For those who want a heart- tongue-smart starter to their day, whatever time of the afternoon that might be.

Cardiac Un-Conscious Sunday French Toast

Ingredients

5 brown eggs

1 tsp. vanilla extract

1 tsp. cinnamon

1 tsp. brown sugar

4 strips of bacon (NOT maple bacon, just the regular stuff)

2 generous slices of sourdough (we got ours from the Rheinland Bakery)

1/2 cup homo milk

Directions

Get a large, shallow bowl or tupperware square (whatever can fit your bread slices and some liquid.) Crack eggs into this container, and beat.

Turn on your frying pan, medium-high.

Add sugar, vanilla extract, cinnamon, and milk. Whisk again.

Lay 2 slices of bacon on the pan. Dredge one slice of bread in your French toast mixture, and place in the pan on top of the bacon slices. Pour a little bit of the French toast mixture on top.

Let cook, then flip. Let cook, then serve.

Repeat for 2nd slice of bread.

Optional: Side of fresh kiwi. No syrup necessary; this toast is plenty sweet and moist as is – but knock yourself out if you’re feeling really Canadian.

Serves 2.

A sauceless way to use up those cupboard staples that accumulate: pasta and canned tuna.

Chicken-of-the-Seashell Pasta

Ingredients

3-4 large brown mushrooms

1 cup small seashell pasta

1 can flaky tuna

1 egg

Montreal steak spice

Butter

Oil

Directions

Fill a small pot with water and salt, set to boiling.

Meanwhile, slice your mushrooms and set aside. Open the can of tuna – do NOT drain it.

Put a skillet on medium heat, and add a dash of oil.

Sautee the mushrooms, stirring every so often. Add a dash of Montreal steak spice, to taste. When slightly browned, add the entire can of tuna, with water. Increase heat (to steam off the liquid), and stir.

When the water boils – which should be about now – add your dry pasta and stir.

While pasta is cooking, crack an egg into the skillet and mix into the tuna and mushrooms, scrambled-style.

Strain pasta when el dente, and remove the skillet from heat. Add the pasta to the skillet with a small knob of butter, and stir to mix together.

Turn every element off, toss into a bowl, and serve.

Optional: Add frozen peas and/or corn  (or fresh, if you have it) during the mushroom sautee stage for more food volume and nutrition.

Serves 2.

For when you want an easy dessert with pizazz and class (and no effort) waiting for you and your friends at the end of a meal.

Local Gin Jello

Ingredients

1 package instant Jello (we used Wild Raspberry flavor)

6 oz. Victoria gin (or other local substitute if you live elsewhere)

8 0z. fruit juice (we used Dole pineapple orange banana)

Water

Directions

Put the Jello powder in a bowl.

Put 4 ounces of Victoria gin into a measuring cup. Fill the rest of the way with boiling water. Pour this into the bowl, and mix until the powder is dissolved.

Put 8 ounces of cold juice in the measuring cup. Add 2 more ounces of gin. Fill the rest of the way with cool tap water. Pour this into the bowl, and stir.

Divide the liquid into four ramekin cups (the type you cook creme brulee in).

Put in the fridge and let sit for 5 hours.

Serve and enjoy responsibly unrepentantly.

Serves 4.

Poor meal planning can sometimes lead to delicious leavings that are combined into something tenfold more awesome, a veritable Megazord of deliciousness that would make Dr. Atkins spin in his grave.

Shell Pasta With Scavenger Sauce

Ingredients

2 cups dry shell pasta

1 jar of tomato sauce, your choice (we used Catelli Garden Select Country Mushroom)

6 strips of bacon

4 small tomatoes

1 cup of mozzarella

3 corn on the cobs or roughly 1.5 cups of corn nibblets

A handful of fresh basil leaves

Directions

Dice up raw bacon strips and set aside in a bowl.

Strip your corn cobs of nibblets and add to the bacon bowl, or simply add your cups of nibblets to the bacon bowl.

Dice your tomatoes and set aside in a different bowl.

Tear up the basil and set aside in the tomato bowl.

Put a large pot of salted water on the stove to boil on high.

Heat a pan to medium, with no oil.

While the pan is heating, put a medium pot on the stove and put your jar of tomato sauce in this.

When the pan is hot, add the bowl of bacon and corn.

While the bacon and corn are sizzling away, dice up your cheese. Or, if you’re lucky enough to have a cheese grater, grate it. Put half into the pot of tomato sauce, keep the other half for adding as a topping later.

