A Daily History of Holes, Dots, Lines, Science, History, Math, Physics, Art, the Unintentional Absurd, Architecture, Maps, Data Visualization, Blank and Missing Things, and so on. |1.6 million words, 7500 images, 4.9 million hits| Press & appearances in The Times, Le Figaro, Mensa, The Economist, The Guardian, Discovery News, Slate, Le Monde, Sci American Blogs, Le Pont, and many other places… 5000+ total posts since 2008.

Author: JF Ptak

  • The History of Dots 6: the Kingly Dot of Copernicus, 1543

    JF Ptak Science Books LLC  Post 556

    “Diligent
    reader, in this new work you have the motions of the fixed stars and planets,
    reconstituted from ancient as well as recent observations, and embellished by
    new and marvelous hypotheses.

    Therefore buy, read, and enjoy this work.”  –Title
    page of
    The Revolutions of the Celestial
    Orbs
    ,by Nicolaus
    (Koppernigk) Copernicus,1566 (second edition)

    Slim is the history of published books where authors directly beseech people–right on the title page–to buy their book.  But such is the case with the De revolutionibus orbium coelestium, which, when published, finally, in 1543, ushered in a new era of scientific explanation–it was perhaps the very beginning of what could be called “modern” science.  And the centerpiece of it all was a fine little dot that was the symbol of our sun.  It is also a little unusual that the standard symbol of the sun was presented so, even at this relatively early date for printing scientific treatises, as the sun was more often than not presented with the standard flaming circumference and human face.  (Earlier in this blog I made a word map of the first ten chapters of De revolutionibus.)

    Copernicus2
    Copernicus
    But the simplicity of the representation of the sun falls quite clearly within the author’s tendency of directness an plain speech.  He presented his theory with ease and a calm matter-of-factness (which included 100 pages of tables, and 20,000 tabulated numbers) which, considering it was overturning an entire world view and threatening a basic tenant of the church, was pretty astonishing.  It was actually quietly shocking at the time, both in how the theory was presented and how it was received.

    Copernicus states very simply that “the author of this work has done nothing to cause blame” in his revolutionary work.  He also states in the preface that he is not the first to work on the sun as the center of the solar system (and universe),  citing for example Philolaus the Pythagorean, Lysis and others. And he also widely recognizes that there was much more to come in the future, much in the line of the way of one of the very last lines of Kepler’s Harmonia:  “there is still much more beyond”.  

    Copernicus certainly did not stand for disagreement with his work, as he thought that anyone invested with a certain amount of mathematical knowledge could in no way disagree with him simple as that.  I quote a rather lengthy bit from the  early stages of the book:

    “Perhaps there will be babblers who claim to be judges of astronomy
    although completely ignorant of the subject and, badly distorting some
    passage of Scripture to their purpose, will dare to find fault with my
    undertaking and censure it. I disregard them even to the extent of
    despising their criticism as unfounded. For it is not unknown that
    Lactantius, otherwise an illustrious writer but hardly an astronomer,
    speaks quite childishly about the Earth’s shape, when he mocks those
    who declared that the Earth has the form of a globe. Hence scholars
    need not be surprised if any such persons will likewise ridicule me.
    Astronomy is written for astronomers.”

    But so much has been written about this fantastic book that I’ll not go
    into it here.  All I want to point out here in my tiny way is the
    urgency and importance of the solar dot–a simple representation of the
    sun, replacing the place of the earth in the primordial soup of the
    solar system, the very fabric of the  construction of the universe.

