Magic and Medicine in Harry Potter

Do Mandrakes Really Scream? This was a question that the National Library of Medicine posed in their magnificent "Magic and Medicine in Harry Potter" exhibit awhile back. The exhibition takes a close look at the facts, fictions, and legends in references to the healing arts in Harry Potter. Very nicely done.

By the way, if you haven't yet explored the NLM's online exhibitions, you really should! Among the many highlights, is the "Dream Anatomies" exhibition. A visually stunning and informative look into early anatomy and dissection.

Another NLM favorite for us here at Wonders & Marvels is the "Turning the Pages" project. Where else can you flip through a copy of Conrad Gesner's Historiae animalium while stretched out on your couch, laptop in hand? The image quality is extraordinary.

And to answer the question about whether mandrakes scream...first-hand experience suggests they don't. We tried it out at a local nature preserve, where mandrakes grow freely in the lush hills of the south. Darn!

Image: Gerarde, "Mandrake Root" (1636) from another impressive online collection of images, hosted by the University of Colorado: The World of Gloriana: Books and Manuscripts from the Age of Elizabeth I.

Holy Foreskin!

By David Farley

When I first heard about the Holy Foreskin, I thought—like a lot of people—it was a joke, either the title of a foreskin fetish magazine or something straight from the mind of a perverted Batman fan. I’d majored in history—focusing on the medieval and Renaissance periods in Europe—and I had a particular interest in the saints and their relics. Yet, in the research I’d done for papers as an undergraduate and grad student, this once-rapturous remain had never come up. Which intrigued me because once I started doing a bit of research—blew a bit of dust off the documents, so to speak—I found out there was a lot of relatively buried material about the history of Jesus’ foreskin.

After moving to the village of Calcata, 30 miles of Rome, the last place the Holy Foreskin had been seen, I wasn’t sure if broaching the topic of the missing relic would be taboo. But, much to my surprise, pretty much everyone wanted to share their knowledge on the history of the relic and their theories on what happened to it. Everyone except the priest, under whose watch it disappeared. (I eventually did get him to talk, but you’ll have to read the book to find out what happened.) Then I talked my way into the Vatican Library and, after enough digging around, unearthed some centuries-old papal-approved booklets about the history of this miraculous membrane. All the documents—complete with an impratur that stated papal approval—put the Calcata foreskin at the center of attention, but they always dedicated some discussion to the other Holy Foreskins that were floating around Europe (though mostly in France) during the Middle Ages (most of the other foreskin relics were lost during the Reformation and French Revolution).

But the publications on the relic abruptly stopped after the 19th century. The reason? In 1900, Pope Leo XIII issued a decree stating that anyone who spoke of or wrote about the relic would face excommunication. I was officially intrigued. How did a relic go from being a major pilgrim magnet to being banned by the church centuries later? Factor in the mysterious disappearance of the relic from Calcata in 1983 and we’ve got a genuine historical mystery on our hands.

David Farley is author of An Irreverent Curiosity: In Search of the Church's Strangest Relic in Italy's Oddest Town.To learn more about David and his book, visit www.dfarley.com

Image: Calcata, Holy Foreskin Niche, courtesy of the author

Telling Time in Early Europe

What time is it, you say? If you were living before the 18th century, you would not look at your wrist watch. No, you'd slip a portable sundial out of your pocket. The more complex sundials could also be converted to moon dials that indicated the time according to the amount of moonlight expected on a clear, starry night.

Although town squares began constructing clocks beginning somewhere in the 14th century, sundials remained in the picture well into the 18th century. Mechanical clocks were exorbitantly expensive and could be found only in the most noble of homes. And they were notoriously unreliable--telling time only within an hour, give or take. They also needed to be reset frequently. Of course, with the help of a sundial.

A well crafted sundial was the mark of good birth and high culture. One of the most famous sundial makers of the late seventeenth century was the Englishman Michael Butterfield, who set up shop along the riverbanks of Paris. His top-of-line sundials were made of silver, not brass, and were engraved with beautifully elaborate designs.

