More in ‘medicine’

A drawing of Alice Augusta Bowlsby from an 1871 pamphlet called “The Great ‘Trunk Mystery’ of New York City”
New Yorkers sometimes complain that the city stinks. They have no idea. When New York was a horse-powered town, the stench of manure and urine was gag-inducing, especially in the dog days of summer. It was on ...

Measles is one of those childhood diseases that, like polio, has been all but eradicated in the United States, thanks to decades of aggressive government vaccination efforts. But New York’s ultra-Orthodox neighborhoods are suffering through their second outbreak in as many years—the direct result of large numbers of unvaccinated children being exposed to regular visitors ...

Melvin Konner
Circumcision, laws governing intercourse, eugenics, big noses, fleshy lips—all of these figure somewhere into notions of Jews and their physical selves. In the new book The Jewish Body, out now from Schocken and Nextbook’s Jewish Encounters Series, anthropologist and physician Melvin Konner explores some of these ideas.
He spoke with Nextbook about physical stereotypes of ...

Moses Maimonides was a Renaissance man before there was a Renaissance. A physician in Saladin’s court, a dazzling Torah scholar, a community leader, a daring philosopher whose greatest work—The Guide of the Perplexed—attempted to reconcile scientific knowledge with faith in God. He was a Jew living in a Muslim world, a rationalist living in a ...

The waters compassed me about, even to the soul: the depth closed me around about, the weeds were wrapped about my head. — Jonah 2:5
So cried out Jonah to the Lord, recalling how he had been “cast into the deep, in the midst of the seas,” before being taken up into the capacious warm body ...