Science
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Last year, we brought you the news that the developers of the Stanley knife were descended from Thomas, Baron Stanley, subsequently Earl of Derby. Now we can announce that a great scientist and inventor was a Talbot, authentically descended from John “Old Talbot”, Earl of Shrewsbury and posthumous father-in-law to Edward IV. William Henry Fox…
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Sir Alec Jeffreys, the scientist who revealed the secrets of genetic fingerprinting, remembers the exact moment of his discovery. “It was 9.05 on the morning of Monday, September 10, 1984 – it’s seared into my memory,” he said. It may not be seared into ours in the same way, but we still marvel at the…
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We all know the amazing reconstruction of the head of Richard III, and the confirmation it gave of how he really had looked. Forget Shakespeare’s Richard III, the real man had been young, good-looking and altogether normal, except for scoliosis that affected his spine. But when he was dressed, it wouldn’t have shown, especially in…
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Ancient human remains can sometimes ‘speak’ to us through time and inform us not only of their own life stories, but how modern medical complaints came to be. Here is a case of a Franciscan friar’s mummified remains found in an old church in Ecuador that collapsed during an earthquake in 1949. The man, who…
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Here is an extract that I found interesting. It’s from a 1968 booklet titled Discovering London 3: Medieval London, by Kenneth Derwent, published by Macdonald, and while it doesn’t condemn Richard, a previous paragraph states that the disappearance of Edward V and his brother “were disposed of” and that “the circumstantial evidence points most strongly…
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Scoliosis treatments at the time of Richard III
“Tudor” propaganda, Battle of Bosworth, Eugenie of York, genetics, hormones, idiopathic scoliosism, Ipswich, James Blake, Kurt Cobain, Leicester Greyfriars, Liz Taylor, Liza Minelli, massage, Richard III, Richard III Society, Robert Lovell, scoliosis, Shakespeare, surgery, traction, Turkish baths, Usain BoltAfter centuries of slanders about Richard III, always named as “the hunchbacked king”, it was finally proved that he just suffered from scoliosis. He was not born with this condition but he probably started to suffer with it in his adolescence between 10 and 15. This is the so-called idiopathic scoliosis that can be, in…
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Another piece …
“confessions”, “Lambert Simnel”, “Perkin”, “Tudor” rebellions, Austin Friars, Battle of Bosworth, Brecon rebellion, Colchester, Deptford Bridge, Elizabeth Roberts, executions, Francis Viscount Lovell, Garden Tower, John Ashdown-Hill, John Earl of Lincoln, mtDNA evidence, Richard of Shrewsbury, sanctuary, Stafford brothers, Stoke Field, The Cornish Rebellion, torture, Tyburn, Westminster Abbey… on two of the major rebellions – Simnel and “Perkin” – against Henry VII. This article is from Voyager of History and we may soon be in a better position to know whether Richard of Shrewsbury could have been at Tyburn in 1499. During the same reign, there was also the Stafford-Lovell rebellion starting…
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The quoted passage below is from this source . “….What will happen to your bones after you die? Will they be venerated as relics? Buried with care by your loved ones? Preserved as part of a museum’s collection? Each of these treatments says something different about the value – religious, cultural, or scientific –…
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Last night I watched (on PBS America) a BBC2 Timewatch episode entitled The Mysteries of the Medieval Ship. It concerned the discovery, in June 2002, of a foundered/scuttled medieval vessel of some size, buried in the oozing mud of the Severn Sea – well, the oozing mud of the River Usk, at Newport, to be…
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Why does this article make me think of That Urn?