Sundial preferences were also gendered. Men went for larger sundials of about 2 1/2 inches nested in a silver box, that itself was nested in a brass exterior box. Women reached instead for daintier, 1 inch models in gold cases that could be slipped more easily in a purse.

Now I'm not a specialist of time telling in the early-modern period. Hardly! Much of what you have here is a distillation of Sara Schechner's outstanding article: "The Material Culture of Astronomy in Daily Life: Sundials, Science, and Social Change" (Journal for the History of Astronomy, 2001, 189-222). Well worth the read!

And for anyone near Chicago and interested in time keeping, a visit to the Adler Planetarium is well worth the trip. Their historical collections are remarkable. Any readers out there with a big checkbook? Take a peek at the sundial collections here. Feel free to ship one to me!

Image courtesy of the National Maritime Museum. For more information on the sundial above, click here.

Thomas Edison at the Eiffel Tower

By Jill Jonnes

On August 14, 1889, Thomas Edison's third day in France, he and his entourage arrived at the Paris Exposition Universelle at 9 a.m. to ascend the world's tallest structure. "Like everyone else I've come to see the Eiffel Tower," the Wizard of Menlo Park declared. When Parisians had first seen Gustave Eiffel's design for his 1,000-foot tower, they hurled no end of insults and lawsuits, denouncing his winning entry for the fair's centerpiece as "a black and gigantic factory chimney, crushing [all] beneath its barbarous mass," a dangerous and hideous "scaffold" even "America would not have."

But by late summer of 1889 when Le Grand Edison arrived to experience this monumental wrought-iron wonder, even Eiffel's worst critics had conceded the tower's originality and grace. The few hold-outs consoled themselves that the tower would mar their beautiful city only for twenty years, when Eiffel would have to dismantle it.

From the day the tower opened to the public on May 15, 1889, it was mobbed. The Prince and Princess of Wales, the Shah of Persia, Lily Langtry, Annie Oakley, a shepherd on stilts, minor royalty of every stripe, politicians, scientists, artists, tourists from the farthest corners of the globe, everyone had to ascend La Tour Eiffel. On the cool August morning when Edison ascended, the famous inventor's party emerged from the elevator to find an unlikely group of fellow American sightseers: Chief Rocky Bear and several dozen Sioux Indians from Buffalo Bill's Wild West show, one of the great sensations of that World's Fair summer. The Indians, their long hair entwined with feathers, rushed over, whooping a welcoming chant to a startled Edison, who gathered his wits to ask how was Chief Sitting Bull?

Gustave Eiffel, away at a spa in Evian, missed Edison's first visit. Subsequently, Eiffel hosted a festive champagne luncheon on the tower for the American inventor, his wife Mina, daughter Dot, and a few French engineers. Afterwards, all repaired to Eiffel's private apartment atop the tower, where Edison demonstrated his new improved talking phonograph, one of the other huge sensations of the fair. Eiffel, who had spotted Charles Gounod dining at a nearby table in the Café Brebant, invited the composer of Faust to join them. High above Paris, Gounod serenaded Edison and played the piano until late into the evening.

Edison was one of the most famous men of his day and he was full of enthusiasm for Gustave Eiffel and his tower. So from the moment I learned of their meeting, I anticipated finding a photo of the two men together. At the Eiffel Archives at the Museé d'Orsay in Paris, I worked my way through the many boxes of century-old photos and charming souvenir menus, but found no such image. Was it possible that Edison and Eiffel, two celebrated men who so admired one another, never posed for a photo together? Especially since there was a photo of Edison posing with Adolphe Salles, Eiffel's son-in-law and partner in their global bridge-building business. Had the Eiffel family perhaps chosen not to pass the photo along when they gave Gustave's papers to the archives? Just one of those little puzzlements.

Sadly, I had no better luck at the vast and wondrous Edison Archives at Rutgers University or at the National Park Service's Edison Historic site at West Orange. They had no photographs at all of Thomas Edison at the Paris World's Fair of 1889, one of the high points of his professional career. And so, I settled for next best, the great inventor with his talking phonograph in 1892.

