Purpose of this blog

Ok, so I broke down and got a livejournal account, so I could post notes about my research and other stuff.

Right now what I'm really excited about is http://google.scholar.com, Google Scholar. It's not the be-all and end-all of research browsers, but it's a good adjunct to regular database searching, and for the people who don't have access to good index and/or library union catalog databases, it's a great boon. My co-workers at the library are fairly impressed with it, too.

Another thing I'm excited about is our library's trial account on Refworks. www.refworks.com
For those who are familiar with Endnote, it's like that but on the web. For everyone else, it's a bibliographic citation manager that lives on the web; it lets you import citations for books, articles, websites, etc. from index databases, and/or enter them individually; you can search your database of citations, you can sort it into folders and you can generate citations/bibliographies in whatever style you like. :) If the university doesn't get a subscription, I will probably buy a subscription of my own. :)

Medicine in History and Fantasy

Right now I'm working on materials for a panel discussion at Darkover convention, on medicine in history and fantasy. It's my personal conviction that a lot of fantasy medicine has been overly influenced by the early women's studies / alternative health mythos, and worse, many people seem to believe that that mythos is the true version of history; some of the rest of it is based on the rational-scientific mythos.

Much Fantasy is set in the pre-modern era, the middle ages, the so-called dark ages, and even the 1700s and 1800s. In most cases people have been presented with a canned version of history of medicine-- or rather 2 versions, one with the heroic physicians dragging the people out of the darkness of superstition, the other with the humble herb-using midwife who used tried and true remedies being persecuted by physicians and the church as a witch.

A good example of this is the character Juniper in Monica Furlong's _Wise Child_.

However, the historical picture is a great deal muddier than either idea. First of all, the difference between a physician and a non-physician empyric medical practitioner was one of status and to a limited extent, diagnosis techniques, in the pre-mdoern world. Both empyrics and physicians did things like cupping, bloodletting, using dangerous or disgusting substances; university trained physicians before about 1700 were more likely than empyrics to use astrology in diagnosis and treatment, but empyrics were more likely to use the doctrine of signatures.

(no subject)

Found a title:
No cure for the future: Disease and Medicine in Science Fiction and Fantasy (Contributions to the Study of Science Fiction and Fantasy)
by Gary Westfahl (Editor), George Slusser (Editor).
Greenwood Press (September 30, 2002)