Stir your bacon and corn. When the bacon is cooked crispy and the corn is charred a little, add your tomatoes and basil and turn the heat down to low. Keep stirring.

Add pasta to the water when it boils, stir it, and let it do its thing.

Turn on the burner with the pot of tomato sauce and cheese on it, to med-low.

Turn off the pan of bacon-corn-basil-tomato glory, and carefully add it to the pot of tomato sauce and cheese. Stir.

When pasta is el dente, strain and butter and salt to taste. Turn off the sauce and all burners.

Serve yourself some pasta, top it with your finished sauce and a bit of grated cheese.

Enjoy.

Suggestion: Add some minced garlic to the bacon and corn cooking stage, if you have it.

An unexpectedly delicious marriage between the Philippines and the Ukraine that won’t dent the wallet too badly. (And your Cooking skill barely needs to have 5 XP in it.)

Sambal Bacon Perogies

Ingredients

12 Cheemo frozen perogies – Any flavor you like (We used 3 cheese)

4 strips of bacon

1 cup frozen peas/corn/beans mix

2 oz. Sambal Oelek chili sauce (or to desired taste/spiciness)

Directions

Take a large skillet and preheat it on medium with a tiny drop of oil.

When it’s hot, add the bacon. Cook bacon until soft, and add the dozen perogies on top of it. Cover with a lid, and let simmer for a while.

Flip the perogies and the bacon (by pushing them all around with a spatula), cook another few minutes.

When the bacon is reaching desired consistency and the perogies are soft and maybe even turning brown, add 1 cup vegetable mix. Cover again, and turn up heat to med-high.

Keep an eye on things – you want your perogies lightly browned, bacon slightly crispy. At the last minute, add Sambal and stir all together.

Turn off heat and serve.

Optional: A dollop of sour cream.  Can increase frozen vegetables to 2 cups for more of that “nutrition” stuff.

Serves 2.

Nothing opens your eyes to the subtle charms and uncharted sights of your city like the realization that everything you take for granted will be no longer accessible to you in a very short time. Once I leave, I don’t know when I’ll ever come back here.

So how do I make the best of my time?

If all goes according to plan, this time next year I will be standing in a flat in Toronto with my meager possessions, not having a panic attack as I prepare to undertake a Master’s degree at University there.

If part goes according to plan, this time next year I will perhaps be in Montreal or Vancouver.

Regardless, unless there is a catastrophic intervention of the Fates against my aims, this time next year I will no longer call the city in which I have dwelt for the past fifteen years my home. So it’s time to say a thorough goodbye.

That’s not to say I haven’t enjoyed Victoria, haven’t appreciated it – on the contrary, I’m simply, suddenly, acutely aware that I have not explored nor exploited this city’s avenues and charms to their fullest.

Oh, I’ve been to the Wax Museum, the Undersea Gardens, Butchart Gardens, and many of those things tourists enjoy here. I’ve sampled much of the local cuisine, and patronized many local stores that only Victorians know or care about. Markets, events, public squares, I’ve dabbled in.

But I know there are gems not yet on my radar, turf unconquered. I’m opening my Farewell Victoria List to suggestions, and I’ll be updating and crossing off my “tasks” as the year progresses. Don’t hesitate to propose something to me, either in comment here, or through one of the ways you can contact me. Places to go, things to do, I want it all. Help me build my list.

The “Farewell, Victoria!” List

• Eat at the Brasserie L’Ecole
• Eat at Konpira
• Spend an afternoon shopping and snacking along Cook St. (Noted shops to investigate: “Pretty,” “The Little Piggy,” that tea store I forget the name of…)
• Go kayaking in the inner harbour

In my Professor Seagull-like need to feel like I’m building some chronicle which will withstand the fallibility of memory – and also to simply point out the diamonds buried in the dense mulch of the Internet -  I have created a Tumblr.

You can see it here.

I suspect it will see more action than Bourchol, as it’s far easier to recognize and point out something interesting or great than it is to say something interesting or great about it.

Many medical historians choose to focus their studies on the social history elements of the history of medicine. Certainly, they may use quantifiable history and other techniques to support their thesis, but ultimately the majority of questions medical historians ask are intimately connected to the idea of how humans respond to disease, and why.

I had the pleasure of learning all about historical human responses to disease in a semester-long course about the history of epidemics. From the Black Death to AIDS, we looked at how diseases have been constructed and combated in both pre-scientific and post-scientific societies.

