That a vomitorium is a room where Romans would go to vomit up their food and drink so they could gorge themselves some more.
Not saying that this act never occurred, mind you.
A vomitorium is a architectural feature that allows large numbers of people to disperse from a tunnel under the seats of a stadium.
This isn’t ancient wisdom. In fact, your debunking uses wisdom that’s more ancient. It is true though.
Check out the history of bird migration science. There was everything from birds going to the moon for winter, swallows burrowing in the mud, transmorphing to different species, up to the 19th century
Add to that where people thought bugs and vermin come from. Obviously they spring fully formed for dirt and muck. Even rats come from rotting grain.
Sounds stupid, but not worse than tiny animals in your blood making you sick (germ theory), or basically anything from cosmology from the Big Bang to dark energy
For anyone curious the history really is interesting, when reading previously I learned about Pfeilstorch, storks throughout the years that had flown to Germany with African arrows stuck in them. First seen at a time when people didn’t understand bird migration, it helped to explain where all the birds would go.
Medicine and not taking anything as the will of god you should just accept, this and perception of death. That direct war, colonies are necessary - because now soft power, investments, influence, proxies are seen as more effective and better for business. That raw physical fitness means an easy superiority - and not a gun. Slavery and serfdom took other forms, so are associated stereotypes. Talking while seemingly alone is, arguably, not a solid sign of a mental illness now. First paleness became no longer a wanted trait, then we learnt that sun tan can be bad too. Putting fire to a field or a property isn’t a good idea like it was before. Natural resources are free, limitless and harvested with no consequencies. Finding a stash of gold isn’t that tempting too. Mass production, services kind off changed the amount of skills one needs in an average household and added complexity to it. Knowledge of how to get a clean water noticeably changed our ways. And perception of sex and family in different cultures drastically changed over time due to religion, law and science.
I don’t know how common it is but my grandmas always said that you shouldn’t eat pork after being released from the hospital or while sick. Then I finally remembered to ask a doctor about it and he said there’s no such thing.
Cheap Pork is the best medicine. Eat it three times a day. It’s full of antibiotics. /s
I understand that the notion behind it is to eat easy to digest foods, instead of red meat, in order not to burden your body trying to metabolise them while it is also fighting a disease.
I can sort of get behind this, but I also say you still need your protein. Over here a chicken stew is quite commonly given to sick people, maybe for this reasoning.
That’s the thing, you can still eat beef and everything from bovines, fish, chicken, my grandmas only said this about pork!
Could have been because of the prevalence of trichinosis in pork until relatively recently (i.e. in your grandmother’s lifetime). If your immune system is in good shape, it’s not terribly risky, but if you just came out of the hospital you probably aren’t in peak form. So avoid pork for a while until your body can properly fight off parasites again.
Proper food safety and livestock handling has dramatically reduced the risk of parasite infections from pork in most of the developed world.
Aristotle was obviously a great teacher and philosopher but he ended up being wrong about a lot. Like he thought the “elements” were earth, wind, fire, and water and that all objects want to be in their “natural” place. So, if you drop a rock, it tries to return to the earth. Fire goes up because it’s trying to get to where it “wants” to live.
He thought eels didn’t procreate because no one had ever seen it happening. (They go out to sea to fuck.) He was into bees and correctly noticed that there were workers and drones and that young bees grow out of the honeycomb. But he just assumed the Queen was a King and that worker bees were out collecting tiny baby bees from flowers. (He thought the air just blew pollen around and the honey naturally appeared.)
He had a lot of ideas that were just ideas but he was so influential and his writings were preserved and translated. It took a shocking number of years for people to question if Aristotle was full of shit.
Ok, but the rocks and flames thing is pretty cute. The elements… they yearn for their homes…
Same, elements. Same.
The worst part of it was that for a ton of stuff he had contemporaries that were right about much much more, but were dismissed in favor of his confidently incorrect BS.