Jill Jonnes is author of Eiffel's Tower: And the World's Fair Where Buffalo Bill Beguiled Paris, Artists Quarreled, and Thomas Edison Became a Count, and Conquering Gotham: Building Penn Station and Its Tunnels as well as numerous other best-selling books.

Medical Curiosities, Authorial Resources

By Kirsten Menger-Anderson

Doctor Olaf van Schuler's Brain began as a short story about phrenology. I was fascinated by the odd idea of determining personality from the bumps in our heads, and intrigued by the diagrams of crisscrossed heads containing "brain organs" ranging from poetic talent to the tendency to murder. What other (now discredited) medical ideas have we held, I began to wonder. And so began my journey through 350 years of medical history.

Early in my research, I discovered the work of Jan Bondeson. His Buried Alive, which tells vivid tales of tobacco-smoke enemas and coffins fitted out with bell towers, inspired a story about a boy who may or may not be dead. Cabinet of Medical Curiosities, an entertaining survey of medical oddities, led to several additional stories that draw from the colorful histories Bondeson tells--tales involving spontaneous combustion and short hirsute women. Past medical techniques and the contemporaneous debates about life, death, and the soul took hold of my imagination. When I came across a review for Soul Made Flesh by Carl Zimmer, I immediately ordered the book.

Soul Made Flesh, which opens in 1662 Oxford, where the "stink of cured fish hanging in fishmongers' stalls mixes with the soft smell of bread in the bakeries," is a history of our search to understand the human brain and the soul--work that inspired the opening story of my collection. From Zimmer, I learned about theories concerning the soul and its relationship to the human body, and how Galen's anatomy, which was accepted well into the seventeenth century, was based on studies of "lower" animals: the brain of a cow, the uterus of a dog, the kidneys of a pig.

I discovered curative radium in Bob McCoy's book Quack! Tales of Medical Fraud. I read about Mesmerism in an essay by Dylan Morgan; I followed the evolution of New York City in Edwin G. Burrows and Mike Wallace's amazing book Gotham. The sciences that drive the characters in Doctor Olaf are the ones I learned about as I researched the book. Only I have the benefit of intervening centuries to see that many of the practices and theories are ill-advised. My characters believe in them.

Image: Skull inscribed for phrenological demonstration. 19th century. Courtesy of the Wellcome Library, London.

Book of the Week: Dr. Olaf von Schuler's Brain

Is it possible to have found a fiction writer who shares such wonder at early medicine's marvels? Does Kirsten Menger-Andersen earn an honorary place among medical historians for translating our odd truths about medical beliefs and practices into breath-taking and respectful prose? Answer: YES.

Doctor Olaf von Schuler's Brain is simply gorgeous. Menger-Andersen moves us from early-modern Europe to modern day New York with subtly and historical appreciation of the fine details that bring these moments together--and that make each uniquely different.

For more, here's a review from the New York Times. Stay tuned on Thursday for a post from author herself.

In the meantime, just click on the book cover to your left for a chance to win a copy.

Image: Provided by author

Chubby Cherubs

By Holly Tucker

Kids, I've told you a million times...Quit Dissecting the Dog!

I came across this image quite by accident today in the extraordinary Wellcome Library image collection. I've been working on some descriptions of early-modern dissections for my book manuscript--and was having a hard time putting into words the tools that anatomists used in their work: their size, shape, and use. Often when I'm stuck, I dip into my favorite arsenals of images to reawaken my creative juices.

It was only after I had flipped through a good hundred images or so that I realized: I'm too jaded. What an odd life it is when you can scan illustrations that are hundreds of years old and think "seen that," "been there," "done that" as you hit enter.

And then, just when I was thinking that nothing surprises me anymore: the putti magically appeared.

Putti (putto in the singular) are what those portly little babies are called. While they are regular features in Renaissance religious art, they show up from time to time as well in later scientific, and especially, medical illustrations.

One of my putti favorites has to be the frontispiece to Regnier de Graaf's De mulierum organis generationi inservientibus (1672), which announced the discovery of the human egg. (Spermatazoa were discovered in 1677--see post on Little Men in Sperm and The Chicken or the Egg).