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  • The Microscopy of Boredom

    JF Ptak Science Books LLC  Post 555

    “Contrive to have as many treats
    for your mind as you can, as many things to which it can fly from itself”  
    Sam.
    Johnson.   (James Boswell, Ominous Years, pg. 287

     blog 20 point missed717
    Boredom is a powerful thing.  It is also, at least as a word if not as a
    concept, relatively young—it first appeared in Dicken’s Bleak House in 1852,
    with the word bore making an earlier appearance in 1762. (Bitter Ambrose Bierce
    redefines “bore” as a person who speaks when you wish them to listen.)  Boredom is distinct from Melancholy, which
    relates more to depression than to boredom, and is an idea and word thousands
    of years old.  Boredom is a universal
    constant, a wide acknowledged entity of enormous reach and singular acuity—and the
    fact of the matter is that you cannot translate boredom into a narrative.  You can create art depicting boredom, and you
    can tell what boredom is, but you cannot, really, cannot write a novel with a
    boredom narrative.  Unless you’re Jane
    Austen.  It is a tired pursuit of
    tireless insipidity which simply escapes capture in the form of a novel—or I
    should say, a novel that you’d like to read, or was readable.  Boredom still awaits its Quixote.  Melancholy on the other hand has many, not
    the least of which is one of the most unreadable and fascinating books in the
    canons of English lit, Burton’s
    Anatomy of Melancholy (which would be an interesting film if another Burton,
    Tim, got his hands on it.).

    I was thinking about boredom in
    terms of some of the printed material  in
    my Naïve Surreal category—those are the pamphlets where the meanings of their
    titles and subjects, once popular in their day, are now aloof and unhinged,
    floating in the present with almost no bearing on what their original logical
    intent was.  And so these titles
    sometimes take on a fantastically removed appearance, and sometimes they are
    simply simple, so simple that they can be at first blush quite boring.  But they’re boring only for a moment, until
    the brain wraps itself around the illogic of them, and then they become not
    boring—fascinating, someti blog 20 donj't716mes.  And what
    is that tiny space between the wide widths of boredom and fascination?  How microscopic are those pores between the
    two entities? And what exactly is that place where boredom and fascination meet?  

    We Think a Point Has Been Missed (published in March, 1933) is an odd example, going from boring to puzzling to incredible to disappointing to interesting all in about a minute.  It is a lovely title to be sure, flying at the heights of the sublime mundane, hiding in its own obvious nature.  Opening the booklet we find that it was published by the Columbia Broadcasting System, and at first blush it seems a fainting on miniature problems of the naiscent radio company.  But it turns out that it is actually fairly topical:  CBS wanted to make it very clear that the eight-minute radio broadcast of President Roosevelt on  March 4th 1933* was a significant and exceptional use of the new medium,  CBS points out that “Roosevelt did advertising’s most significant job…advertising ‘courage” and “conquered despair”, and that those eight minutes  over the radio “added cash value of the nation….commodity markets pulsated, dollars rose around the world, demand for department store credit rose 40 percent”.  In short, this was an early recognition of the extreme value of immediate access to a national population.  

    The Roosevelt speech, which went without quotation in this short report, was his inaugural address, the day of his taking the reigns from Herbert Hoover–the “All  we have to fear is fear itself” speech, which did indeed galvanize the nation, delivered virtually immediately via radio. (“God bless Roosevelt; god bless radio” intoned Will Rogers.)   It is one of the country’s best inaugural speeches, made at a time when the country needed one, there in the depths of the Great Depression in the late winter of 1933.  But all of this is so far down in this slender seven-page book that the speech almost smokily wisps its way through it, the main emphasis being the importance of the delivery system and not the stuff of delivery.  Its a queer little thing, all of its importances semi-hidden, made more pronounced in this particular copy since it was owned by Roosevelt.  

    The second example or boring-interesting is the ultra-under compelling Don’t, which when published in 1926 threatened directions for advising improprieties in conduct and common errors of speech.  Written by “Censor”, it dragged itself through 76 pages of nitty dialog details that are in a way interesting as a window on correct conduct during the roaring times.  Ultimately though the text doesn’t survive interest, and all we’re left with is the very unusual title. 

    Which takes us back to appearances and second-life and the intersection of boredom and the fantastic.  I suspect that if we apply the microscope to that boundary that we see exactly what we want to see.

