A weekly check-up of gender, medicine, and history in the news.
- 10 snack foods that started out as medicines.
- 3 ways cooking has changed over the past 300 years.
- Did the Temperance Movement almost kill root beer?
- Do babies develop food allergies through damaged skin?
- Judge in UK authorizes a forced sterilization.
- Birth, infanticide and midwifery in early modern Scotland.
- Germany to offer three genders on birth certificates.
- What’s it like to be a patient in a 19th-century madhouse?
- How the “Wild West” really looked.
- The mystery of the vanishing gun inventor.
- Badger digs up a medieval treasure in Germany.
- Aging Chinese population come to terms with Cultural Revolution.
- Haunting photos of cathedrals destroyed in WWI.
- Rare photos of Paris’ mechanical sidewalks.
- A 1960s pamphlet instructs children how to tell the good people from the bad.
- And finally, Star Wars characters urge you to vaccinate!
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The discussion of Coca-Cola’s health-giving effects, in the first of these articles, is curiously deceptive.
Carbonated water had, of course, been popular since that ingenious Huguenot, Mr Schweppe, introduced his drink flavoured with the extract of cinchona bark in 1771. Being carbonated would prevent it from becoming a stagnant source of miasmatic vapours and keep it potable on board ship, while the cinchona would be useful as prophylactic against the ague.
The distinctively medicinal feature of Coca-Cola in its early years was that it was a coca wine (NOT a cocoa wine as is often stated), modelled on the French drink. This was why it was touted as curing, or alleviating the symptoms of, so many ailments. Not until Americans began to panic about recreational drugs was the coca removed from the recipe, to be replaced with caffeine.