Today is Copernicus’s 540th birthday. You may remember Copernicus as the man who said “Hey, what if the Earth went around the sun?” To which the Catholic Church replied “Hey, what if we set you on fire?”
I hate to be ‘that guy’, but the Catholic church never threatened him. His calendar reform and his ideas on heliocentricism weren’t even discussed at the Council of Trent and his works were seen as uncontroversial. Copernicus never faced any persecution directly or indirectly by the Holy See. In fact, Pope Gregory XIII used Copernicus works on heliocentrism to reform the calendar in 1582. It was only 75 years later that it was even brought up again by Galileo. The pope at the time was a conservative one and the Catholic church was desperately trying to counter Protestantism and the thirty years war, hence why the pope and the inquisition placed him under house arrest on suspicion of heresy, using Copernicus’ theories as their argument against him.
In the 1800s, the infamous Robert Liston
performed what was dubbed ‘the only
operation in history with a 300%
mortality rate.’ He rushed through a leg
amputation and failed to save his patient
(who died of gangrene), then cut off the
fingers of his assistant (who also died
of gangrene), and slashed through the
coat of a surgical spectator who was so
terrified his vitals had been cut that he
dropped dead from fright. Source
what would you think of a woman who addressed a club meeting of men by telling them how charming, how well gowned, how pretty, they were?
This is why I really like books that are set in oldey times with people who have views like this, and why it annoys me when people say but that’s not historically accurate
tbh, half the time ‘not historically accurate’ is code for ‘i wish things were still like my imaginary version of 19th century England only minus the cholera’
This just makes me absurdly happy, especially because it’s written by a man calling out other men for this shit.
“But they didn’t know better” you sure about that?
dude was so mad about this he was snarking in all caps
After Cambodian Aki Ra’s parents were
killed by the Khmer Rouge, they made
him a child soldier and forced him to set
up landmines. He later devoted his life to
removing landmines, collecting and
defusing over 50,000 of them with
only a pocket knife, a hoe, a stick,
and his bare hands.
Waiting for Winter 