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مؤلف هذا الكتاب ديوضّح شغلة مهمة بعلم الآثار هي أنّه من الصعب تخيّل شكل الحيوان (عضلاته وألوانه وتصرفاته) من هيكله العظمي فقط. الديناصورات مثلًا، اللي احنة ما نعرف غير هياكلها العظمية، ممكن تكون أشكالها وسلوكها مختلف جدًا عمّا نتصوره حاليًا. الكاتب علمود يثبت هالفكرة يكول: تخيل لو ورة ملايين السنين، بعد إنقراض أغلب الحيوانات الحالية (أو تطورها لأنواع ثانية) اجوا علماء الآثار واكتشفوا الهياكل مال الحيوانات الحالية مثل البزازين والأبقار والأفاعي والفيلة، همين رح يتصوروها على حقيقتها مثلما هي الآن؟ لو رح يتخيلوها بشكل مختلف تمامًا عن الواقع؟ هاي الصور هي من منظور علماء الآثار المستقبليين وهمة يعيدون تشكيل "reconstruct" حيوانات منقرضة (في ذاك الوقت) هي البزازين والفيلة والأبقار والأفاعي من هياكلها العظمية فقط... الباقي يمكم، عود توقعوا كل صورة تنتمي لهيكل أي حيوان.

— All Yesterdays

— All Yesterdays

The Little Art Connoisseur, 1863 August Friedrich Siegert

Wilco album covers

It's a synthetic opioid used as an analgesic for severe pain (as in cancer patients)

The amount of fentanyl that is lethal for an adult

*كأنك بالانتباه تُطيل عمر الشيء*

One day I will find the right words, and they will be simple.

Using numerical methods and probability, Pierre Louis (1787–1872) revealed that it made no difference to the outcome of pneumonia whether [bloodletting] was performed early or late, or whether large or small amounts of blood were let; in fact, nothing had much effect. Likewise, no therapies did much good with various fevers. Louis had sometimes been dubbed a therapeutic nihilist; his early medical experiences in Russia had indeed taught him the sobering fact that medicine rarely cured. Corvisart mused that medicine ‘is not the art of curing diseases’. Leading his editor to call his works ‘a meditation on death’. — The Greatest Benefit to Mankind

بالمناسبة، اغلب مبادئ طب باريس ما زالت ذات فائدة اليوم لأن الطب والتعليم الطبي الحديث كلها متأثرة بيه

أما روي بورتر، فهذا شكو كتاب ألزمه عن تاريخ الطب، لازم لو هو كاتبه، لو ذاكريه بصفته مصدر بالكتاب...

— The Greatest Benefit to Mankind, by Roy Porter

Medical training had therefore to be a matter of drilling students to interpret the sights, sounds and smells of disease – in short, a morbid education of the senses. Clinical judgement was the elucidation of what trained senses perceived, its end being to designate disease.

Bichat told doctors what to do: ‘You may take notes for twenty years from morning to night at the bedside of the sick, and all will be to you only a confusion of symptoms . . . a train of incoherent phenomena.’ But start cutting bodies open and ‘this obscurity will soon disappear’. Here was the medicine of the all-powerful gaze.

Paris medicine, dubbed as anatomico-pathological, built upon the tissue pathology developed by Bichat. In place of symptoms or organs, tissues assumed primacy, regarded as basic building-blocks and as pathological sites. The nuances of this or that patient were brushed aside, for such symptoms were now viewed as mere foam on the surface of what Jean Louis Alibert called 'the uncharted ocean of diseases.' ‘The sick person has become a thing’ the German physician Robert Volz noted in the 19th century

Paris medicine's golden rule was 'read little, see much, do much'

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