strange but true...
Teeth from Chambers Gigglossary illustrated by Iain McIntosh.
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Phrenology (from Greek: phren, "mind"; and logos, "knowledge")
Phrenology is a theory which claims to be able to determine character,
personality traits, and criminality on the basis of the shape of the head
(reading "bumps"). Developed by German physician Franz Joseph Gall
around 1800, and very popular in the 19th century, it is now discredited
as a pseudoscience. Phrenology has however received credit as a
protoscience for having contributed to medical science the ideas that
the brain is the organ of the mind and that certain brain areas have
localized, specific functions (see in particular, Brodmann's areas).
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A Scottish Hercules
Hector "Hercules" MacSwinnery, the fattest scot of modern times, was
a character of legendary strength. At the Aboyne Highland Games, held
in a field outside the village in July 1891 when Hector was still only ten
years old, he tossed the caber so far it landed in the neighbouring
village of Tarland, killing three ducks and a sheep. Bulky Heck later
emigrated to the United States where he pursued a successful career
as a newspaper delivery boy
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Northern Light
Mary MacNab of Craighouse, Isle of Jura, was reputed to possess
the shiniest pate in the Western Isles. On stormy nights Mrs. MacNab's
coastguard husband Alexander, armed only with a hurricane lantern,
regularly used Mary's naked napper as a reflector to guide shipping
through the notorious Strait of Corrievrechan, at the northern tip of Jura.
When the toll of sunken ships had mounted to 100, however,
the islanders built a lighthouse.
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Robert Knox Anatomist
After 1815, the Royal Colleges of the United Kingdom had enforced an extension of anatomical examination in the medical curriculum, in the hope that dissecting bodies would become legal. It did not. In the 1820s, "Resurrectionism" was a century-established tradition of providing the bodies of the poor and homeless for dissection. The success of Knox's school bred further expectation for more and yet more corpses. If he taught according to what was known as ‘the French method’ the ratio would have had to approach one corpse per pupil.
In November 1827 William Hare became one such figure, when an indebted lodger died on him by chance. He was paid £7, 10 shillings for delivering the body to Knox. After 17 more transactions, in what became known as the West Port Murders, on 2 November 1828 Burke and Hare were caught, and the whole city convulsed with titillated horror, fed by ballads, broadsides and newspapers, at the terrible deeds of Burke, Hare and Knox.
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Oedipus Snark
Liberal Democrat MPs are nice, but not this one – even his mother detests him. He would like to be Prime Minister, of course, but will have to settle for something less. Lives in Dolphin Square. Meet the People from Corduroy Mansions
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Regensburg's ever-popular Hotel Angst.
A buzzing venue in this charming town.
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David Hume (1711 – 1776) was an 18th-century Scottish philosopher, economist, and historian, considered among the most important figures in the history of Western philosophy and the Scottish Enlightenment.
He attended the University of Edinburgh at the unusually early age of eleven.
Hume was the first great philosopher of the modern era to carve out a thoroughly naturalistic philosophy. This philosophy partly consisted in the rejection of the historically prevalent conception of human minds as being miniature versions of the Divine mind; a notion Edward Craig has entitled the ‘Image of God’ doctrine. This doctrine was associated with a trust in the powers of human reason and insight into reality, which powers possessed God’s certification. Hume’s scepticism came in his rejection of this ‘insight ideal’, and the (usually rationalistic) confidence derived from it that the world is as we represent it. Instead, the best we can do is to apply the best explanatory and empirical principles available to the investigation of human mental phenomena, issuing in a quasi-Newtonian project, Hume's ‘Science of Man’.
Hume was heavily influenced by empiricists John Locke and George Berkeley, along with various Francophone writers such as Pierre Bayle, and various figures on the Anglophone intellectual landscape such as Isaac Newton, Samuel Clarke, Francis Hutcheson, Adam Smith, and Joseph Butler.
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