The putti in the bottom left-hand portion of the illustration have just dissected a hare. They have put its ovaries on a tray and are looking at it close-up through a telescope-like device. Behind them stands a statuesque figure who holds a hand-drawn image of the female reproductive system.

But for as much as the Regnier image is eye-catching (and figures prominently on the cover of one of my books), I have to say that this new set of putti amuse and mesmerize me while also creeping me out in no small measure.

Related posts:

Gross Anatomy

Realism in Dissection

Dissection of Syphilis Patients

Anatomy of a Teaching Gig

Image: Etching by Bernard Picart, 1729. Wellcome Library, London.

Decoding the Heavens

By Jo Marchant

In autumn 1900, Captain Dimitrios Kontos and his crew of sponge divers were sailing home from their summer diving grounds off Tunisia. They were heading for the island of Symi in the eastern Mediterranean, but were blown off course by a storm and sheltered by a barren islet called Antikythera.

After the storm’s retreat, they discovered on the seabed a spectacular shipwreck . A Roman ship from the first century BC, it was carrying stolen Greek treasures, including statues, armour and jewellery.

The divers salvaged the wreck for the Greek government, and the artefacts were taken to the National Archaeological Museum in Athens. Among the haul was a lump of rock no one unnoticed at first. Then it cracked open, revealing gearwheels, inscriptions, and dials. This “Antikythera mechanism” turned out to be the most stunning scientific artefact we have from antiquity. Nothing close to its complexity appears again for more than a thousand years.

For much of the last century this mysterious machine was largely ignored by mainstream historians. But thanks to a succession of men who devoted their lives to decoding the device (see video), its secrets have finally been revealed. It was a clockwork computer for calculating the varying movements of the Sun, Moon and planets, and even predicting future eclipses.

I first heard about the Antikythera mechanism in summer 2006. A paper revealing its workings was due to appear in the science journal Nature, where I was on staff as an editor. The story grabbed me immediately, and I travelled to Athens to see the remains of the mechanism, and meet those who had studied it.

In my new book, Decoding the Heavens, I describe the 100-year quest to understand the device. But along the way I became intrigued by the bigger tale, of where this unexpected technology came from and where it went for a thousand years. I was stunned to discover that the expertise embodied in the device was not lost. Traces were passed to the Islamic world, and back to Medieval Europe, where this ancient knowledge triggered much of the technology that shapes our lives today.

Jo Marchant in the author of Decoding the Heavens: A 2,000-Year-Old Computer and the Century-Long Search to Discover Its Secrets, published by Da Capo Press

Historical Footprints

by Martha A. Sandweiss

In Passing Strange: A Gilded Age Tale of Love and Deception Across the Color Line, I unravel the hidden life of Clarence King, the celebrated western American explorer, who crossed the color line from white to black to marry the woman he loved. For thirteen years, from his marriage in 1888 until his death in 1901, King lived a secret double life as a black Pullman porter named James Todd. His prominent white friends never knew that King had an African-American wife and five mixed-race children. And Ada Copeland, the woman he married, had no idea of her husband’s true identity. Not until King lay dying in 1901, did he disclose his true identity to his wife.

King sought to ensure that no paper trail of his secret life would exist. But most families in late nineteenth-century America left behind some trace in the historical records, and this one was no exception.

The federal census records proved essential to my search. Historians of a certain age will recall the tedium of scrolling through endless microfilm reels of census data. Now the data is digitized and searchable. One can track characters across time. Minor characters spring instantly to life. Broad hypotheses are easily checked. I could quickly calculate, for example, how many Georgia-born African Americans lived in Manhattan in 1880. Not very many. I could then infer that Copeland had exercised a rare sort of ambition in moving north from her native state.

My students initially find census records uninteresting. But they soon see their potential. They can figure out who lived in a particular neighborhood, imagine the languages that would be heard on the street or think about the work places where people spent their days. They can ask hard questions about family structure, gender, and literacy. In short, they can make these historical records speak to individual life stories as well as to larger themes of American history.