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  • Bad Ideas Department: Children, Tall Ladders and Bees

    JF Ptak Science Books LLC  Post 554

     blog 19 children714
    From the Bad Ideas Department, and from the deeper/further “what the hell!?: sub-department, comes this bizarre offering.  I don’t know what the photographer or writer or publisher or whomever was thinking–or, for that matter, what the graphics department was doing, when they put this photo on the cover of this skimpy children’s rag, inducing an automatic cringe respond from any thinking person. The Child in Nature, Studies in Visualization is a mystery–what were these people thinking, or trying to think, or visualize? (And let me just point out that this was a “happy” book, not an Aesopian tale of possible woe and lessons-to-be-learned-the-hard-way book.) There is a picture on the inside of the result of this activity, but the swollen-up eye of the finger-poking child was just too much to bear, and so I just couldn’t possibly publish it.  Released by the Expression Company (?) of Boston in 1939, I would hope that those responsible have gone on to receive their appropriate rewards. 

    Its just shockingly, stupidly,  stupid.

     blog 19 children715

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  • What Pictures Tell Us: Medieval Treatment of Women in a Renaissance World

    JF Ptak Science Books LLC  Post 553

     blog 19 obst chair711
    There are all sorts of famous seats:  seats of wisdom, of power, of lameness, of government, of discontent, of honor, of learning, of war; there’s the hot seat, the best and worst seats, a seat on the board, a seat on the bench, a seat at the bar; there are captain’s chairs, endowed chairs, and famous chairs (like architectural gems/mules of Mackintosh, Wright, Saarinen, van der Rohe, Eames, Gehry, LeCorbu) and famous seats (at the original Yankee stadium or a Roman coliseum).  The seat pictured at left, though, is anonymous and lonely, but it is full of a story. 

    Sometimes one discrete, odd image can tell you a lot of history or the story of its time:  It might seem simple and benign, but once you stop to think about it just  little, an entirely different story can emerge.  Take for example this woodcut from Jacob Rueff’s De conceptu et generatione hominis, et iis quae circa haeac potyissimum consuderantur (in six books), published in Zurich by Christoph Froschauer in 1554.  It looks like it might be a seat straight out of an old WC, but it is actually a birthing  blog 19 obst astrolog712chair.  And it doesn’t look particularly inviting (or not threatening) for the tasks to come; and such was the state-
    of-the-art of birthing children in 1554.  Well, earlier than that, really, because Rueff’s work was an improved version of a still earlier work by Rosslin (Der swangern frauen). I look at this chair/seat, and I think,  “oh dear god”, even with an historian’s sensibilities, knowing full well that it hadn’t been changed much for hundreds of years prior to this publication.  There’s quite a bit in this book’s 66 illustration to excite the historian of medicine, some of which are rather beautiful and demanding, like this astrological representation of anatomy (at right).  But it is still the chair in all of these pictures that is the most powerful to me. When all of the medical advancements and distractions were boiled away, and the discussion of the two types of foreceps was eliminated, it all came down to a woman in an uncomfortable, stiff-backed straight-up chair.   A chair with no cushion or throw or anything of any sort for the comfort of the woman, though there was an extensive dust ruffle flanking it.  And as great as the advancements were in medicine in the first part of the  16th century, dealing with women in labor was still a Medieval practice.

    I should also point out that the Rueff book, as old as it was, was reprinted, translated, into English with many of its ideas riding out time intact, published in London eight decades later.  The chair was still there. 


  • Bizarre & Naive Surreal Book Titles: Sex, God, Food, and Clean (and Colorful) Blood

