe.

Avempace (died 1138): a famous physicist from Muslim Spain who had an important influence on later physicists such as Galileo. He was the first to theorize the concept of a reaction force for every force exerted.

Adelard of Bath (c. 1080 – c. 1152): was a 12th-century English scholar, known for his work in astronomy, astrology, philosophy and mathematics.

Avenzoar (1091–1161): from Muslim Spain, introduced an experimental method in surgery, employing animal testing in order to experiment with surgical procedures before applying them to human patients.[4] He also performed the earliest dissections and postmortem autopsies on both humans as well as animals.

Robert Grosseteste (1168–1253): Bishop of Lincoln, was the central character of the English intellectual movement in the first half of the 13th century and is considered the founder of scientific thought in Oxford. He had a great interest in the natural world and wrote texts on the mathematical sciences of optics, astronomy and geometry. In his commentaries on Aristotle's scientific works, he affirmed that experiments should be used in order to verify a theory, testing its consequences. Roger Bacon was influenced by his work on optics and astronomy.

Albert the Great (1193–1280): Doctor Universalis, was one of the most prominent representatives of the philosophical tradition emerging from the Dominican Order. He is one of the thirty-three Saints of the Roman Catholic Church honored with the title of Doctor of the Church. He became famous for his vast knowledge and for his defence of the pacific coexistence between science and religion. Albert was an essential figure in introducing Greek and Islamic science into the medieval universities, although not without hesitation with regard to particular Aristotelian theses. In one of his most famous sayings he asserted: "Science does not consist in ratifying what others say, but of searching for the causes of phenomena." Thomas Aquinas was his most famous pupil.

John of Sacrobosco (c. 1195 – c. 1256): was a scholar, monk, and astronomer (probably English, but possibly Irish or Scottish) who taught at the University of Paris and wrote an authoritative and influential mediaeval astronomy text, the Tractatus de Sphaera; the Algorismus, which introduced calculations with Hindu-Arabic numerals into the European university curriculum; the Compotus ecclesiasticis on Easter reckoning; and the Tractatus de quadrante on the construction and use of the astronomical quadrant.

Jordanus de Nemore (late 12th, early 13th century): was one of the major pure mathematicians of the Middle Ages. He wrote treatises on mechanics ("the science of weights"), on basic and advanced arithmetic, on algebra, on geometry, and on the mathematics of stereographic projection.

Villard de Honnecourt (fl. 13th century): a French engineer and architect who made sketches of mechanical devices such as automatons and perhaps drew a picture of an early escapement mechanism for clockworks.

Roger Bacon (1214–94): Doctor Admirabilis, joined the Franciscan Order around 1240 where, influenced by Grosseteste, Alhacen and others, he dedicated himself to studies where he implemented the observation of nature and experimentation as the foundation of natural knowledge. Bacon wrote in such areas as mechanics, astronomy, geography and, most of all, optics. The optical research of Grosseteste and Bacon established optics as an area of study at the medieval university and formed the basis for a continuous tradition of research into optics that went all the way up to the beginning of the 17th century and the foundation of modern optics by Kepler.[8]

Ibn al-Baitar (died 1248): a botanist and pharmacist in Muslim Spain, researched over 1400 types of plants, foods, and drugs and compiled pharmaceutical and medical encyclopedias documenting his research. These were used in the Islamic world and Europe until the 19th century.

Theodoric Borgognoni (1205-1296): was an Italian Dominican friar and Bishop of Cervia who promoted the uses of both antiseptics and anaesthetics in surgery. His written work had a deep impact on Henri de Mondeville, who studied under him while living in Italy and later became the court physician for King Philip IV of France.

William of Saliceto (1210-1277): was an Italian surgeon of Lombardy who advanced medical knowledge and even challenged the work of the renowned Greco-Roman surgeon Galen (129-216 AD) by arguing that allowing pus to form in wounds was detrimental to the health of he patient.