Years ago, I approached an academic library to request that they subscribe to Ancestry.com, the best and most easily navigated of the proprietary digitized census sites. We don’t buy resources for genealogists, they said. I quickly showed them what academic historians might do with these resources and won them over. Now the librarians are among the database’s biggest fans, and I incorporate census research assignments into many of my undergraduate courses. Students initially get hooked by finding the trace of a grandparent. But they quickly discover that they can become real historical sleuths, as well, able to recover forgotten bits of the past.

Image: Wallace King, Ada and Clarence's son (right) in the family's home, 1950s. Courtesy of Patricia Chacon.

Alchemy's Secrets

By Holly Tucker

Natural philosophers and alchemists everywhere should head over to Yale's Beinecke library to explore their latest exhibit.

Book of Secrets: Alchemy and the European Imagination, 1500-2000

From the exhibit guide and online blog, all beautifully done:

"European readers were familiar with alchemical motifs and literature, even when they did not believe in alchemy or were actively critical of its practitioners. Ben Jonson, so knowledgeably mocking of alchemical practitioners and processes in The Alchemist, was only one of many satirical commentators on alchemy. In Areopagitica, his famous polemic against censorship, the poet John Milton uses alchemical allusions scathingly, arguing that “I am of those who beleeve, it will be a harder alchymy then Lullius ever knew, to sublimat any good use out of such an invention [i.e., book licensing].” This was no passing flirtation with alchemical imagery, but the mining of a metaphor which Milton knew would be familiar to his readers in its many complexities: the science of alchemy, its authorities such as Raymond Lull, and the tenuous state of alchemy’s premise that its practitioners could transform base metal into sublime material. Alchemy, as Milton knew, occupied a place in the cultural economy, circulated by poets and authors in the coinage of verse, satire, literary defense, and attack."

Image: Yale University, Beinecke Rare Books and Manuscript Collections

They Weren't Green, But Were the Giants Jolly?

By Holly Tucker

On January 21 1742, the minutes of the English Royal Society reported that:

"Daniel Cajanus a Finlander about thirty two years of age was brought into the Society as a Sight and an instance of one of a gigantic Size of human body.

He stood by one of the Pillars [at Crane Court] & his Height was marked, which measured seven feet four inches and a quarter, and the heels of his shoes were about an inch....The Man said his father was 6 1/2 feet in height, and his Mother six feet three inches and that he was brother to one of the name name shew'd for a sight in London some years ago. His servant affirmed that his usual mean was about 4 1/2 pound of meat.

But as some of the Society were of opinion that this Man was the very same person with the other formerly shown in London; there being a great resemblance in their Feature, tho' this seemed more proportionally made: the Revd. Dr. Pearce, who happen'd to be one of the tallest Gentlemen in the meeting, said he had some reason to think otherwise. For that he had observed he could not reach higher than the other man's forehead, yet he could reach about an inch above the forehead of this man."

This all leaves me to wonder the average height of NBA basketball players. And what a marvel they would be for these early members of the Royal Society!

And, apparently, WE can marvel at Cajanus's skeletal remains from the waist down at Leiden University's Museum of Anatomy and Embryology in Holland--where the bones are said to be on display...

Image: portrait of giant and dwarf, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna (German, late 17th Century)

References: John H. Appleby, "Human Curiosities and the Royal Society, 1688-1751" Notes and Records of the Royal Society of London 50 (1996): 13-27

Another favorite resource for marvels:

Lorraine Daston & Katharine Park. Wonders and the Order of Nature: 1150-1750 (New York: Zone, 1998).

Take a Peek: 17th Century Cookbooks

By Holly Tucker

I mentioned last week that the Wellcome Library for the History of Medicine is one of the wonders of the world for people working in the history of medicine. I have been there several times and have felt like a child in candy store. My last trip was about a year ago. It was generously funded by a Library travel fellowship. I rented a studio flat about five minutes away from the library, which is in central London not from King's Cross station. I spent my days carefully turning the pages of 400 year old dissection manuals, and my evenings reading up on what I needed to prepare for the next day's research foray. The trip was blissful.

I recall vividly my first trip to the collections several years ago. I was finishing up a book on women's medical knowledge in the seventeenth century. I stumbled across the Library's extraordinary collection of early cookbooks and household manuels.

