Science Archive
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The Cyrurgia of Albucasis and other works, 1500
Posted on April 12, 2014 | No CommentsFour surgical treatises, printed in the last year of the fifteenth century, make up the oldest illustrated printed book in the Sibbald Library. The second one, the Cyrurgia of Albucasis, is the most interesting and I shall deal only briefly with the others. -
Quasicrystals in Medieval Islamic Architecture
Posted on March 28, 2014 | No CommentsQuasicrystal patterns have remarkable properties: they do not repeat periodically, and have special symmetry---and were not understood in the West until the 1970s. -
A Medieval Multiverse
Posted on March 26, 2014 | No CommentsIdeas in a thirteenth-century treatise on the nature of matter still resonate today, say Tom C. B. McLeish and colleagues. -
Medieval Magic Tricks
Posted on March 23, 2014 | No CommentsHow to turn water into wine, make a cross turn by itself, or have worms appear on cooked meat - some fun medieval magic tricks! -
Sickness in the Nidaros Cathedral?
Posted on March 14, 2014 | No CommentsUp towards the ceiling vault of the Nidaros Cathedral, a number of artworks are hidden from public view. Many of the stone sculptures portray mythological animals and other scary creatures. In such company, one would imagine that human faces were also intended to evoke fear and anguish. Do they depict people with diseases? -
The fire that comes from the eye
Posted on February 28, 2014 | No CommentsOne of the earliest ideas about vision is that it depends on light that streams out of the eye and detects surrounding objects. This view was attacked in its own time and finally disproved more than 2000 years later. -
Voynich Manuscript partially decoded, text is not a hoax, scholar finds
Posted on February 20, 2014 | No CommentsA Professor in Applied Linguistics believes he has decoded a few words from the mysterious Voynich Manuscript, a 600-year old work that has baffled scholars for the last hundred years. -
Limitations imposed by wearing armour on Medieval soldiers’ locomotor performance
Posted on February 10, 2014 | No CommentsOur findings can predict age-associated decline in Medieval soldiers’ physical performance, and have potential implications in understanding the outcomes of past European military battles. -
‘Royal’ pediculosis in Renaissance Italy: lice in the mummy of the King of Naples Ferdinand II of Aragon (1467-1496)
Posted on February 3, 2014 | No CommentsPediculosis seems to have afflicted humans since the most ancient times and lice have been found in several ancient human remains. Examination of the head hair and pubic hair of the artificial mummy of Ferdinand II of Aragon (1467-1496), King of Naples, revealed a double infestation with two different species of lice... -
Anesthesia Drugs in the Medieval Muslim Era
Posted on January 25, 2014 | No CommentsIn the Middle Ages, Christian Europe was in a state of intellectual stagnation and the theological doctrine that pain serves God's purpose and must not be alleviated militated against the improvement in methods of narcosis. Nuland points out that the Middle Ages in Europe were dark ages so far as advances in the pharmacology of anesthesia were concerned. -
Stature and frailty during the Black Death: the effect of stature on risks of epidemic mortality in London, A.D. 1348-1350
Posted on January 4, 2014 | No CommentsRecent research has shown that pre-existing health condition affected an individual ’ s risk of dying duringthe 14th-century Black Death. However, a previous study of the effect of adult stature on risk of mortality during the epidemic failed to find a relationship between the two; this result is perhaps surprising given the well-documented inverse association between stature and mortality in human populations. -
Can medieval drugs help modern patients?
