The drawing shows us an expert, sitting behind the patient
lying, extracting a tooth and helped by two assistants. The man on the
left pokes fire with bellows, and the other on the right, holds fire
with a grip near the “dentist”.
Charaf-ed-Din (1404-1468) left us his famous Chirurgie of
Ilkhani, an ancient dental manuscript, written and illustrated by him in
1465. This Turkish manuscript of ancient dentistry is preserved at the
BNF (National Library of France).
Many are still shocked to hear the story of how tens of
thousands of people paid to see an exhibit of tiny babies in incubators
in Long Island, New York at Coney Island in the early 19th century. But
there was a very important reason for this, one that continues to save
lives every day.
Incubators, while now standard in any hospital, were once an
untested technology. Their developers needed a way to prove their worth
and get the word out. So Dr. Martin Arthur Couney did the only thing he
could to show the world that this technology was indeed needed and could
save many lives. And that is how premature babies were put on display
at Coney Island, as the “Baby Incubator Exhibit”.
The attraction resembled a normal hospital ward, with babies,
nurses providing specialized care, and the doctor over-looking
everything. The only difference was that they were on display as a paid
exhibit. His medical staff consisted of five wet-nurses and fifteen
highly trained medical technicians including his daughter Hildegarde, a
nurse. By 1939, he had treated more than 8,000 babies and saved the
lives of over 6,500. Dr. Couney never charged parents a fee for the care
he gave their infants. His clinic was financed strictly through
entrance fees.
The exhibit on Coney Island was a spectacular, and seemingly
successful, affair. Outside of the attraction, carnival barkers,
including a very young Cary Grant, pulled people into the exhibit. The
sign over the entryway proclaimed, “All the World Loves a Baby.” Any
child who was prematurely born in the city would be rushed over to Coney
Island to be placed in the exhibit, including Couney’s own daughter,
who spent three months there.
Over time, the ‘graduates,’ of the program came back to
visit Couney and see the new crop of premature babies. In 1939 towards
the end of the attraction’s run, an article in the New Yorker mentioned
that a few of the male graduates became doctors themselves. By the time
his Luna Park exhibit closed in 1943, incubators were being used in
hospitals across the world.
Three preserved human fetuses, presented in an antique display
cabinet. The first is an altogether healthy fetus, the second suffers
Polymelia, six arms, and the final, suffers a rare infection of the
Shope papilloma virus, which causes a series of horn like growths in the
forehead. These three are part of a large collection of human
specimens, afflicted with various genetic diseases.
The remains of the immaculately dressed ‘Princess
Ukok’, aged around 25 and preserved for several millennia in the
Siberian permafrost, a natural freezer, were discovered in 1993 by
Novosibirsk scientist Natalia Polosmak during an archeological
expedition.
Buried around her were six horses, saddled and bridled, her
spiritual escorts to the next world, and a symbol of her evident status,
perhaps more likely a revered folk tale narrator, a healer or a holy
woman than an ice princess.
There, too, was a meal of sheep and horse meat and ornaments
made from felt, wood, bronze and gold. And a small container of
cannabis, say some accounts, along with a stone plate on which were the
burned seeds of coriander.
‘Compared to all tattoos found by archaeologists around the
world, those on the mummies of the Pazyryk people are the most
complicated, and the most beautiful,’ said Dr Polosmak.
The tattoos on the left shoulder of the ‘princess’ show a
fantastical mythological animal: a deer with a griffon’s beak and a
Capricorn’s antlers. The antlers are decorated with the heads of
griffons. And the same griffon’s head is shown on the back of the
animal.
The origins of one of the America’s oldest unsolved mysteries
can be traced to August 1587, when a group of about 115 English settlers
arrived on Roanoke Island, off the coast of what is now North Carolina.
Later that year, it was decided that John White, governor of the new
colony, would sail back to England in order to gather a fresh load of
supplies. But just as he arrived, a major naval war broke out between
England and Spain, and Queen Elizabeth I called on every available ship
to confront the mighty Spanish Armada. In August 1590, White finally
returned to Roanoke, where he had left his wife and daughter, his infant
granddaughter (Virginia Dare, the first English child born in the
Americas) and the other settlers three long years before. He found no
trace of the colony or its inhabitants, and few clues to what might have
happened, apart from a single word—“Croat”—carved into a wooden post.
The “Dare Stones”
In 1937, a twenty-one-pound quartz stone was found in a swamp
60 miles west of Roanoke. On one side was a cross and the instruction
“Ananias Dare & Virginia went hence Unto Heaven 1591.” On the other
were carvings that, when deciphered by faculty at Emory University, were
a message from Eleanor Dare to her father, John White, that the colony
had fled inland after an Indian attack.
The story told by the stones matched some of the details of
Strachey’s account, and a number of academics believed them. During the
next three years, nearly forty more stones were found in North Carolina,
South Carolina, and Georgia. Together, they told a story of the
colonists’ journey through the southeast, ending in the death of Eleanor
Dare in 1599.
The timing of the discovery, exactly 350 years after the
English settlement of Roanoke, made the “Virginia Dare Stones” a perfect
story, and the media jumped on it. In 1941, though, an article in The
Saturday Evening Post revealed the “discoverers” of the stones to have
staged an elaborate hoax. The stones were quickly forgotten by most
people, although there are others that state that the article in the
Post was biased for “tourist” reasons. There are many scholars that
still believe the first stone found to be authentic. But the other forty
stones, conveniently “found” after the fact, are definitely suspect and
most likely a hoax.