For example the Epicureans, who thought matter was made of tiny indivisible parts, that light too was made of indivisible parts moving really fast, that each parent contributed to a “doubled seed” which determined the traits of the child and could bring back features of skipped generations, that the animals which we see today were just the ones that were best able to survive to reproduce, and that all of existence arose only from the random interactions of these indivisible parts of matter and not from any intelligent design.
And because Aristotle’s stupid ideas influenced the lineage of modern thought, most people learn about him but very few learn about the other group that effectively preempted modern thought millennia earlier.
But he just assumed the Queen was a King
Actually, he acknowledged “some say” the Queen was female, but then argued it couldn’t be because the gods don’t give women weapons and it had a stinger. And the identification of the leader of the hive as male was actually used for centuries to justify patriarchal monarchy as being “by God’s design” because after all, look at the bee hive (somehow when we realized it was actually a female that logic went up in smoke).
So there were other people that did know what was correct, but Aristotle screwed up the development of thinking around it by rationalizing an opposite answer with an appeal to misogyny.
Wild that he was only two degrees of separation from a teacher famed for praising the knowledge of self-ignorance and not falling into false positives and negatives.
But the Epicureans also denied that virtue is primary in achieving eudaimonia and from a Stoic POV, that’s just a cardinal sin. Due to the Stoics is also the idea of animals being self-aware as well as cosmopolitanism and the absolutely unheard of notion that women have the same mental faculties as men and thus should also enjoy education.
But really, all the “Figuring out how to be like Sokrates” schools of philosophy were highly productive.
It’s Plato’s fault. Plato was a shithead.
What I’m getting from this is that people were the same back then as they are now. Aristotle was basically a hack who said just the right bigoted things for the ruling class to latch onto to justify the status quo. Like an ancient political commentator, or popular “scientist” who says anything for attention.
“Element” is a fairly general word, we just generally use it colloquially to refer specifically to the chemical elements. If you interpret his usage in the same way we use “states of matter”, it’s not horrendously far off. Earth, water, air, and fire roughly correspond to solid, liquid, gas, and (extremely rudimentary, very low ionization) plasma (or perhaps a more general energetic concept). In any case, an object “wanting” to get to its “natural” place also isn’t terribly far off from a statement of consistent physical laws. Solids do “want” to accumulate with other solids by gravity, energetic gases do “want” to rise above less energetic ones through buoyancy.
damn, you already said the thing I said but better
It’s fascinating just how utterly alien this all sounds to our modern ears, with the benefit of many generations cycling through the creation and deployment of the written word, then the printed word, then electromagnetic communication, then computers, then the internet.
Imagine the strange descriptions and explanations that were passed down via the spoken word and memory alone, for countless generations until arriving at Aristotle. Before the Sumerians and all the way up to the Phoenicians and FINALLY the invention of a workable, practical phonetic alphabet. Imagine the tales they would tell! So many of them lost to time, before they had a chance at being registered in a physical medium.
How did they make sense of what they saw in the night skies at places like Lascaux and Gobekli Tepe? How did they regard and explain the migration of the birds, the rainbow and the lightning?
Accumulating knowledge and communications technology have standardized certain views of the world, one step at a time, first slowly then more rapidly, and accelerating. In the days of Aristotle, this was all just barely beginning, and I believe that what we don’t know about those people before that time - the human primate in the process of becoming civilized - could surprise and confound us, that their views might have been more alien and even outlandish to us than we can imagine.
I mean… Aristotle sounds weird enough, right? I believe he’s just the tip of a huge and deep iceberg of ideas and time.
Like he thought the “elements” were earth, wind, fire, and water and that all objects want to be in their “natural” place. So, if you drop a rock, it tries to return to the earth. Fire goes up because it’s trying to get to where it “wants” to live.
That’s basically correct, though, as long as you’re intepreting “elements” to mean something more in linenwith “states of matter”, rather than actual fundamental periodic style elements.
