Curious History: Healing Demon Ghost Crystal

John Dee (1527-1609) was an English mathematician and astrologer interested in divination using crystals and mirrors. This purple crystal was used for curing disease and predicting the future by looking for symbols or the ‘ghosts’ of people in the stone. Dee claimed that this crystal was given to him by the angel Uriel in November 1582, and that Uriel had instructed Dee and his assistant Edward Kelley (1555-1597/8) on how to make the Philosopher’s Stone – one of the goals of alchemy. The crystal was entrusted to Dee’s son, Arthur (1597-1651) who passed it on to Nicholas Culpeper (1616-1654) as a reward for curing his liver complaints. Culpeper was a physician and alchemist who used the crystal to try and cure illness, until 1651, when he believed a demonic ghost burst out from it.

Curious History: Hung, Drawn and Quartered

  Quartering was the third part of an execution method known as hanging, drawing and quartering, and most commonly applied to those convicted of high treason in England. First the condemned was half hanged, usually from a gibbet. However, the neck was not broken, but they were left hanging so as to almost choke. it was important that the condemned was left alive at this point for the following stage of execution. 
  Next, they were taken down and laid out, and had their abdomen cut open and their entrails pulled out in front of them. The entrails were often burnt at this point. Somewhere about now the condemned usually died. Finally, the corpse was cut into four parts, and those parts sent to different points of the kingdom to be displayed over city gates.
  Usually one portion was sent their county of origin. Note, because high treason was a conviction imposed by Act of Attainder, it almost inevitably applied only to nobles. Commoners involved in rebellion would normally be cut down on the spot of battle, or summarily executed shortly after capture. Also, note that there were some creative variations on the theme.
  When Hugh Le Despenser the Younger was executed, he was hanged from a ladder. This enabled the executioners to perform an additional humiliation. His genitals were cut from him and stuffed in his mouth. Queen Isabella reportedly insisted on this because he was also convicted of sodomising the king.

Curious History: The Evolution of “Wound Man”

“Wound Man” is an illustration which first appeared in European surgical texts in the Middle Ages. It laid out schematically the various wounds a person might suffer in battle or in accidents.
Late medieval anatomy works often contain a standard set of illustrations, copied and recopied from text to text. Typically, these depict the body front and back; the skeleton and muscles within it each from the same two viewpoints, and so on. Strangest to our modern eyes is the illustration that usually comes last: the Wound Man, a compendium of all the injuries that a body might sustain. Captions beside the stoic figure describe the injuries and sometimes give prognoses: often precise distinctions are drawn between types of injuries, such as whether an arrow has embedded itself in a muscle or shot right through.