    JF Ptak Science Books LLC  Post 552

     blog 12 titles bizarre diet688
    Continuing a minor thread on bizarre and spectacularly mundane book titles comes today’s entries on the various uses of “sex” in finding high-ideal  religion and a proper waistline. Harry Haas had a very simple answer to sex (a concept that I was frankly surprised to see described in three words):”low cultural sex instincts” lead to “low cultural levels”, the reverse evidently never entering the writer’s mind.  Sex “was not a moral issue”, but an instinct “which like other instincts must be satisfied in one way or another”. It is also “Nature’s unscientific way of propagating the human races–the pre-logical and instinctive, the animal way”.  He asks the reader “why do some of us read these risque publications if they are so degrading? Tobacco Road and various other pornographic diversions, I mean “[sic]. Mr. Haas doesn’t know, but he does believe that the sex problem was vast, “a modifying agent in our personality growth” which “is responsible for an enormous amount of neurosis (and) seen to be at the bottom of the world’s greatest achievements”.  This leads of course to babies “blind, crippled and diseased and mentally hopeless–all of which find their common origin in sex troubles, feelings processes or chemical changes.  Probably nine-tenths of our anxieties, if not the major cause of world unrest, can be traced back to sex”. Mr. Haas then gets to his major and remarkably scarce question:  “could it be that the writers and interpolators o blog 12 titles bizarre diet689f the Bible were themselves unconsciously afflicted with sex troubles?”  He then takes this issue far and wide, and frankly by this point everything got so muddied and biblical that I just lost interest.  But the title is still good enough to stand firm and true, even if the the author didn’t get to an answer, except to suggest that you purchase his pamphlet on the  psychoanalysis of  the bible–it was available for one dollar, postpaid, and had something to do with Albert Einstein.  He published this booklet on his own  in Orangeburg, S.C., in 1941, while the world was hell bent on some religico-sex-fueled instinct war.

    Ernst J. Stevens (“Chromo-dietician and Expert Human Analyst”) let loose his spongy  Nulife Sex-Diet Book III of the Social Science Series (Illustrated) in 1934–it is one of that class of books that doesn’t look right, doesn’t feel right, and smells a little like it spent too long lost under the cushion of a chair in a bad place.  His book is a hopeless melange of shrinko-babble, blood coloring and therapeutic color use wrapped around dietary “laws” of dubious value.  Having dispensed with 10 chapters in 15 pages, Dr. Stevens takes on “Color, Music, Taste and Skin Odors” after having established a priority in “colors in our flesh, colors in our thoughts and colors in our foods” and their connects to color balance and blood cleansing skin beautifiers.  That sounds like a lot to deal with in 15 five-inch-tall pages, but that’s the least of it–the true metier of the book was also woven through everywhere, the messages of vim and vigor and health sense and mixing of the sexes colliding at every level with everything else.  It is a powerhouse display of some sort of need that I cannot identify.  The title, of course, is super. 

     

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  • Legislating a Change in Pi Day (3.14): When 3.2 was “Almost” Pi, Indiana, 1897

    JF Ptak Science Books  Post 550

    Pi movie poster


    The issue of establishing scientific validity and fact through political and religious machinations, rumination, fascinations and condemnations has a grindingly used, odd history, and little of it comes to much of a good end.  Usually it is just a bad idea, or a wronger-than-bad stinkingly non-idea; that, or something with a sickening wiff of eau de maison funeral perfumery.  I’m not so sure about whether anyone has legislated that a point in space exists, or that non-Euclidean stuff is twisted, or that the world (as in “Earth”) began precisely at 11:11 am (?!) on the first day of the first week of the first month of the first year 4004 BCE.  Biological matters have been taken more seriously in the legislature and courts, at least in my country, than stuff in physics and math—the meaning of death has more or less been legislated, while the whole issue of sustainable “human” life has been battered around for decades (with the last administration’s elephantine approach to things like stem cell research now just being lifted following eight years of abuse).  Many examples begin to emerge when looking deeper into the history of science, especially with the influence of the churches, hammering evidently tender belief systems on top of scientific endeavors.

    The issue with mathematics and the law seems mostly limited to weights and measures and time, which is logical; I’m not so sure about the more ethereal stuff, except for the very famous example of the Indiana pi debacle of 1897.  It was in this that the solemn state legislature was nearly hoodwinked by an amateur semi-mathematician, crank and number cruncher named Edwin Goodwin, who persuaded the people who need to persuaded and had a bill* introduced in the Indiana General Assembly—it basically established that the value of pi be set at 3.2   t his makes not too much sense until you realize that the only good that could come of this tripe is to use it in one of a never ending series of attempts at squaring the circle. 

