Clik here to view.
Last Days of Patient 33
In the afternoon of September 26, 1818, a family from Gloucester County, New Jersey arrived at Friends’ Asylum in Frankford, outside Philadelphia. They had brought their relative, a 26-year-old woman,...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Struggling with Ptolemy’s Ὁ Καρπός
It is perversely reassuring to see that other people have had to labor to understand Ptolemy’s aphorisms.[1] Consequently, this 15th-century copy of Ptolemy’s Ὁ Καρπός (more widely known by its Latin...
View ArticleClik here to view.
More fun with Ptolemy’s Ὁ Καρπός
Our premodern reader didn’t just add Latin glosses to his copy of Ptolemy’s Ὁ Καρπός, now and then he emended the Greek. For example, on the second aphorism the copiest wrote “τὴν κρεῖττον”. The reader...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Aphorisms 4 and 5 from Ptolemy’s Ὁ Καρπός
Let’s follow our reader through a couple more aphorisms from Ptolemy’s Ὁ Καρπός. Again he glosses most of the Greek with Latin translations and, once again, corrects a couple scribal errors by writing...
View ArticleClik here to view.
ὁ Καρπός, Aphorisms 6 – 10
As our reader continued to work through Ptolemy’s Ὁ Καρπός he either was uninterested in the minor errors in the Greek or didn’t notice them (such as the τοῦ γενεθλίω which clearly should be τοῦ...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Aphorisms 11–20 from Ptolemy’s Ὁ Καρπός
Here are aphorisms 11–20 from the copy of Ptolemy’s “Ὁ Καρπός” in BnF gr. 2180. As to be expected, there are a number of idiosyncrasies here, some going well beyond the orthographic changes (which are...
View ArticleClik here to view.
More Ὁ Καρπός Fun
Here is the next group of ten aphorisms, 21–30, from the copy of Ptolemy’s Ὁ Καρπός in BNF gr. 2180. Idiosyncrasies continue to be the norm. As is common in this text, along with the orthographic...
View ArticleΣτοιχειωματικοὶ were casters of something
As progress continues on Ptolemy’s Ὁ Καρπός I find myself confronting more and more questions that E. Boer’s critical edition does not and cannot answer.[1] Some of these questions are small and...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Chambers Full of Snakes
Thumbing through a couple early modern collections of secrets always turns up strange and fascinating techniques and recipes. Some seem obviously useful, such as how to make a candle burn under water...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Ghosts and the Society for Psychical Research
Sometime in the mid 1770s the German scholar Georg Christoph Lichtenberg predicted with a certain degree of optimism: Our world will yet become so intricate that it will be as ridiculous to believe in...
View Article