Naturally, my interest was piqued when I heard about this potentially pandemic swine flu.

I feel I owe it to potential history students of the future to make my observations on the reactions I’ve seen. (Nothing worse than scouring what seems like a juicy diary contemporary to an epidemic for some nice comments on your essay’s focal disease, only to come back empty handed. When time machines are invented, you 27th century kids reading this, feel free to come back and thank me for helping you out. Here’s a good thesis title too: “The 21st Century Swine Flu Epidemic: Privilege To LOL?”) Here follows my swine flu weather report.

There are two big categories of response which I’ve been privy to as Someone Who Uses The Internet(tm):

-Data sharing/contribution

-Humor

The first is fairly self-explanatory, and relates to sites like FluTracker (which, notably, is an upgrade from the first Google Map which was apparently unable to keep up with data and scaling demands. Let me also point out that the huge yellow “!” in the middle of the Pacific Ocean near California – right now a hotbed for swine flu – was kind of alarming before I realized it wasn’t a part of the data.)

Twitter has seen a fair few “X number of steps to avoid getting the swine flu” and “how to protect yourself and your loved ones” links. Most of the sites repeat the same information, filtered from authoritative sources like the NIH and CDC, etc. Wash your hands, wash your hands, wash your hands. And, perhaps, don’t go to Mexico – though the overriding sentiment I’ve been in touch with suggests that people are cancelling their trips for the pragmatic reason that everything is closed down there anyway.

Locally, a few reports of swine flu didn’t stop the local NHL playoff game between the Canucks and the Blackhawks at GM Place. Everything has been business as usual, with perhaps an increased presence of pump hand sanitizer.

The newscasts I’ve watched have seemed level-headed, though already some segments have begun to air that ask the question, ‘are we overreacting to swine flu?’ The “we” being the media primarily, but also governments and individuals. I can’t speak to individual and small group hysteria (which I’ve heard is circulating, but haven’t encountered myself), but I can certainly say that I’d rather see a government “overreact” with disease control than underestimate a viral opponent, particularly when dealing with a relatively new virus which had several early fatalities. It’s better to look back and say, “whoops” and feel embarrassed than to look back and say, “whoops” and feel dead.

While an air of sober inquiry characterizes most newscasts and data-sets available online to keep abreast of the latest developments, the swine flu jokes have flown so hard and fast that they’re all groaners now. Already. Being enjoined to cure swine flu with a bacon sandwich is commonplace, crying “swine flu!” with a laugh in response to any cough and sniffle is standard, and mocking anyone actually concerned about the ‘epidemic’ with melodramatic shouts of “the aporkalypse is here!” goes on both online and in real life. It seems amazing to me that in the space of roughly a week, our collective trepidation and curiosity dissolved utterly into comedy, and just as quickly, disinterest as the jokes grew stale.

In the wake of it, we’re left with blatantly humorous shirts like this one, and the unflappable chic of various designers offering a stylish alternative to the hypochondriac’s mask.

It seems like the internet generation isn’t holding its breath. With access to the latest to-the-second information, it’s easy to feel informed and to maintain a grasp of the disease’s scope both in terms of its spread and its morbidity rates. This feeling of control and perspective may be why dismissive humor was so prevalent so quickly in North America as a collective response to swine flu. It will be interesting to see how the view of the flu changes as the problem itself evolves. And, in the long term, if the way we access information has irrecovably altered our social relationship with transmittable diseases.

Aside from the Northwestern University’s (apparently halted?) efforts to translate Vesalius De Humani Corporis Fabrica, the final volume of the anatomist’s work (part of an ongoing translation effort by Dr. William Frank Richardson), has been completed. The books are available both in regular and collector’s editions here.

*rubs hands together* This will make systematic analysis of the Fabrica possible for us peons unable to read Latin!

I’m lucky enough to be in a situation where I love the career I’m building for myself. I didn’t always know that I wanted to be a historian, though. One significant moment which affirmed my choices happened this past fall while I was enrolled in a course on the history of the early printed book at the University of Victoria.  The class was tasked with engaging an early modern printed book in a hands-on project; rare enough at the undergraduate level, but made particularly special for me because the special collections department of the library just happened to have a book I’d particularly wanted to get my hands on for some time.

Vesalius’ anatomical masterpiece, the De Humani Corporis Fabrica Libri Septem.

