Category: Science/Technology

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O is for Oncology

Offering to the Egyptian deity, Imhotep, god of medicine and architecture. Painting by Ernest Board, 1912.

There is no treatment…

From an Egyptian medical text @1600 BCE describing removal of breast cancer tumor.

As a disease of the cells, cancer is likely the oldest disease on Earth. Oncology is the study of cancer, of tumors specifically, since tumors are how cancer shouts Hey, I’m here! to the body. Cancerous tumors have been found on fossils, both dinosaurs and fish from earlier ages. As soon as there were cellular life forms, there must have been cancer.

Before I go any further, F#CK Cancer. Though it’s not really cancer’s fault, that’s just what it is. It’s part of the natural world, and Mother Nature makes the rules, not me. Even so, F#CK Cancer.

I don’t know any Egyptian swear words, so I can’t translate that into hieroglyphics for you. But the Egyptians knew about cancer, as did the ancient Greeks, Indians, and Chinese. Other than finding skeletons with tumors, what we know now about what they knew then comes from what they wrote. And what they wrote shows that this scourge of our modern health system has been a scourge since they put up stone towers and started figuring out how to make bread.

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I is for Ice Cream


“Ancient” American ice house,, Louisiana October 1938, Library of Congress photo by Russell Lee.

Nearly five years ago, I wrote a version of this post after reading Who Ate the First Oyster?, Cody Cassidy’s marvelous book, which chronicles stories of individual firsts. My approach focuses globally rather than on firsts. So far we have journeyed around the world to see what humanity has created, from Siberia to Chile to Australia to Germany to Egypt and to the Fertile Crescent.

I’ve leaned into anthropology and archaeology fairly heavily, although today’s journey will be more standard history. For this particular topic, we need to stretch the boundaries of “ancient” forward a little, tiptoeing into the Middle Ages, to understand this marvelous creation. Really, it’s why probably humans learned to control fire, stand up, carry our babies with us, and build giant pyramids. We needed to develop knowledge and skills to invent Ice Cream.

The road to inventing ice cream was a bit circuitous and meandered from the ziggurat-days of Ur to the sophisticated empires of the Far East and back to Fertile Crescent. The most important part of the invention happened near the beginning. Because to make ice cream, you needed ice.

Lemon gelato in Venice. Photo by kajmeister.
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E is for Earthquake

Biblical illustration @1220 CE of a historical earthquake described in the book of Amos. National Museum of Portugal

I personally have felt several earthquakes, from big ones like Loma Prieta where the things fell off the shelves while I was shopping, to lots of small ones at home, because I live on the Hayward Fault. A month ago, a 3.9 twitch occurred less than 2 miles from my neighborhood, causing the house to “boom” and shake so hard that I thought we were going to get lifted off to Oz. My wife simply looked up and said, “Oh, earthquake,” which is usually what Californians do. You don’t know when earthquakes will happen, which is a blessing and a curse. I’ve not been through hurricanes, floods, or tornadoes, but I’m sure those are equally frightening. A reminder of our puniness in the face of Mother Nature.

Ancient people wrote about earthquakes, volcanoes, and other disasters. They were common enough that writers used them as metaphors as well as describing when they happened. This is why today’s post on Earthquakes isn’t precisely cheating in terms of Ancient Inventions. Clearly, earthquakes aren’t an invention. But history is.

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