    The bill of course almost made it all the way through—it started life in the place where it should’ve ended, in the Committee on Swamp Lands, and then blazed its way through Education and eventually passed unanimously by the Indiana house.  Had it not been for the serendipitous acuity of Purdue professor C.A. Waldo—who alerted the state senators about its humbug nature, where the bill was finally shuttled into its everlasting postponement….in the Committee on Temperance. 

     

    *A Bill for an act introducing a new mathematical truth and offered as a contribution to education to be used only by the State of Indiana free of cost by paying any royalties whatever on the same, provided it is accepted and adopted by the official action of the Legislature of 1897.

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  • History of the Future: Electric Balloons, Tethered Eagles and an 18th century Space Station

    JF  Ptak Science Books LLC  Post 549

    The prehistory of heavier than air flight is loaded with some fantastic ideas, some just generally fantastical and some prescient, or recognizably prescient from some advanced point in the idea’s future.  There was an immediate and relatively massive published reaction to the Montgolfier brothers’ first balloon ascension in June 1783, much of which was useful and applicable, some of which was interesting if not practicable, and a little of which was just deeply problematic, not very considered, and all-around wrong–overall, it was interesting thinking, thinking about this brand-new issue, people trying to get their heads around new concepts and answering them with new- and not-so-new-thinking. 

     blog 16 electric balloon704
     blog 16 eagles705

    One lovely pre-Montgolfier  example of fantastical thinking was Louis Guillaume de la Folie’s  (1733-1780) La Philosophe sans Pretension, ou l’homme rare…, published in Paris in 1775.  La Folie’s fictionall adventure is an example of early science-y sci-fi, coming as it did in the midst of the fabulous electric age of the mid-18th century.  He tells the story of a Mercurian, Ormisias, who by his own trivial care winds up flying a chariot fitted with electric balloons from Mercury to Earth.  This was more believable than previous works on space flight, which saw the vehicles powered by whirlwinds, fireworks, horses, beasts, catapults and (hello Johannes Kepler!) demons. 

    An example of the very charming and not effectual peep-into-the-future approach to modifying the Montgolfier effort  was by Jakob Kaiserer, who in 1801 published his Ueber Meine Erfindung, einen Luftballoon durch Adler zu regieren. Kaiserer, a bookseller, confronted the issue of steering, featuring s aero-craft by using a pair of tethered eagles.  His was a picturesque

    Montgolfier

    answer to the steering and propulsion issue, meant in a way to be taken seriously, and was not really too far from the ordinary offering.  (Kaiserer really was thinking, because he also had a spare pair of eagles in the gondola, waiting to replace those in flight when exhausted.)  Leashed birds wind up in a number of designs over the years to come, not to mention bird-inspired flying machines designed to function as a bird, the most famous example of which was piloted by Otto Lilienthal to his death.)

    A more prescient image  was the wonderful flying observation platform shown in Sur son projet de voyager avec la sphere aerostatique de M. de Montgolfier, published in Paris (“Aeropolis, chez Zephirolin”) in 1783.  (The images I’m using at left and below are  from the Lilly Library.) It is perhaps the first such suggestion in print of such a device–the balloon is powered by “dense air” which is evidently being pumped by the four men at the air pump in the foreground, and is host to a myriad of scientific activities, not the least of which is the astronomer and his large telescope.  It really is a remarkable effort, looking into the future of possibilities for the spanking-new invention of flight.  A space station it is not, but it was certainly within the realm of the possible, and for its time must’ve seemed like an impossible bit of fancy brought very close to reality.Aeropolis

    (This image reminds me of Honore Daumier’s 1862 caricature of Nadar “elevating photography to the condition of art”.) Nadar’s issue here is not only using photography from an elevated platform, but is also using the camera as a tool, and not an artistic element.)