Dude developed testable hypotheses thousands of years ago, not exactly like but very close to what we call the scientific method today. Full of shit? What an ignorant thing to say.
My boy Aristotle thought men had more teeth than women, and whatever testable hypothesis he created to prove that fact didn’t include, you know, counting the teeth of men and women.
Don’t get me wrong, I love the guy, and will agree that “classical elements” is probably the dumbest thing to accuse him of being wrong about. Hell, I have considered getting a Bekker number tattoo, but he was definitely full of some shit. It’s okay to acknowledge he was right about some things and wrong about others. That’s the whole point of this thread.
REEEEEE
IF HE WAS WRONG THEN HE WAS WROOOOONG
ree
Phlogiston, its where heat comes from!
it’s* where
if it as wrong, it wasn’t wisdom, just a belief.
lmao at the brilliant wordsmiths downvoting this literally tautological and necessary truth.
that night air is bad for you.
‘A clock is right twice a day’ and ‘two stones one bird’
But a BROKEN clock is right twice a day?
Lewis Carol noted that a clock that doesn’t work at all is right twice a day whereas a clock that loses a minute a day is right every 1.97 years, and by this calculation the broken clock is the better value.
But of course, if we know the clock loses a minute a day, you could derive the current time based on how long ago the clock was set to the correct time, or you could just throw it forward one minute at the end of every day and reset it that way with no reference. The broken clock is just completely useless as a timepiece, though. I think lewis carol was wrong.
I’m pretty sure Carol was being facetious. There’s more value obviously in a mechanical thing that works — even if not well — then one that doesn’t. The joke is in the notion that we judge clocks based on how well they tell time, which is not a good metric once they deviate significantly from that standard.
The clock on my phone is right at least twice a day and it seems to be working fine.
No, your clock is right 1440 or 86400 times a day. Not exactly twice.
The saying is “even a broken clock is right twice a day”
Do you mean ‘hit two birds with one stone’? That’s not advice, it’s a useful expression for describing getting good value.
Traveling faster than a horse is harmful.The body waa not made for that speed.
I don’t know if anyone else has said it, but the belief that human illness and all that were caused by an imbalance of four bodily humors: black bile, yellow bile, blood, and phlegm. It’s an old belief where the earliest I found it being practiced was around 400 B.C.
Babylonian astronomy
pretty interesting wiki page, is their 60 base math the reason we still have 60 base time?
Basically, yes. Time, angles, geographic coordinates.
round things! time being a flat circle, obviously. ;)
witch burning
Yep, better to test if they can swim.
Or if they weigh as much as a duck
She turned me into a newt!
… A newt?
…I got better.
Just need to know if they’re heavier than a duck.
But she coughed nails! Her master’s 6 year old daughter saw the maid do that!
Don’t shower because you’ll get water on your brain and go dumb
Dang. Is this brought to us from the same people who believe washing your asscrack makes you gay?
Given the increasing popularity of showers over baths over the last several decades this could actually explain a lot.
Classic case of survivorship bias
People back in the day had just as much terrible advice as we have today, it’s just that the only one that survived long enough to survive to the present day is the really good advice
But to answer the question, anything related to the ingestion of mercury
it’s just that the only one that survived long enough to survive to the present day is the really good advice
Okay but… I thought that was basically the point, in that if the advice survived for that long, then it is worth paying attention to at least, to consider if it might apply to a particular situation? e.g. chicken soup really is good for a cold, whether we knew the precise reasons why or not.
Or anything radioactive. Turns out it was a bad idea to make radium-lined water coolers
But whatt about radium dusted clothing, they have such a healthy glow too them./s
Was listening to an American history podcast (the dollop) about the radium girls. They wore uranium infused lipstick because it glowed and they thought it was cute. They licked their fingers regularly to help apply uranium dust to things.
While their male supervisors were wearing full lead suits totally for no reason and let those girls do that.
