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It’s the cure that will kill you: An exhibit of questionable medicine

I suspect I am predisposed to enjoying medical-themed exhibits, as I come from a medical family. My father, now retired, was a research professor on the subject of psychopharmacology, while my mother is a pharmacist. Dinner-table conversations would often revolve around various drugs, their effects on the brain, and their side-effects. I imagine this is also the sort of conversation you hear if you’re the child of junkies, albeit perhaps excluding my parents’ vocabulary, which included phrases like hippocampus and basal ganglia,.

But, then, perhaps medical-themed exhibits are just natively awesome. Many Minnesotans probably remember the Museum of Questionable Medical Devices, formerly housed at St. Anthony Main, now part of a larger collection at the Science Museum. The various devices are off-limits to questioning hands now, but when it was part of its own museum, you could touch and try out pretty much everything. these include orgone boxes, which were supposed to accumulate sexual energy, and phrenology helmets, which were supposed to measure the bumps on your head for clues to your character, including a score in something called “sexamity.”The only device that was truly off-limits was something that used to be common at shoe stores, a box that patrons could insert their feet into and then see their own foot bones. It was an X-ray machine, it actually worked, and it probably caused cancer.

In New Orleans they have a pharmacy museum, which used to obsess me, and I don’t think it is simply that I am the son of an apothecary. Victorian pharmacies were more like herbalists than contemporary drug dispensers, and almost everything they offered was a mixture of plant life, an alcoholic tincture, and liquid opium. The places smelled great, served cocktails and soft drinks (in fact, the creator of Dr Pepper was a pharmacist, and his soft drink was intended to taste the way his pharmacy smelled), and was probably as useless as much of what was on show at the Museum of Medical Questionable Devices, and sometimes as deadly as the X-ray shoe box. Museums of medicine are necessarily, to a large extent, museums of failed medicine — the New Orleans Pharmacy Museum had a pacifier created for Victorian children that was made of lead, because children, as anyone who has discovered them eating paint knows, like the taste of lead. Brilliant. Before the scientific method, medicine seemed about as likely to kill the patients as leave them be, and decidedly unlikely to cure them. It was a world of quackery and best guesses, and that’s what’s on display right now at the Owen H. Wangensteen Historical Library of Biology and Medicine on the University of Minnesota campus.

First, there is an exhibit called, cleverly, “Take two Lyllie Rootes and Call me in the Morning,” which is a collection of botanicals and medical receipt books, the latter phrase containing a bit of outdated English. “Receipt book” in this instance means “recipe book,” and that’s precisely what’s on hand: a collection of herbal cures for illnesses belonging to one Mary Pewe, who lived in England sometime between 1630 and 1690. Who was Mary Pewe? nobody seems to know, although she was likely the wife of a relatively well-off landowner, and she served as a sort of combination small-town doctor and one the witches that gathers around a bubbling cauldron in “Macbeth.” The books are genuinely glorious, many handwritten in a crabbed, careful script, others containing exquisite illustrations of plants, and some containing lists of people who died from the bubonic plague.

On the subject of the plague, a lot of Mary’s recipes seemed to be advice on how to “break a pestilent sore,” which is something I hope never to have to attempt, although, thanks to Mary Pewe, I now know how to do it. Simply take the brains of a boar, combine it with the poor creature’s stones, stamp it all together and place the mixture on the sore. “In the manner of plaster,” the book tells us, “it will break incontinent.” Marvelous. 

But there are all sorts of cures on hand at the library, including one for syphilis that includes white wine, cayenne pepper, mutton, fennel and mustard. perhaps you’ll excuse me for saying so, but, with the right setup, I could whip these exact ingredients into a romantic meal that’s more likely to cause the transmission of a social disease than cure it.

And there is some handy advice on how to discover if a child has worms, although perhaps it only works on a childe who has wyrms. It involves, basically, covering a feather with spices and then putting it on the babby’s bellybutton. If the feather falls, the wee bantling is parasite free. If the feather sticks, you have a mite with mites of his own.

Mary Pewe’s books also offer some advice for dealing with melancholy, one which suggests that maybe a cocktail before bedtime would help. another combines rare insects, stones, amber and ambergris, the latter of which is intestinal waste from a sperm whale. Then you add borage and gold to the liquid and there you have it, an expensive and impossible to procure drink that will help nothing at all. At least the ambergris is unlikely to be toxic — it’s been used to flavor food and cocktails for ages, and Charles II loved to eat eggs and ambergris. he lived to be 54, but back in the mid-1600s, when he lived (and when this collection of books dates from), the average life span was about 35, so he was relatively aged.