    Nadar


  • The History of Missing and Blank Things #35: The Disappeared Solids of Johannes Kepler

    JF Ptak Science Books LLC    Post 548

    (Continuing the thread on a History of Blank and Empty Things…)

    Spheres_Euclids5solidsKepler
    The great Joahnnes Kepler, conceived at 4:27 on the morning
    of his parents’ holy joining, was raised a disagreeable boy by disagreeable parents,
    and that in spite of being supremely gifted, mutually dependent on his
    hypochondria, intellect, and astrology. 
    He was perhaps one of the dozen most influential scientists of the last
    500 years, and had an over-assuming and awful disposition.  

    The man who brought about the final loosening of religion’s grasp
    on astronomy and the development of cosmology had a difficult time in his childhood,
    sounding lonely and exiled.  His father was
    irritable and irritating, but his mother, described by some as garrulous and quarrelsome
    and of a “vile disposition”, seems to have been in a class by herself, and left
    an indelible mark in her son.  The full
    truth of Kepler’s mother was that if you described her as being like  a ”witch”, you may have been correct:  the old woman, at 74, after years of being
    suspected of being a witch, was arrested, finally, and hauled away under this
    suspicion.  In a posthumously-published
    work called Somnulum, Kepler himself writes of his mother as being in contact
    with devils from the Moon (among many other things).  His childhood left a long shadow on his
    social life.

    It is remarkable to note his nearly alphabetical diatribe on
    his schoolday associates; I’m not o sure how you leave behind ideas and feeling
    like this later in life, and I suppose that you don’t.   It has nothing to do with his development as
    a scientific icon, but I

    He rattles off his chums as follows:

    “Holp openly detested me and on two occasions we got into
    fist fights….

    Molitor dislike me because I betrayed him…

    Kollin didn’t hate me, but I hated him…

    Braunbaum turned from friend to foe because of my
    boisterousness…

    Huldenbach became hostile because of my rash accusations…

    Seifer disliked because everyone disliked him…

    Kleber detested me because he thought I was a rival…

    Redstock was ticked off whenever someone praised my
    abilities…

    Husel tried to block my progress…

    Between Dauber and myself there was quite a jealousy…

    Lorhard would have nothing to do with me….

    After Jaeger had lied to me I was insulted for two years…

    The rector became my enemy because I did not accord him
    sufficient honor…

    Murr became my enemy because I reprimanded him…”

    And on and on.  Kind
    of incredible if you ask me, but from this did greatness come. 

    On the way to restructuring the universe with his Harmonicae mundi and Epitome astronomiae, Kepler made a first
    abbreviated stop in his Mysterium Cosmographicum—it was an interesting work, but
    as substantial as it was it had as many flaws. 
    Galileo received a copy, and wrote politely back, but was very guarded
    in his opinion of the work.  Part of the
    problem was Kepler’s sustained interest in his astrological callings; another
    part came with his great reverence.  He
    thought that god was perfect, and that the universe he created as perfect, and
    so it all could be explained perfectly with a perfect method, which in this
    case was geometrical.  Explaining the proportions
    between the sun and its planets, Kepler devised a system in which spheres and
    squares and other objects were described within one another, separating the planets
    via distances determined by their points of contact.  It wasn’t a winning system, but it did abide
    the Copernican system, even as his forms disappeared into nothingness..  Kepler went on to
    bigger and greater things.

     Einstein, who much admired Kepler, said of the man: “[He]
    was one of the few who are simply incapable of doing anything but stand up
    openly for their convictions in every field.” 

