Learning to write in the tropics

 After four intense months in Dresden, during one of the hottest summers I have ever lived through, time came for me to move to what was suppose to be my home for the entire PhD. The small university town of Jena was chartered in 1230 and its university was founded in 1548. It is best known for having been the home of the German Romantic movement, home of such intellectuals a Friedrich Schiller  and Wolfgang Goethe. Walking through the small university town it is easy to find many a blue plaque identifying 'X" house as the home or birthplace of some well-known, long dead personage. What fascinated me the most was that it had managed to remain so small, for so many centuries, somehow it felt unchanged -minus the hideous communistoid tower right smack in the middle of an otherwise medieval/early modern town centre- since the 13th century. This feeling was helped by the fact that the medieval Catholic Church, only one in the town, had been Catholic since its foundation back in th...

 Living in Germany is difficult to describe, it is a beautiful country with a complicated past, it is materially very comfortable to live in Germany but dealing with Germans can be a pain in the neck and yet I made some great friends there. The contradictions abound from its history to the fact  that nowhere else in Western Europe, outside of Spain, will you find so many good Spanish speakers. A friend of mine from Oxford, the best dance partner I've ever had, embodies these contradictions, he is quite smart, a physicist, and you would never guess from his geeky exterior that he is a such a good dancer nor that he has such a passion for it. Coincidentally, he is one of those Spanish speakers.  The best way to begin with Germany is at the beginning of my encounter with the place, with my time in Dresden and  the Goethe Institute. We were given accommodation in a student house in the middle of an industrial park, of all places, that was next to a forest in the outskirt...

 I have recently been invited to talk on a podcast called Guatemala Global about my research and just life in general.  This has been an interesting and enlightening experience, making me wonder about my presentation skills and those rather annoying nervous ticks I have discovered I have while presenting. How can I get rid of them (is it even possible)? During last nights podcast the subject of alcohol and fermentation came up mainly because I learnt to drink with nuns.  I say that quite lightly but I am realising learning to drink amongst religious is not something that happens on a regular basis. I studied in Spain, particularly in wine country and a lot of wine was easily available. My body developed a high tolerance for alcohol quite quickly and this has remained with me through the years.  My one random nun comment led to a more extensive discussion of fermentation and alcohol creating, which brought me to the subject of alcohol consumption and fermentation duri...

 I have gotten this question a lot, especially in connection with a second question of "what does a historian of medicine do?" While it is fun to tell people that we solved long ago deaths -you know as detectives would do!- it can  be a bit more 'practical' than that. Most historians of medicine, at one point or other of their career, will end up teaching first and third year medical students. These classes will be clinic-related, as in they are classes in medical terminology or the ethics of medicine or they will be that fun class that the medical student remembers in later years, ie the one on the actual history of medicine. To study physicians, especially at the height of the 19th century when medics were trying really hard to be hard-core scientists, can be a journey into the bizarre. There was that time that Robert Koch ( if I am remembering correctly) swallowed a sample of tuberculosis bacilli to test out whether in fact that was the way of transmission. This is...

I remember it fairly clearly, my first day in Oxford. The bus from the airport went over Magdalen bridge and I panicked big time. Then I somehow found my way to St Cross some 10 minutes walking from the bus station with my two suitcases. The junior dean received me, since it was a Saturday, and there was no one else in the office to give me my key and just generally introduce me to the place. He very rightly guessed that on a Saturday, just landed from a transatlantic, I wouldn't have access to a bank account and lent me 20 pounds to make it to Monday. Bizarrely I don't remember his name but I do remember the name of the other dean, Morgan. Once the hectic moments of settling in had passed the panic returned. WTH was I doing there and how was I going to survive???? So I called the one friend I had in the place, Ruben, a guy I had met years before in London and who had started his doctorate the year before. He took me to this Chinese place, we got take out and ate in the MCR at ...

 Human dignity is inherent to all human beings from the time of conception to natural death. There was a time some years ago that it became my job to find sources, whether historical, literary, artistic, eastern or western, that represented and explained this concept. After undergrad I spent a year working at the Catholic University in Tegucigalpa, Honduras and after that I moved to Mexico and then New York interning and working for an organisation called the World Youth Alliance. Their central aim is to put at the centre of policy decisions the human dignity of the person. I worked on reformatting their staff and intern training material, the ideas was to internationalise it, and for me it was important to structure it in what I considered a logical progression.  I spent 6 months exclusively searching and reading texts that dealt with the concept of human dignity understood as inherent. This part was important because there is another understanding of dignity that was more co...

The third year of my degree rolled around with all its intensity. We had been warned by students of previous years that it had the toughest classes and they were not exaggerating.  While the first year had been a year of adapting to the new system the second year had flown by with the now known rhythm of the classes but the third year brought a change in what was expected of us. We were now being taught how to produce history, how to use the archives and the methods to be used. All other disciplines have a history of how they developed but how do you write a history of history? It seems a bit redundant but it is not. The best way to understand it is through the philosophy of history. The history of the debates and theories that formed the discipline of history. History's history can be traced to Herodotus, a greek historian that lived in the Persian empire in Halicarnassus, it can be said that there has always been someone writing down the history of what is going on. Now the moder...