Europe
"On Scarlet Fever"
There are many fevers listed as the cause of death in early modern England that do not translate well into modern diseases (worm, spotted, pining, nervous) but scarlet fever is still with us. The Puritan Dr.
Lady Mary Wortley Montagu on Small Pox in Turkey
Lady Mary Wortley Montagu (1689-1762) was the wife of the British Ambassador to Turkey. In 1715 she had survived but been terribly scarred by smallpox while her brother had died from the disease.
Decameron
Giovanni Boccaccio provided the most famous description of what happened during the Black Death in Italy.
Indian Tales of the Great Ones
Born in 1870 into a Parsee family in India, Cornelia Sorabji (1870–1954) became a writer and a lawyer. By the end of the Victorian period, many elite Indian men had traveled to Britain to study.
Letters of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu
The following are excerpts from the letters of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu (1689-1762), a noted English essayist and one of the earliest advocates of women’s rights.
The Whole Duty of Woman
The following selection comes from a late 17th-century English advice book for women.
Swaddled Children Terra Cotta Bas-Reliefs
These images of swaddled infants come from a series of 10 glazed terra cotta bas-reliefs known as the "bambini." Andrea della Robbia sculpted them between 1463 and 1466 to adorn the Ospedale degli Innocenti, or Foundling Hospital, in Florence, Italy.
Paleolithic Finger Flutings Cave Drawing
This image from Chamber A1 of Rouffignac Cave was created by a young girl we posit to be between four and five years old from her height and the places in the cave where she has chosen to make her flutings.
Facial Recognition Manual
If they wanted to keep out spies, security personnel on both sides of the Berlin Wall had to become sophisticated readers of facial features.
Berlin Wall Trabant
This painting by Birgit Kinder is on a segment of the Berlin Wall that was on the east bank of the Spree River that separated portions of East and West Berlin.