Word: holmesing
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In the 1927 case of Buck v. Bell, Chief Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes handed down the infamous ruling summarized in the subheadline above. He was talking about forced sterilization of the “feeble-minded,” but his words also sum up one attitude towards Harvard?...
Like a modern-day Sherlock Holmes in scrubs, the title character of House can solve just about any medical mystery. That's not altogether unrealistic, says Dr. Lisa Sanders, the show's technical adviser. Sanders, an internist and the author of Every Patient Tells a Story: Medical Mysteries and the...
Such fraternization between poets and scientists wasn't uncommon. Poetry and science weren't wholly separate yet: they were seen as complementary ways of piercing the veil of everyday phenomena. William Wordsworth, Lord Byron and the Shelleys (Percy Bysshe and Mary) followed scientific breakthroughs like sports scores. Holmes traces echoes...
Holmes doesn't romanticize the Romantics. The first great age of ballooning, which began so amusingly in the skies above Paris, rapidly declined into mere showmanship. (The flamboyant Italian aerialist Vincent Lunardi once proposed the following toast: "I give you me, Lunardi - whom all the ladies love!") From there it...
Ballooning wouldn't be revived in earnest for decades. But it had permanently changed the way people thought about the planet. "It had been imagined that it would reveal the secrets of the heavens above," Holmes writes, "but in fact it showed the secrets of the world beneath. The early...