Word: mather
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...great Scourges of Mankind -Priests, Lawyers, and Physicians." Divine aid was considered more important than that of the physician. Only through God's grace could one escape disease or survive its attack. In The Angel of Bethesda, the first general treatise on medicine written in the colonies, Cotton Mather advised in 1724, "Lett us look upon Sin as the Cause of sickness...
...With no anaesthesia, the best surgeons were the ones who could cut, hack and saw most rapidly, aided by the strongest assistants to hold the patient down. Herbs and plants were extensively used in treatment. Governor John Winthrop of Massachusetts Bay prescribed a paste of wood lice, while Cotton Mather-who together with Zabdiel Boylston brought inoculation to the colonies in 1721 to prevent serious cases of smallpox-condemned the use by Boston physicians of "Leaden Bullets," to be swallowed for "that miserable Distemper which they called the Twisting of the Guts." By the early 18th century, there were only...
...Strangelove. I've always suspected Stanley Kubrick of basically despising human beings. His sets tend to resemble the Mather House courtyard, done in that intimidating style intended to give people the feeling that they are insignificant. In Strangelove, though, his contempt for people isn't particularly noxious, because he's portraying a particularly contemptible group--the American military-political elite. George C. Scott satirizes the character of military men brilliantly--at heart, they are adolescents who never grew up, infatuated with the noise and destructive power of weaponry, and strangely naive...
...victims executed was the minister George Burrough (A.B. 1671), condemned mainly on the basis of his feats of excessive strength. Burrough's hanging was urged by Cotton Mather (A.B. 1678), who three years earlier had published a book about several witchcraft cases. Mather failed to speak out even when he realized things were going awry, but later tried to atone by treating and curing two girls who decided to start a witch-hunt in Boston...
...most responsible for ending the prosecutions, however, was Harvard president Increase Mather (A.B. 1656). He and some other Cambridge ministers, meeting in Old Harvard Hall, agreed that no court should condemn anyone to death on the basis of "spectral evidence" alone. Mather followed up at once by composing a tract, Cases of Conscience Concerning Evil Spirits, which was instrumental in persuading the Governor to end the sorry business; and, visiting in prison a number of persons who had under pressure confessed to witchcraft, Mather got eight of them to recant...