“Most hostage takers do not begin their day planning to kill someone and then die in a hail of bullets. They are usually focused on getting their demands met. In a small number of cases, a suicidal individual purposefully holds hostages and seeks a confrontation with the clear intention of dying at the hands of the police. These rare cases are classified as “suicides by cop.”
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“them. Through most of medical history, doctors happily steered clear of incontinence, with folk medicine filling the vacuum. People ate roast pig penis sandwiches topped with buttered horse dung and stuck frogs to their kids’ waists. Mice seem to have been a universal remedy; in disparate cultures all over the world, people had them fried, boiled, baked into pancakes, and worn around the neck.”
― Strange Medicine: A Shocking History of Real Medical Practices Through the Ages
― Strange Medicine: A Shocking History of Real Medical Practices Through the Ages
“A doctor would tie a leech to some silk thread and lower it down his patient’s throat. When the leech became heavy with blood, he’d reel it in like a fish. To bleed a man’s testicles, doctors often applied, over the course of several days, a hundred or more leeches.”
― Strange Medicine: A Shocking History of Real Medical Practices Through the Ages
― Strange Medicine: A Shocking History of Real Medical Practices Through the Ages
“According to official Soviet statistics submitted to the World Health Organization in the 1970s, virtually every imaginable infectious disease was on the decline or had disappeared, thanks to communist policies. It was widely believed in international health circles at the time that these statistics were wholly fabricated. 9”
― The Coming Plague: Newly Emerging Diseases in a World Out of Balance
― The Coming Plague: Newly Emerging Diseases in a World Out of Balance
“By the seventh century, eminent physicians were arguing over the best cure for lovesickness. All agreed, however, that keeping the brain sufficiently moist was absolutely critical. To achieve the desired humidity, doctors would force a lovesick man to smell the menstrual cloth of his beloved or inhale the stinking embers of her burned feces.”
― Strange Medicine: A Shocking History of Real Medical Practices Through the Ages
― Strange Medicine: A Shocking History of Real Medical Practices Through the Ages
The Year of Reading Proust
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2013 was the year for reading—or re-reading—Marcel Proust's À la recherche du temps perdu or In Search of Lost Time for many of us. However, these th ...more
Tatiana’s 2025 Year in Books
Take a look at Tatiana’s Year in Books, including some fun facts about their reading.
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