Tag: science

Footnote on ‘The Plant Hunter’ by Cassandra Leah Quave

The great Alice Wong’s Disability Visibility newsletter hit my inbox last year with a book giveaway of The Plant Hunter: A Scientist’s Quest for Nature’s Next Medicines, by Cassandra Leah Quave. It’s not too often that my interest in disability culture crosses with my lay-person’s obsession with plant chemistry, so my curiosity was immediately piqued when I read the blurb… Read more

Aromatica Poetica, My New Magazine Dedicated to the Arts & Sciences of Smell

Aromatica Poetica combines our love of literature with our love of smell in a colossal endeavor to promote and celebrate the oft-disparaged sense, the “fallen angel,” as one of our inspirations Helen Keller named it in her attempt to raise it. We hope to give beautiful language to a sense that is usually denied literary efforts, and in such a… Read more

Snake Oil Essentials: The History and Science of the Much-Maligned Medicinal

Chinese Snake oil, from the erabu sea snake, has been a traditional remedy for arthritis and bursitis for hundreds of years, and seems to have been introduced to the U.S. in the 19th century when thousands of Chinese laborers were contracted to help build the Transcontinental Railroads–an estimated 180,000 emigrated to the U.S. between 1849 and 1882, according to Richard… Read more