Melancholy, of course, was an early word for what we now diagnose as depression, and there is a second exhibit at the library on just that subject. Specifically, it details one Charlotte Perkins Gilman, who not only had the misfortune to suffer from depression but also the misfortune to suffer it at the end of the 19th century. Worse still, she consulted with a fellow named Dr. S. Weir Mitchell, who has his good qualities — he was a patron of the arts — and his bad qualities — the way he treated depression. he conceived of something called the “rest cure,” which involved, well, locking the afflicted person away and treating them like an invalid for months and months and months. As Wikipedia dryly notes, “It was not effective and caused many to go insane or die.” Weir primarily prescribed the rest cure to women, whom he saw as being inherently hysterical; he was working at a time when women were seen as having especially delicate emotions and feverish brains, and something as simple as an education could set them off.

Gilman was educated, and she was bright enough to know the rest cure wasn’t doing her any good, so she rejected it, along with her entire life at the time — she separated from her husband in 1888, feeling that doing so was necessary for her mental health. She then wrote a short story about the rest cure called “The Yellow Wallpaper,” which can be found online here. It’s a first-person account of a descent into madness as the result of Dr. Weir’s cure, and ends with a scene that is genuinely demented, in the literal sense of the term. 

The story is considered an early feminist classic, and Gilman became an activist for women’s causes, which this exhibit addresses. It glosses over some of Gilman’s sketchier qualities — her views on immigration, as an example, would have made her a popular speaker at a contemporary Tea Party rally. but, then, this is a museum of medicine, not of politics, and Gilman was among the first people to offer both an insider’s look at severe depression and the failings of medicine, which, in her time, was less a science than a fiction, invented out of whole cloth and then never tested for effectiveness, and the best one could hope for from a doctor was at least a halfway decent cocktail he had invented while seeking a cure for ennui.

Durham neighborhood hit hard by tornado

DURHAM — A Durham couple watched Wednesday from inside a hallway in their house on the 8800 block of Durnell Drive as a tornado passed overhead and a large aluminum roof zoomed past their property.

Gary Nordstrom and his wife, Sheri Berger, saw the trees in the next-door orchard pulled from the ground and snapped with a “bam.” Nordstrom was worried about his wife and projectiles slamming through his windows. the couple and their home escaped harm.

“It was a real experience to see the power of Mother Nature and be safe while doing it,” he said.

A length of their wooden fence fell over at once with a few yards of pickets being peeled and flipped like popsicle sticks, Nordstrom said Thursday, standing on top of his fence.

  • PHOTO GALLERY of the events

“The visual of what we were seeing was all-consuming,” he said. “It wasn’t a noise, it was a, ‘Look at that.’ “

Pieces of an outdoor table were strewn on their property and in the orchard. the wind bent corn stalks in their backyard, but didn’t take artichokes off their stems. he has yet to find a few panes from his greenhouse.

“I said it last night and I’ll always say it, we dodged a bullet,” Nordstrom said.

Nordstrom heard somebody is missing a tractor, he said.

“A tractor has gotta come down,” he said.

The family’s four outdoor cats scattered, but all returned, he said.

“I think we were fortunate we weren’t in the middle of that point that took out all the orchards,” Berger said.

Neighbor Kelly Hernandez said her family didn’t hear a tornado warning, but when the French doors blew open on their house on the 2300 block of Hanlon Road, “that’s when we realized something unusual was happening.” the family, along with their two dogs, hunkered down in the bathroom.

The tornado pushed a tree into the facade of the house and threw branches across their yard. the wind closed the tailgate on their pickup truck but didn’t damage their cars.

Both Hernandez and Nordstrom spoke to their insurance agents first thing Thursday.

Nordstrom said he moved out to Durham for the peace he enjoys with just four neighbors.

“All four of ‘em last night showed up to see if I was OK,” Nordstrom said. “Every one of ‘em got hit.”

Best Compact Table Saw – DEWALT DW745 10-Inch Job-Site Table Saw

DEWALT DW745 10-Inch Compact Job-Site Table Saw with 16-Inch Max Rip Capacity

I decided to ask a neighbor, who is a specialist constructor who operates using table saws on a daily basis, to detail his opinions on each model. The information was in fact of such fine quality that I chose to publish the reports in order that they might give guidance to other prospective buyers.

When table saws are discussed, most of us think of DEWALT; and their particular DW745 10-Inch Compact Job-Site Table Saw is definitely a great illustration of the reason for that. The DEWALT DW745 Table Saw is sold with a wide selection of features and due to it selling at this sort of low price it is without a doubt a true bargain.

If you find the evaluation on the DEWALT DW745 Table Saw or additional facts on this site interesting, be sure to leave a comment.