Thomas Aquinas (1227–74): Doctor Angelicus, was an Italian theologian and friar in the Dominican Order. As his mentor Albert the Great, he is a Catholic Saint and Doctor of the Church. In addition to his extensive commentaries on Aristotle's scientific treatises, he was also said to have written an important alchemical treatise titled Aurora Consurgens. However, his most lasting contribution to the scientific development of the period was his role in the incorporation of Aristotelianism into the Scholastic tradition.

Arnaldus de Villa Nova (1235-1313): was an alchemist, astrologer, and physician from the Crown of Aragon who translated various Arabic medical texts, including those of Avicenna, and performed optical experiments with camera obscura.

John Duns Scotus (1266–1308): Doctor Subtilis, was a member of the Franciscan Order, philosopher and theologian. Emerging from the academic environment of the University of Oxford. where the presence of Grosseteste and Bacon was still palpable, he had a different view on the relationship between reason and faith as that of Thomas Aquinas. For Duns Scotus, the truths of faith could not be comprehended through the use of reason. Philosophy, hence, should not be a servant to theology, but act independently. He was the mentor of one of the greatest names of philosophy in the Middle Ages: William of Ockham.

Mondino de Liuzzi (c. 1270-1326): was an Italian physician, surgeon, and anatomist from Bologna who was one of the first in Medieval Europe to advocate for the public dissection of cadavers for advancing the field of anatomy. This followed a long-held Christian ban on dissections performed by the Alexandrian school in the late Roman Empire.

William of Ockham (1285–1350): Doctor Invincibilis, was an English Franciscan friar, philosopher, logician and theologian. Ockham defended the principle of parsimony, which could already be seen in the works of his mentor Duns Scotus. His principle later became known as Occam's Razor and states that if there are various equally valid explanations for a fact, then the simplest one should be chosen. This became a foundation of what would come to be known as the scientific method and one of the pillars of reductionism in science. Ockham probably died of the Black Plague. Jean Buridan and Nicole Oresme were his followers.

Jacopo Dondi dell'Orologio (1290-1359): was an Italian doctor, clockmaker, and astronomer from Padua who wrote on a number of scientific subjects such as pharmacology, surgery, astrology, and natural sciences. He also designed an astronomical clock.

Richard of Wallingford (1292-1336): an English abbot, mathematician, astronomer, and horologist who designed an astronomical clock as well as an equatorium to calculate the lunar, solar and planetary longitudes, as well as predict eclipses.

Jean Buridan (1300–58): was a French philosopher and priest. Although he was one of the most famous and influent philosophers of the late Middle Ages, his work today is not renowned by people other than philosophers and historians. One of his most significant contributions to science was the development of the theory of impetus, that explained the movement of projectiles and objects in free-fall. This theory gave way to the dynamics of Galileo Galilei and for Isaac Newton's famous principle of Inertia.

Guy de Chauliac (1300-1368): was a French physician and surgeon who wrote the Chirurgia magna, a widely read publication throughout medieval Europe that became one of the standard textbooks for medical knowledge for the next three centuries. During the Black Death he clearly distinguished Bubonic Plague and Pneumonic Plague as separate diseases, that they were contagious from person to person, and offered advice such as quarantine to avoid their spread in the population. He also served as the personal physician for three successive popes of the Avignon Papacy.

John Arderne (1307-1392): was an English physician and surgeon who invented his own anesthetic that combined hemlock, henbane, and opium. In his writings, he also described how to properly excise and remove the abscess caused by anal fistula.

Nicole Oresme (c. 1323–82): was one of the most original thinkers of the 14th century. A theologian and bishop of Lisieux, he wrote influential treatises in both Latin and French on mathematics, physics, astronomy, and economics. In addition to these contributions, Oresme strongly opposed astrology and speculated about the possibility of a plurality of worlds.

Giovanni Dondi dell'Orologio (c. 1330-1388): was a clockmaker from Padua, Italy who designed the astarium, an astronomical clock and planetarium that utilized the escapement mechanism that had been recently invented in Europe. He also attempted to describe the mechanics of the solar system with mathematical precision.