PUBLICATIONS: New Blog Post over at the Wellcome Collection



I have written a new blog post for the Wellcome Collection on the use of guide dogs by blind people in the Middle Ages.  You can find it here. 


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HISTORY OF MEDICINE: The Anglesey Leg

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C/W: Contains description of surgery and amputation.  The story of prosthetics is one of human ingenuity.  Based on the existing evidence the earliest entry in this story is of an individual who would eventually be buried near the ancient city of Thebes some time between 950 and 710 BC.  This individual at some point found themselves in need of a replacement big toe, and a prosthetic was made.  Their mummified remains, complete with their prosthetic toe, were discovered in AD 2000, and ten years later a team of biomechanical engineers would discover that the design of the prosthetic was such that it did not require the individual to wear any kind of specialist shoe to hold it in place - they could walk barefoot or in normal Egyptian sandals.  The previous earliest prosthetic we have (or rather had) physical evidence for dated from 300 BC - known as the Capua leg, named for the site of its discovery - it was held by the Royal College of Surgeons, but was destroye...
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This post summarises a thread I wrote on twitter in response to a tweet from Erik Wade regarding the assignment of biological sex to human remains.  Erik’s thread contains a number of incorrect assumptions both about how archaeological assignment of biological sex works, and about how these results are interpreted.  Also through use of particular terms it conflates a number of distinct issues.  This 8 point summary contains a couple of corrections for minor errors which crept in due to the problems of using speech-to-text software.  Speech to text software can’t always negotiate accents very well and in my case it often corrects ‘sex’ to ‘six / cepts / sepsis’ – which means I usually use gender as a placeholder and then correct by hand – occasionally I miss the odd one and it causes unintentional confusion.  I’ve also included a brief summary of some additional points made due to a dialogue with one particular individual.  All these points are within the bo...
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