Should Yoga Be More Than Exercise?
How should Westerners studying modern postural yoga think about the religious and medical systems in which it developed?
Green Sickness, the Disease of Virgins
In the mid-seventeenth century, John Graunt, the “father of English statistics,” claimed dozens of young women in London died of green sickness every year.
The Fear of Bare, Naked Ladies’ Faces
The mask, like the veil, is seen by the anxious West as concealing a racialized female subject in need of liberation from a backward culture.
The Pharaoh’s Curse or the Pharaoh’s Cure?
A toxic fungus from King Tutankhamun’s tomb yields cancer-fighting compounds.
Toxic? But It Has a Leaf on the Label!
Is it possible to produce common household products that are sustainable and safe?
Performing Forensics: Doctors Becoming Expert Witnesses
Doctors in skeptical Scotland had to persuade the courts to listen to them, in part because of the historical animosity between the professions of law and medicine.
How Interwar Britain Saved Their Dogs
Canine distemper became a major threat in Great Britain after World War I. Saving the nation’s dogs depended on an imperfect collaboration.
Crocodile of a Migraine? An Egyptian Rx
Why the ancient Egyptians did—or did not—recommended strapping a clay crocodile to an aching head.
Tapping Cultural Values Against Domestic Violence
Southeast Asian Americans navigated evolving cultural norms while building grassroots organizations to combat violence against women.