The large bound volumes had clearly been passed on through generations. The hand written recipes and notes were in the hand of different women at different moments. These were not recipes on how to make cakes. No, the recipes included procedures for distilling herbs, curing common ailments, and even tips on how to stay beautiful.

I gasped aloud when I turned the page of one such cookbook--I think it was the one by a French family dated 1699--and discovered several meticulously pressed leaves. Imagine this: those leaves had been in the book for nearly 3oo years. This is why I do what I do for a living. This is why I delight in being a researcher.

The Wellcome has made many of its cookbooks now accessible online. In fact, they're looking for beta testers. If you want to have a look yourself, just head over to the Library's outstanding blog for more information.

And let me know if you're hooked too. I'll bet you will be!

Image Wellcome Library.

Early Lens Making

By Holly Tucker

As part of my day job, I write. I research. I write some more.

There are moments when it's hard to cut out hard-earned words. This is one of them. But I also know that--at least for this chapter that I just finished buttoning up--readers' eyes could glaze over in all the details about early telescopes and the challenges of lens making. It had to go.

So here I am, asking your indulgence as I put a least some of that writing to use in a post...

In the seventeenth century, the challenge for astronomers was to be found in the lenses. Lenses were extraordinarily difficult to make, and the quality was inconsistent at best.

The best available glass for telescope lenses was concocted from a mixture of sand and soda, borax was then added along with a bit of lime and manganese oxide. These last two ingredients tempered the yellow and greenish hue in the glass, not entirely but at least noticeably. All of the materials were left to boil in gigantic melting pots until the various components fused into a unified liquid. Sweating and covered in soot, the glassmaker then began the delicate and dangerous process of scooping the molten liquid onto marble slabs and rolled thin layers flat. The glass would be built up progressively, in layers, until just the right thickness had been achieved. Anything could go wrong in the process--and it usually did. Bubbles, particulates, and fissures specked the glass. And even the most faultless piece of glass was never perfectly clear. "The good colors of glass," wrote the astronomer and instrument-maker Cherubin, "are approaching wine-colored, or blue, or green, even black, but always transparent. Green or the color of sea water is most common."

Once the rough shape of the lens was traced out and cut with a diamond, the grinding process began. [Imagine here several paragraphs of minutiae on lens griding--also deleted!] It could take twenty, thirty, and sometimes more tries to get one lens that was of sufficiently high enough quality for use in a telescope.

Now before you think that I've gone the way of history of engineering, know that much of this great information is indebted to Maurice Daumas' Scientific Instiruments of the 17th and 18th Centuries and Their Makers. Another excellent book is J.A. Bennett's The Divided Circle: A History of Instruments for Astronomy, Navigation and Surveying. Or, the visually stunning Scientific Instruments: 1500-1900, an Introduction by Gerard L'E Turner.

Image courtesy of the Wellcome Library for the History of Medicine

The King Dances

At the tender age of six, Louis XIV showed very little signs of kingly behavoir. He was a socially awkward child, tongue-tie, and bashful. Hushed whispers ran through the court that the young boy would likely be unfit to lead. One Italian traveler reported followed a trip to the royal court at the Louvre that the French "considered him dim-witted."

Whether through training or through maturity, there would be little doubt just a few years later that while Louis was a taciturn youth, he had an uncanny gift for physical activities.

Each morning, Louis woke to a room full of well-wisher and attendants. He was helped from bed to a small alter in his room and knelt to pray. Hair combed, tights and knee-length pants on, Louis springed with delight to a large room just behind his chamber for his daily exercises. One of his valets de chambre, Dubois de Lestourniere, wrote that the king "vaulted with an admirable lightness, like a bird and had his wooden horse propped up to its highest point. He would fall back on the saddle as noiselessly as if it were a pillow. He then fenced, jousted, and went back to his alcove room where he would dance."

France dance in the seventeenth century required outstanding coordination, strength, and delicate agility. It was an exercise in control as the dancer completed elaborate and richly choreographed movement to pounding, triumphant music that shift in rhythm an dmood. Every part of the body was involved: the dancer's feet tapped, praced, and swirled, torso still and upright, hands followin gin stylized staccato. Restrained facial expressions were careful to hide the complexity of the art.