This was the first time I would touch a book so old – 453 years old when I got to it. I’d seen images of the woodblocks from the De Humani online at the fantastic Historical Anatomies on the Web exhibit, but never had I experienced such an artifact firsthand.

It strikes me as unusual and tragic that only in rare cases do history undergraduates here get to experience their source material. Certainly this is a problem for premodern historians of Europe who live in Canada. Perhaps it’s different across the Atlantic where one is geographically closer to strongholds of artifacts and archives of a richer history. I was excited to almost ‘play at’ being a real historian – instead of relying on the work of other scholars, I’d get to throw my intellect at the real deal.

It was terrifically rewarding. I love books (as my entry about acquiring The Sot-Weed Factor will attest, perhaps I am obsessed), but I don’t think I was the only one in the class who felt something when being introduced to our source material for the first time.

Much of history is being digitized. This means that sources are being photographed, catalogued, put on the net, and made into databases. This is fantastic, and certainly makes my life as a Canadian undergraduate studying early modern and medieval European history a lot easier. But there’s an absence of emotional resonance with digital sources which I worry may fail to inspire future generations of historians. It took holding the De Humani in my arms for me to recognize that yes, my degree meant something, and that yes, if I kept going on with this history business I would truly love my career.

We all smelled each others’ books. I like to think that mine smelled the most delicious. It smelled of woodsmoke, heavy-gauge paper, history.

Working with the 1555 edition of the Fabrica made me recognize not only that I was in the right place, but also that I would be passionate about introducing people to slices of history on a firsthand basis, and that Vesalius would continue to be one of my pet pleasures amongst a panoply of historical topics I enjoy. (Secretly, I hope to adapt his life and story to film one day…)

Below, you can see the overview of the source which I was required to write as part of the project. It doesn’t express at all my emotional involvement with the text, but it does offer historical context and an example of the sort of thing that comes out, academically, from this type of experience.

The following is (c) me, 2008.

Andreas Vesalius is a significant case study in the sphere of early modern printing primarily for his contribution of the anatomy text De Humani Corporis Fabrica Libri Septem (or The Fabric of the Human Body in Seven Books). Charles O’Malley, chief Vesalius biographer, articulated the consensus of mid 20th-century medical historians when he described Vesalius as the “founder of modern anatomy.”(1)

Andreas Vesalius, or Andreas Van Wesele, was born in the city of Brussels in the year 1514 (December 31). Medicine ran, as it were, in his blood. His great grandfather had been civic physician of Brussels, his grandfather had served Emperor Maximilian as physician, and his father was employed as the apothecary of the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V.(2) Accordingly, Vesalius was afforded a rich education, studying Hebrew, Latin, and Greek in Louvain, and eventually medicine in Paris. His interest in Galenic anatomy was fostered through association with Sylvius and Guenther, who recognised Vesalius’ intellect and skills in medicine even at the age of 20.(3)

Anatomy became his passion, and once he had obtained his medical degree he proceeded to Padua where he was appointed surgeon-lecturer and anatomist. Andrew Cunningham suggests it was Vesalius’ charisma here that may have assisted in elevating the social status of the anatomist from sawbones to respected professional.(4)

Vesalius was not afraid to roll up his sleeves outside of the anatomy theatre. In 1539 he was involved in a dispute about bloodletting, namely confusion about the optimum spot from which to bleed to cure pleurisy. The controvery pitted traditional Arabists against the modern Galenists, hinging on a translation of a word within a Hippocratic manual. Vesalius sidestepped the meaning of the word and reported what he saw in the body itself – empirical observations he went on to publish, to no little scandal.(5) This set the tone for Vesalius’ career of stimulating debate and reassessment of practice amongst his peers  by putting higher value on contemporaneous anatomical observations than on the doctrines of ancient texts. These observations were to culminate in a text of his own, the De Humani Corporis Fabrica.

In 1543, the year the first edition of the De Humani Corporis Fabrica was published, Copernicus also published his work on heliocentric theory. It is the publication of the works of Copernicus and Vesalius that conventionally mark this year as the start of the Scientific Revolution.

The De Humani Corporis Fabrica is an impressively realized anatomy text. Vesalius’ earlier publishing experiences were smaller affairs, sketches for the accompaniment of his dissections, paraphrases of previous literature, and revisions not unlike the extant body of medical commentary.(6) The Fabrica was conceptually not unique in that it followed a Galenic form (by presenting the body in ’systems,’ for example, from skeleton to organs), but its execution and ultimate form made it an indispensible resource to the medical profession quickly after its publication.