Many of them lost their jaws. There was a suit filed that they won, but every single one of those girls died before they could collect the money.
The suit led to a law establishing workers’ safety rights, so it wasn’t all bad. But that law was definitely written in those girls’ blood.
Wikipedia link to radium girls
I think you got the right idea but that description is missing the big points.
They were painting watches and their employers told them to use their lips to make fine points on the brushes, meaning they ingested a ton of the paint. The employers told them it was harmless despite evidence to the contrary. They chose not to use other options because wiping the brush on their lips increased productivity and they were paid per watch.
I don’t think you meant to imply that they were doing it for trivial reasons, but I do think mentioning that they were doing it for a job and that their employers were intentionally deceiving them is important context!
Sure, but they did also paint their nails, teeth, and lips with it for fun, so person above isn’t entirely wrong about that either.
A decent amount of safety law was written in the blood or sweat of women. The origins of fire code come from the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire which manufactured garments in New York which was staffed almost entirely by women.
Not to say a lot of safety law wasn’t developed because of the deaths of men but a bunch of women dying all at once due to negligence does seem to be a decently galvanizing force for society which makes it easier to get a ball rolling and women, particularly widows and family members of victims , have always been important advocates and organizers in the fight for safety legislation.
Just a small correction. They were women. Not minor female children. Calling them girls is infantilizing.
Only infantile here is you
They were women. Not minor female children.
At least accordingly to this link, the trend for dial-painters was to be teenagers. Some started as early as their fourteens. It makes sense considering the 1920s, when adult women were expected to stay at home and take care of children, not to be part of the workforce. So odds are that “radium girls” is accurate, because most of them were not adult women.
Wikipedia, and the sources that Wikipedia is relying on, are also rather consistently calling them “Radium girls”. This is clearly a fixed expression, that shouldn’t be decomposed like you’re doing.
And even if we disregard both things above (we should not), your “small correction” boils down to “I’ll vomit an «ackshyually» to boss the other user around on language usage, disregarding what they say to whine about how they say it”. This is simply not contributive.
Radioactive jock straps put out a lot more radiation.
Anything related to health care in general, really. Keep in mind that germ theory was only invented in the late 16th century, and it was ridiculed for centuries in favour of Miasma theory. It wasn’t until the mid 19th century that it started gaining legitimacy.
Whatever you do, don’t ask for bloodletting if you get sick
Unless you have excess swelling in specific parts of the body, like a cranial bleed, which does require letting out some blood to relieve pressure that can kill you. And leeches are used medically for relieving some types of swelling as well. Then there is maggots that can be used for infections to eat dead skin. All of those practices came from some specific medical treatments that did work for some specific types of injuries, although a few of them were overused for things that had nothing to do with why they existed in the first place which was counterproductive.
So while not asking for it is good advice, don’t turn it down if an actual licensed medical doctor recommends them as a treatment that has been supported by evidence.
There’s also a condition where you make too much blood, where bloodletting is literally the treatment, but frequently donating can work too.
Also apparently frequent blood donation reduces microplastics in your bloodstream, so maybe do go in for boodletting.
Look into the death of George Washington. His doctor responded to what could have been a mild cold by taking a liter of blood 4 separate times from him. Washington very well could have recovered if he was just left alone.
Oh, and the doctor somewhat realized his mistake and tried to put some of the blood back after(!) Washington expired, with the logic that if blood loss killed him giving it back should revive him.
So yeah. Pumping blood back into a dead man. That was done on the founding president of the United States.
Adding to the ACKSHSCHUALLYies…
If you have hemochromatosis, and you get sick from it, you probably should be asking about bloodletting. Regular bloodletting is one of the most effective and cost-efficient treatment options available to reduce or prevent the myriad of complications caused by this health condition.
Sometimes leeches are used for this, even in modern hospitals
if i’m not mistaken leeches inject an anticoagulant as well, which is a nice cost-saving measure. ;)
