Word: alcoholism
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...five-mile crescent of Copacabana and the other Rio beaches blazed with the ritual candles of some 600,000 devotees of Brazil's fastest-growing cult: "spiritism." Altars were set up everywhere in the sand, heaped with fetishes and food offerings, bottles of beer and the rotgut alcohol known as cachaça. Around the altars, while drums pounded faster and faster, men, women and children danced and shouted, stomped and babbled. Yemanjá, goddess of the sea, was the special object of honor; poor families from Rio's slums and evening-clad nightclub patrons waded into...
...bleeding ulcers and who may need massive blood transfusions can be saved by a chilling technique worked out by the University of Minnesota's Department of Surgery, reported its chief, Dr. Owen H. Wangensteen. The patient swallows a balloon through which a frigid (23° F.) solution of alcohol and water is circulated. The chilling cuts down blood flow, and also the secretion of gastric juices to a negligible level so that they can no longer digest the stomach wall at the ulcer site. In ten patients it has taken an average of 25 cold-stomach hours to stop...
...outwardly charming, cold-fish personality seems to carry a jinx. Before he is 20, he is partially responsible for the deaths of his childhood sweetheart and of his first mistress. At home he can do nothing to stave off his mother's crack-up as she drowns in alcohol...
...went to those who had known him-both "the indulgent sentimentalists, who melt as they tell of the handsome and elegant young man, so lordly, so cultivated and so exquisitely kind-hearted," and "the intolerant, for whom the artist does not excuse the unbearable buffoon, who could neither stand alcohol nor keep away from it, the weak author of his own downfall, the boring, drunken spoil-sport...
...sculptures, Modigliani stole subway ties and building blocks. Once some workers came upon him carving one of their blocks in the dawn light, and summarily built it into the foundations while he wept and stormed. For his portraits he would charge ten francs a sitting, "and a little alcohol." His nudes were of girls that were close to him, done with restrained appreciation. "For anyone who knew only the nudes and portraits of Modigliani's last years," his daughter writes, the artist's life "would seem . . . the quiet manifestation of a mild optimism." He found peace...