Part of the Fabrica’s importance lies in its visual presentation, featuring many woodblock pictures of organs, limbs, and whole dissected bodies. These were the “most detailed, intricate and spectacular anatomical illustrations that the world had ever seen.”(7) Through showing the reader the body, Vesalius supported his textual corrections to the anatomies of Galen, anatomies primarily based on philosophical guesses and the dissection of animals simply because “force of circumstance” prevented him from dissecting humans.(8)

Vesalius was very invested in every step of the printing process, from inception to the writing of the text to its final publication. It is a book created with much care in its design and presentation, nothing short of a self-aware attempt to promote accurate anatomy as the best foundation for medical knowledge.

The Book Itself

Edition

The 1555 second edition of Vesalius’ De Humani Corporis Fabrica was printed in Basel by printer Johannes Oporinus. It contains the full text of the De Humani Corporis Fabrica and incorporates some of Vesalius’ revisions from the first edition.(9) (A significant revision is the description of vein valves, unknown in 1543.)(10)

Traces of Readers

Evidence of readers is in short supply. The title page bears a faded and scratched-out signature, and another name in the corner (presumably the ‘newer’ owner’s).

Book as Material Object

This edition is folio-sized and just over 800 pages thick.

Its covers are composed of leather and hard stock with decorative marbling. The title page consists of a full woodcut of the anatomy theatre in all its organised chaos. There is a full-page woodblock portrait depicting Vesalius himself gazing at the reader, displaying the muscles of a dissected arm. Beyond this is a preface addressing the Emperor Charles V.

The printed pages, arranged in quires of 3, feature crisply aligned right and left margins and Arabic page numbers at the top of each page. Each page is 49 lines.

The main text in Latin contains a number of typefaces, the bulk of it being of an unusually large sized Roman font, suggesting instructional rather than personal use.

There is also an Italic typeface in evidence, plus Greek and Hebrew integrated in the typecast relatively seamlessly. The Latin text demonstrates many of the conventional medieval shortcuts in writing, primarily joined letters and shorthand syllables.

Most pages feature signes de renuui, supertexts which correspond to smaller parts of accompanying woodblock anatomical diagrams. These woodblocks, created in Titian’s studio(11), were apparently improved in quality from the first edition’s run, with the exception of the “decidedly inferior” title cut(12). There is no rubrication or coloration, but initial letters are woodblock prints featuring medical scenes acted out by putti behind the inscribed letter itself.

—

(1) Andrew Cunningham, The Anatomical Renaissance (England: Ashgate, 1997), 3-4.

(2) Andrew Cunningham, The Anatomical Renaissance (England: Ashgate, 1997), 88.

(3) Andrew Cunningham, The Anatomical Renaissance (England: Ashgate, 1997), 89.

(4) Andrew Cunningham, The Anatomical Renaissance (England: Ashgate, 1997), 91.

(5) Andrew Cunningham, The Anatomical Renaissance (England: Ashgate, 1997), 101.

(6) Jeremy Norman & Co. Auction catalogue excerpt. San Francisco: 1977.

(7) Andrew Cunningham, The Anatomical Renaissance (England: Ashgate, 1997), 117.

(8) Andrew Cunningham, The Anatomical Renaissance (England: Ashgate, 1997), 117.

(9) Jeremy Norman & Co. Auction catalogue excerpt. San Francisco: 1977.

(10) Clinical Anatomy Associates, Inc., “Andreas Vesalius: A Biography,” http://www.clinicalanatomy.com/vesalius2.htm.

(11) Clinical Anatomy Associates, Inc., “Andreas Vesalius: A Biography,” http://www.clinicalanatomy.com/vesalius2.htm.

(12) Jeremy Norman & Co. Auction catalogue excerpt. San Francisco: 1977.

Bibliography

Clinical Anatomy Associates, Inc. “Andreas Vesalius: A Biography.” Richard S. Westfall. http://www.clinicalanatomy.com/vesalius2.htm (accessed Oct.9, 2008).

Cunningham, Andrew. The Anatomical Renaissance: The Resurrection of the Anatomical Projects of the Ancients. England: Ashgate, 1997.

Jeremy Norman & Co. Auction catalogue excerpt. San Francisco: 1977.

Montagu, M.F. Ashley. “Vesalius and the Galenists.” The Scientific Monthly 80, no.4 (April 1955): 230-239.