Posted on December 14, 2013 | No CommentsWere medieval drugs effective at helping patients? Can modern pharmaceuticals make use of their knowledge? -
Depicting the Medieval Alchemical Cosmos: George Ripley’s Wheel of Inferior Astronomy
Posted on December 10, 2013 | No CommentsAlchemical writing often develops the idea of a physical or analogical correspondence between heaven and earth: a relationship most fre- quently and conveniently expressed by the use of the seven planetary symbols (Sol, Luna, Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn) to denote the seven metals (usually gold, silver, quicksilver, copper, iron, tin and lead respectively). -
![Healthscaping a Medieval City: Lucca’s Curia viarum and the Future of Public Health History G. Geltner (Department of History, University of Amsterdam) Urban History: 40, 3 (2013) Abstract In early fourteenth-century Lucca, […]](http://www.medievalists.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/watch-2-115x90.jpg "Healthscaping a Medieval City: Lucca’s Curia viarum and the Future of Public Health History")
Healthscaping a Medieval City: Lucca’s Curia viarum and the Future of Public Health History
Posted on November 24, 2013 | No CommentsHealthscaping a Medieval City: Lucca’s Curia viarum and the Future of Public Health History G. Geltner (Department of History, University of Amsterdam) Urban History: 40, 3 (2013) Abstract In early fourteenth-century Lucca, […] -
Ironing Out the Myth of the Flat Earth
Posted on November 21, 2013 | No CommentsIt seems there’s one fact about the Middle Ages that always seems to astound people: medieval people did not actually think the world was flat. -
Galileo, the Impact of the Telescope, and the Birth of Modern Astronomy
Posted on October 19, 2013 | No CommentsGalileo would have dearly loved to explain to his examiners how his observations made belief in the Copernican system more intellectually respectable even though he had no irrefutable proof of the Earth’s motion, but this was an opportunity he never got. -
From Rome to the antipodes: the medieval form of the world
Posted on October 9, 2013 | No CommentsHere we discuss how some medieval scholars in the Western Europe viewed the form of the world and the problem of the Antipodes -
Into the frontier: medieval land reclamation and the creation of new societies. Comparing Holland and the Po Valley, 800-1500
Posted on September 29, 2013 | No CommentsIn the paper it is shown that medieval land reclamation led to the emergence of two very divergent societies, characterised by a number of different configurations; (a) power and property structure, (b) modes of exploitation, (c) economic portfolios, and (d) commodity markets. -
Political Science in Late Medieval Europe: The Aristotelian Paradigm and How It Shaped the Study of Politics in the West
Posted on September 26, 2013 | No CommentsWhile scholars have provided many interesting insights into the role of Aristotle in shaping later political theory, I argue that they are inadequate to explain the rapid “Aristotelianization” of political thought in the later Middle Ages. -
Islamic Astronomy in Medieval China
Posted on September 15, 2013 | No CommentsIn 1271, Kublai Khan founded the Bureau of Islamic Astronomy in Peking, which operated alongside the long-established Chinese Astronomical Bureau. -
The Medieval Metal Industry Was the Cradle of Modern Large-Scale Atmospheric Lead Pollution in Northern Europe
Posted on September 4, 2013 | No CommentsThis study indicates that the contemporary atmospheric pollution climate in northern Europe was established in Medieval time, rather than in the Industrial period. Atmospheric lead pollution deposition did not, when seen in a historical perspective, increase as much as usually assumed with the Industrial Revolution (1800 A.D.). -
![A New Look at the Role of Urinalysis in the History of Diagnostic Medicine William I. White CLIN.CHEM.37/1, 119-125 (1991) Abstract Before this century, urine was the predominant body fluid […]](http://www.medievalists.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/12/zodiac_man_image-115x115.gif "A New Look at the Role of Urinalysis in the History of Diagnostic Medicine")
A New Look at the Role of Urinalysis in the History of Diagnostic Medicine
Posted on August 1, 2013 | No CommentsA New Look at the Role of Urinalysis in the History of Diagnostic Medicine William I. White CLIN.CHEM.37/1, 119-125 (1991) Abstract Before this century, urine was the predominant body fluid […] -
The Night the Moon exploded and other Lunar tales from the Middle Ages
Posted on July 21, 2013 | No CommentsPeople in the Middle Ages asked what was the moon made of? How far away was it? Could it make my child vindictive? Here is what they found out. -
Blood beliefs in early modern Europe
Posted on June 29, 2013 | No CommentsThis thesis focuses on the significance of blood and the perception of the body in both learned and popular culture in order to investigate problems of identity and social exclusion in early modern Europe. -
The Nature of West European Science in the Late Middle Ages (1200-1500)
Posted on June 16, 2013 | No CommentsI will argue that what medieval scholars did with natural philosophy and the role they assigned to it in intellectual life was ultimately more important than what they did with the technical sciences.
