Isolated from opium by the German chemist F. W. A. Sertürner around 1804, morphine (named after Morpheus, the Greek god of sleep and dreams) was used to treat opium addicts. Invented by Bayer Pharmaceuticals in 1898, heroin (derived from the Greek word for hero) was used to treat morphine addicts.
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Charles d’Éon de Beaumont went to Russia in 1755 as a secret correspondent of French king Louis XV. Disguised as a woman, he obtained an appointment as reader to a Romanov empress; he returned for a mission the next year dressed as a man. By the 1770s speculation about his gender reached such fervor that odds were quoted by London brokers. An 1810 postmortem finally confirmed that he was anatomically male; Marie Cole, his companion of fourteen years, reportedly “did not recover from the shock for many hours.”
Although many New York City theaters closed during the influenza pandemic of 1918, Broadway’s Plymouth Theater went ahead with its October 3 premiere of Leo Tolstoy’s Redemption. Frustrated by the audience’s coughing at one performance, lead actor John Barrymore returned to the stage after intermission and threw a “fair-sized sea bass” into the crowd, shouting, “Busy yourselves with this, you damned walruses!”
One of the oldest extant terrestrial globes, dating from around 1510, the Lenox, is the only map known to use the phrase “here be dragons,” designating an area in Southeast Asia near to the island of Komodo, known for its large lizards.
Maria Theresa, archduchess of Austria, queen of Hungary and Bohemia, advised son Ferdinand in 1771 not to support the Mozart family of musicians. “You ask me about taking the young Salzburger into your service. I do not know why, believing you have no need for a composer or useless people,” she wrote. “Furthermore, he has a large family.” The Mozart family had four members. Ferdinand did not make an offer.
When the seventh-century Japanese prince Shōtoku was having his tomb built, he told the laborers, “Cut here, trim there—I wish for no descendants.”
“You don’t need a brain to sleep” was a central takeaway for a team of biologists who found that Cassiopea, a genus of upside-down jellyfish, display signs of sleep deprivation when disturbed by water pulses at twenty-minute intervals throughout the night.
In 1993 Estelle Ellis, Seventeen magazine’s first promotion director, gave a speech at the Fashion Institute of Technology titled “What Is Fashion?” Ellis gave her answer. Fashion is a perpetual-motion machine expressed in four areas: “mode—the way we dress; manners—the way we express ourselves; mores—the way we live; and markets—the way we are defined demographically and psychologically.”
In 1965 Stanley Kubrick and Arthur C. Clarke discussed a film project, then called Journey Beyond the Stars. “Science-fiction films have always meant monsters or sex, so we have tried to find another term,” said Clarke. “The best we’ve been able to come up with is a space odyssey,” added Kubrick. “The far-flung islands Homer’s wonderful characters visited were no less remote to them than the planets our spacemen will soon be landing on are to us.”
While on his American lecture tour in 1882, Oscar Wilde drank elderberry wine with Walt Whitman; saw Niagara Falls, later noting, “Every American bride is taken there, and the sight of the stupendous waterfall must be one of the earliest, if not the keenest, disappointments in American married life”; read aloud passages from Benvenuto Cellini’s autobiography to miners in Colorado; and witnessed a lynching in Louisiana.
The Talmud tells of a third-century rabbi named Joseph who died, saw a heavenly paradise, returned to life, and told his father of a world to come that would be “the reverse of this one—those who are on top here were below there, and vice versa.” “My son,” said his father, “you have seen a corrected world.”
Paul Cézanne’s father, a banker, was fond of telling his son, “Young man, young man, think of the future! With genius you die, with money you live.” At least this is according to Émile Zola, who recalled the words of admonishment in one of his letters to his friend Paul. The two had first met as teenagers at boarding school in the 1850s.
In Britain in 60, Boudicca, queen of the Iceni tribe, led a revolt against the occupying Romans. According to the historian Tacitus, her forces killed seventy thousand people, sacking and burning the cities later known as St. Albans, Colchester, and London. “We must conquer in the line of battle or fall,” she announced before her final charge. “That is the fate of this woman; let men live on as slaves if they wish.”
A fifteenth-century Tunisian sex manual relates that “a big beard denotes a small mind” and tells of a long-bearded man who reads a quote to this effect on the back of a book. Afraid of being seen as a fool, he tries to trim his beard by setting it on fire but burns it off entirely. He then writes on the book below the quote, “These words are entirely true. I, who am now writing this, have proved their truth.”
Corporations, wrote Edward Coke in a 1613 legal decision, “have no souls,” for they are “invisible, immortal, and resteth only in intendment and consideration of the law.” A corporate body, Coke argued, can’t “do fealty, for an invisible body cannot be in person, nor can swear.”