Scandals, conflicts and controversies
Ether Dome anaesthesia 1846: the story of the October morning that ended surgical pain, and the bitter four-way dispute over who deserved the credit.
Nathaniel Eaton served as Harvard College’s first master from 1638 until his dismissal in September 1639, when the Massachusetts Bay General Court found him guilty of savage beatings of students and the systematic near-starvation of the men in his charge, making him the first administrator in Harvard’s history and the first to be removed from
Introduction to Peter Abelard Héloïse Paris In the winter of 1117, a cathedral canon in Paris named Fulbert made what he would later describe as the worst decision of his life. He invited a philosopher into his house. Peter Abelard, then the most celebrated teacher in Europe and already a man who had made powerful
Why are the Oxford town and gown riots 1355 still relevant? For nearly nine centuries, Oxford has been defined by an uneasy coexistence: a proud English market town forced to share its streets, its water, and its identity with a university that answered, for much of its history, to nobody but God and the Crown.