     


  • A History of Missing Dots: Donne’s (Missing) Discovery of Platelets, 1842

    JF Ptak Science Books LLC  Post 547Blog 13 donne detail

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    Alfred Donne (1801-1878), physician, experimenter, microscopist and photographer, is best known for things other than what he should probably be best known for:  his discovery of the third element of the blood, platelets.  Donne had a wonderful vision, and was among the very first on the scene to write about and employ the spectacular invention of the daguerreotype in chemistry and microscopy.  As a matter of fact Donne, along with his collaborator Leon Foucault,  produced the very first engraved images of photomicrographs for his cytology paper of 1840. (He was also the first to use electricity in producing a medical illustration, and was among the first modern physicians to write on the great efficacy of mothers using their own milk in breast feeding their children.)  The discovery of platelets paper of 1842*–preceding two other works published in the same year–does indeed identify the new object, but actually fails to make a methodological examination of the new body, calling the new units “globulins du chyle” (or small globules
    derived from plasma).  He also fails to make a drawing of what he saw; so, the combination of these two important elements asked the reader to accept his findings on faith, the tools of reproduction of his observations not being present.  And so we remember Donne for some other significant things, na dless so for his lightly-interpreted and un-illustrated “dots”.

    *Donne, Alfred. De l’origine des globules du sang, de leur mode de formation et de leur fin. Comptes rendus de l’Académie des Sciences, Paris, 1842, 14: 366-168. 

    (Overall the history of the
    discovery of platelets is convoluted: 
    Leewenhoek (1675) and Henson (1782)  were the first to fully describe the “undefined”
    particles of the blood; Donne’s work was then more fully described by Beale in
    1850, and then again (identified as “small corpuscles” by Zimmerman in 1860 and
    then again by Schultze in 1874 and Laptschinski (also in 1874). William Osler
    then enters the scene in 1880, followed by Giulio Bizzozzero who was the
    first, in the years 1881 -1882, to establish central role of platelets
    not only in physiological haemostasis, but also in thrombosis.  Anyway it is a longish and not-clear
    history.)

    .


  • Baroque X-Ray of the Soul: Jacob Boehme’s “Psychologia”, 1632

    JF Ptak Science Books LLC  Post 546

    0 abay feb 23 boehme622This solar-systemesque plan of the human soul appeared in Johannes Werdenhagen’s translation of  the expansive Jakob Boehme’s Psychologia [graece] vera I[oanni] B[oemi] T[eutonici] XL quaestionibus explicata, printed in Amsterdam in 1632.  Boehme’s (1575-1624)  original work waited for 8 years following his death to appear in print in any form, fearing during his lifetime that perhaps some retribution for his barrier bending work might find him–and it turns out to have been true, as this book (and the only one of Boehme’s subsequently published works) made its way onto the Roman Index in 1633.  Boehme was a mystical panthesist and psychic who blended the Kabbbalah,  Valentin Weigel, Paracelsus and the Bible in doses wide and narrow, finding his own advanced-Lutheran voice in works concerned with sin, evil and redemption, populated with angels and grace and on and on, in a world view far-reaching and way to complex to go into here. 

    Part of that philosophy is displayed in this map of the soul, found in Psychologia–it would’ve been fairly impenetrable to me had I not found an English translation (below) of the image, published in Forty Questions Concerning the Soule in 1655. 

    I thought that I was going to try to make a summary of the map, but, honestly, it is too just involved and intertwined and complex to do this quickly, so I’ll just let whoever cares to have a go at it under their own steam.  I will point out that the major geographical feature here is the cross at center, which is actually Christ’s crucifix and the great delineator of the system of the soul. But this is a gross simplification of the work of an unschooled man who rose to be a cobbler before compiling his remarkable set of ideas.  I’ve included a few explanations of the 63 items incorporated in the map–it is a difficult go, particularly since this was part of only the first of the forty questions addressed in the book. 

    Zzz--boehme

    Zzz--boehme xray
     

    *Another example of Boehme’s style of writing:
    “For he that will say, I have a Will, and would willingly do Good,
    but the earthly Flesh which I carry about me, keepeth me back, so that
    I cannot; yet I shall be saved by Grace, for the Merits of Christ. I
    comfort myself with his Merit and Sufferings; who will receive me of
    mere Grace, without any Merits of my own, and forgive me my Sins
    .
    Such a one, I say, is like a Man that knoweth what Food is good for his
    Health, yet will not eat of it, but eateth Poison instead thereof, from
    whence Sickness and Death, will certainly follow