In 1653, the full power of the young king's artistic talent was put on display for the court. He took the stage as Apollo, Sun God. His costume was "covered with a rich gold embroidery and many rubies. The rays that appeared around his head were of diamonds and the crown was of rubies and pearls topped with numerous pink and white feathers.'

Now if time travel is ever made possible in my lifetime, this is the historical moment I would give anything to attend...

References: Regine Astier, "Louis XIV, 'Premier Danseur.'" IN Sun King: The Ascendancy of French Culture During the Reign of Louis XIV. Ed. David Lee Rubin. NJ: Associated University Presses, 1992: 73-102.

Image: Ballet of the Night, 1653

The Art of Dying

by Kris Waldherr

Of the many méthodes de la mort presented in my book Doomed Queens, it's beheading which generates the most buzz. After all, thanks to Henry VIII and his infamous wives, it's a rare person who hasn't seen Hollywood footage of one of his queens losing her head. These cinematic scenes are usually acted with a trembling lower lip, defiant last statement, then cue birds flying away (no doubt symbolizing the flight of the soul to heaven).

Beheading has been utilized worldwide since ancient times. It's considered a quick and effective way to end a life, provided the executioner is skilled. In the case of Mary Stuart, it took three blows to sever her head. During Henry's era, the condemned were usually blindfolded after they made a pious last statement that included forgiveness of the executioner and praise for the monarch. Next, they placed their necks upon the block; in the case of women, sometimes someone held their hair to the front, to steady them for the blow to come. Though an ax was traditionally used, Henry sent for a French swordsman to execute Anne in 1536; it was rumored that he was so skilled that she would feel no pain. Anne quipped, "He shall not have much trouble, for I have a little neck." The queen was killed with a single sword stroke while kneeling upright mid-prayer.

The much-married king did not splurge for the French swordsman in 1542 for Catherine Howard, his fifth queen but second conjugal beheading; she was dispatched in the usual way. The story goes that poor little Queen Kitty was so nervous about her upcoming date with death that she requested the block to be brought to her. She spent the night before her execution rehearsing how to place her head on the block. Presumably these efforts left her exhausted; her legs gave way as she climbed the scaffold and she had to be helped up.

As for Marie Antoinette, she was beheaded with a guillotine in 1793, which was a la mode in France due to the efforts of Dr. Joseph-Ignace Guillotin. The good doctor submitted a modest proposal in 1789 to an assembly evaluating changes to the French penal code. Within it, Guillotin made the audacious suggestion that all men be treated equal when executed—that is, without pain and without torture. He wrote, "In all cases where the law imposes the death penalty on an accused person, the punishment shall be the same. . . . The criminal shall be decapitated; this will be done solely by means of a simple mechanism." Contrary to popular belief, Guillotin was not a fetishist fascinated by executions; he was a lapsed Jesuit who hoped that a more humane method would lead to the abolition of the death penalty. Nor did he design the "simple mechanism" that bore his name. Variations of the guillotine have been around since the fourteenth century. After nearly two years of debate, the Assembly approved his measure in time for the Reign of Terror's communal bloodletting.

Did the guillotine really render its victims a painless, swift death? The jury is out on that, since no one can tell us. However, one story suggests that consciousness did not immediately cease after the blade fell. Charlotte Corday, the infamous murderess of Marat, was recorded to have blushed with "unequivocal indignation" after her severed head was slapped by her jubilant executioner. That written, a neuropsychologist recently informed me that it was likely that individual consciousness would end within four seconds, in response to the severing of the aorta during decapitation. More probably, Charlotte's famed blush was in reaction to the slap itself. Since the guillotine operates so quickly, her blood would be caught still circulating toward her brain, leaving her skin responsive to physical force after consciousness ceased—unless that was one really fast slapper.

Kris Waldherr is the author of Doomed Queens: Royal Women Who Met Bad Ends From Cleopatra to Princess Di from Broadway Books. Image: Kris Waldherr