Product highlights of the DEWALT DW745 16-inch Table Saw:

  • Better value than alternative products
  • The 16-inch of rip will easily cuts a variety of larger shelving and trim materials
  • Excellent, robust and safe design
  • Rack and pinion fence rails make fence give fast and accurate adjustments
  • Made by a trusted brand
  • Highly portable – only 45 pounds and the telescopic fence rails retract
  • 3,850 rpm, 15 Amp motor quickly rips through hardwoods with ease
  • Table saw blade can be adjusted 0 – 45 degrees for beveled applications
  • More durability provided by the metal roll cage base

Straight from the box the DEWALT DW745 Table Saw is a great saw. What most people don’t realize is that if you just spend an hour or so aligning everything you can turn it into the best in its class. Not only that, it will cut as well as a $6000 cabinet saw. This isn’t to say that you can’ use it straight away, but if you are a perfectionist, these addition adjustments can make all the difference.

Good Alignment Turns the DEWALT DW745 Table Saw into a $6000 Tool

So how do you go about setting up the DEWALT DW745 Table Saw? first of all use a TS aligner to check all the main alignments. It is well known that Dewalt uses good quality bearings so the runout is good. But with any new table saw there might be a number of other small inaccuracies, which on their own are alright but can add up to a few thousands of an inch when put together. these inaccuracies might include slot-parallelism, arbor run-out, blade-alignment, fence alignment and so on.

It only takes about an hour of checking and measuring, but the dial indicator on the TS aligner will help you to get everything perfect. there is no secret, it is just that this is a table saw with good bearings and a design that makes it easy to make adjustments. It only takes an hour or so and since you have to assemble the table saw anyway, the additional time is not a problem.

Please don’t be put off by these adjustments. as I stated it’s good to go and it is already the best on the market from the box. It’s just that the quality of the DEWALT means that once you make these adjustments you will have the most perfect table saw you can get!

Cuts Repeatably and Reliably

So what sort of cuts can you expect from your DEWALT DW745 Table Saw. well mitered molding and trim, custom cabinets that require exact cuts and so on, the uses are limitless. in addition after using the TS Aligner, the noise-level will be lower and blades will stay sharp much longer, which will in turn increase the lifetime of the saw.

You will be able to make cuts repeatably and reliably so that the DEWALT DW745 Table Saw will have paid for itself in no time. you will be wasting less wood, the blades will last longer and the motor will run cooler.

DEWALT DW745 Table Saw Overview

Having discussed the merits, let’s see what you get in the box. The DEWALT 10-Inch Jobsite Table Saw has the Site-Pro Modular Guarding System for application-specific setups that result in quick, accurate cuts. a powerful 15 amp high-torque motor delivers no-load speed of 3,850 rpm and combines with the large 16-inch rip capacity to give optimum performance and versatility. The saw comes with blade guards, a push stick, a miter gauge, and a 10-inch, 24-tooth carbide blade. as well as providing a large rip capacity, a maximum cut depth of 3-1/8 inches at 90 degrees and 2-1/4 inches at 45 degrees can be obtained.

Weighing in at just 45 pounds, this DEWALT table saw is truly portable and along with the folding stand makes for an easy set-up and tear down. The handy 2-1/2-inch dust collection port means you can use a Shop-Vac for dust extraction giving you a cleaner work area.…Find out more

Table Saw Reviews Dewalt DW745 Rating:

DEWALT DW745 Table Saw Price

See How much you can Save Today:

Technical Specification:

Length: 22.8 inchesWidth: 23.5 inchesHeight: 18.75 inchesWeight: 53.80 pounds

Man with his arm resting on a large table saw blade

Image by The Field Museum Library

Unidentified man with his arm resting on a large table saw blade. his occupation is woods filer. 1910.

Name of Expedition: Huron H. Smith Expedition to OregonParticipants: Huron H. SmithExpedition start Date: 1910Expedition End Date: 1911Purpose or Aims: Collecting Botany specimens, taking portraits of treesLocation: Palmer, Oregon, U.S.a., North America

Original material: 5×7 glass negativeDigital Identifier: CSB32986

Related Table Saws Products

Searching for Table Saws Using Reviews

Most wood workers use of table saws. The many reviews will assist you to find the numerous sorts of table saws that you’re in a position to uncover useful to create use of. these table saws are outstanding for cutting wood in a variety of techniques. You’ll uncover numerous sized table saws. Most of these will have been made by well acknowledged manufactures like DeWalt, Stihl, Delta, Incra and many others.

To acquire most likely probably the most benefit from the reviews you ought to read at least a variety of numerous sorts of critiques. to acquire a wide scope of info you’ll uncover articles by past clients. these people will let you know of their experiences even though utilizing table saws of numerous brands.

You’re in a position to uncover other reviews which have been done by experts within the company. from these critiques you’ll uncover the specifications for the many numerous table saws. The fantastic elements and also the poor elements will most likely be noted down. The reviews will for most likely probably the most component reveal how these tools will perform in a variety of situations that people are acknowledged to create use of them for.

When you are reading these reviews you ought to look for details of recalled or problematic table saws. as buying these saws will trigger you significantly much more problems it’s generally extremely very best to know what these problems are…Read More

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