Hernández-Sáenz on Mexican Healers

The His­tory of Health and Medi­cine Sem­inar series wel­comed Luz Maria Hernández-Sáenz today, who presen­ted the lively story of Dona Maria Tiburcia Reyn­antes. Her paper “Between Medi­cine and Magic: the Story of an 18th cen­tury Mex­ican healer,” explored the rather fas­cin­at­ing case of a trav­el­ling healer in eight­eenth cen­tury Mex­ico who com­bined magic and medicine …

Graham and Pauly on the Complexity of Global Relations

The 2007–2008 Wilson series of lec­tures in Cana­dian His­tory kicked off at McMas­ter Uni­ver­sity today. John Weaver, the act­ing Wilson Chair in Cana­dian His­tory, has attrac­ted an excit­ing list of speak­ers for the com­ing year. Lou Pauly spoke on ’Glob­al­iz­a­tion, Polit­ical Author­ity and the Pre­ven­tion of Sys­temic Fin­an­cial Crises.’ He fol­lowed Angela Gra­ham who, less …

Fedunkiw on Diaries as a Historical Source

I atten­ded a lively and effer­ves­cent talk by Mari­anne P. Fed­unkiw at the His­tory of health and Medi­cine Unit. Dr. Fed­unkiw presen­ted her work with the diary/scrapbook of Dr. Dorothea Maude, a rather atyp­ical Eng­lish med­ical doc­tor dur­ing the early twen­ti­eth cen­tury. Dr. Maude was act­ive in the Balkan Wars of 1912–14 and then during …

Minding the Gap

Jim Pick­worth poin­ted me to Hans Rosling’s series of TED talks. Clearly I have been sleep­ing and missed point­ers to these in the past. Hans Rosling is an amaz­ingly dynamic and fluid presenter who has embarked on a mis­sion of data lib­er­a­tion. His talks have seem­ingly inspired the UN to release pub­lic health data that …

Luxuriating in the Complex

I atten­ded a wildly anim­ated, won­der­fully amus­ing and thought pro­vok­ing key­note talk by David Wein­ber­ger entitled ’The Busi­ness of the Mis­cel­laneous’ at the Annual Gen­eral Meet­ing of the CIRA this after­noon. Wein­ber­ger claims that soci­ety has solved the threat posed by inform­a­tion over­load by cre­at­ing more inform­a­tion. Addi­tion­ally, he claims, the blur­ring of the line …