What plague doctor meme?

I'm a nonbinary queer. I like mint and orange in my chocolate. I'm a writer! I like plague doctors but I do not abide by pseudosciences and quack healthcare

[the-stray-liger]

I can't give up. I have to see Willem Dafoe fucking the werewolf in Eggers' upcoming movie Werewulf

[creekfiend]

its so wild how dismissive ppl are about medieval bubonic plague PPE. that shit was seriously so fucking smart and we act like it doesn't count, bc people back then conceptualized the routes by which it worked differently than we do now. ppl just act like essentially it's an example of fundamentally getting something "wrong," and any benefits the PPE had must therefore have been incidental? when modern PPE for so many things has barely advanced from that very design, aside from materials and small details? BONKERS. BONKERS way to act about a technology that we have only improved on rather than rendered obsolete by reason of developing an alternative that is better. hubris, thy name is "human beings who are alive currently"

[kaijuno]

Idk if this is just my Sickly Kid Aesthetic coming though but that bubblegum flavored amoxicillin fucking slapped

[kaijuno]

6yo me was Off the shits on this

[medievaljournalist]

scientists have made a breakthrough in the cultivation of christobacteria from samples left on the holy grail, bringing us one step closer to a vaccine against divinity

[evilwizard]

idc about fluoride in the water supply im petitioning my congressman to add a drop of that mysterious green fluid that emits a ghostly green skull when you put it in

[evilwizard]

just one☝️drop a week could turn everyone sickly

[archaeologistproblems]

What the gold rush means to most people: Prospectors! Dusty mine cars on tracks in the wild west! Gold nuggets!

What the gold rush means to an archaeologist: Hmm, where on this 100-acre plot of land covered in contaminated mine tailings do I think these clowns might have buried barrels full of literal cyanide?

[archaeologistproblems]

How dare you leave this nugget hiding in the notes!

[garden-eel-draws]

Why were they burying barrels of cyanide? How and why would you even compile enough cyanide to fill multiple barrels???

[archaeologistproblems]

My friend let me introduce you to the terrifying process of cyanidation, wherein finely crushed ore containing traces of gold is made into a slurry by adding water, then transferred into vats known as “slime separators,” where potassium cyanide is then added to leach the gold into a liquid. Slaked lime is used to prevent the cyanide from going into full Murder Mode as hydrogen cyanide. The gold is then separated from the cyanide through one of a series of processes that I’m not really qualified to explain, but I think there are a few websites that talk about them if you want to google them.

But the key point here: from what I can tell, cyanide has been the main method of getting gold out of the ground for the last 120 years. (Yes, this process is still used today.) Before this technology came along, instead a thin coating of mercury was spread onto a copper plate, and the ore was allowed to wash over it. The gold stuck to the mercury, creating an amalgam, and then the amalgam was scraped off the plate and the mercury was boiled off (urk) to leave the gold behind.

And when processing mills shut down historically, why bother to dispose of your leftover deadly chemicals properly, when you can just bury them in your local tailings pile, which is already contaminated with mercury and arsenic? The known case of this happening in my local area was revealed through a bloom of “Prussian Blue” (ferro cyanide) on the surface of the tailings. Luckily, this is a fairly stable form of cyanide. Unluckily, geologists are crazier than archaeologists and they went ahead and dug a sample test unit right next to it, even knowing what it was, because science.

When I said to myself, “I’ll be an industrial archaeologist. It’ll be cool,” I did not foresee the terrifying knowledge it would unleash upon me.

[garden-eel-draws]

I’m from Goldrush Country and I didn’t know this. All the gold-mining-related historical attractions around here are about good old-fashioned panning and pick-axes. Now I’m incredibly glad I’ve never had any urge to go explore the suspiciously colorful hills left in the wake of various mining operations.

[archaeologistproblems]

Eek! Please don’t play in tailings piles and outflows folks, they are Bad News. “Oh but it’s lovely sand we want to take our ATVs out on it and let our kids build sandcastles” NO. DO NOT.

[garden-eel-draws]

Reblogging because some desert-dwellers might not know this. Yes, those pretty hills are probably within ATV driving distance of Amargosa, Ocotillo, Buttercup, Superstition or whatever other recreational area you might be camped out at, but rainbow-colored dirt is usually rainbow-colored for toxic reasons!

[archaeologistproblems]

Absolutely! And bear in mind too, not all tailings are brightly coloured - the ones in my area are just light grey. “Sand in spots where sand isn’t common” is sometimes the only warning sign.

[archaeologistproblems]

I’m reviving this post because I’m doing up a Health & Safety protocol for digging near a mining site and folks. I did the math based on some recent soil tests. The tailings near my test site contain enough arsenic that ½ teaspoon of soil (tailings) easily contains a fatal dose of arsenic for an adult. Please stay safe and wash your hands thoroughly before eating/drinking/smoking if you aren’t 100% certain what the dirt is like where you’re digging.

[thatdisasterauthor]

And this is why we found a whole quart of mercury in my grandparent’s basement! Old timey prospectors would really just do shit.

[can-i-make-image-descriptions]

[Image ID: Tumblr reply from highEmpressOfDirt reading: a different kind of Mine Sweeper /End ID]

[archaeologistproblems]

Thanks for the image description!

Since I’m seeing a few people tagging or commenting with the assumption that this post is about US history: this is a Canadian blog, based on my experiences in Canada, and this mine waste phenomenon is, unfortunately, a problem in much of the world. Nova Scotia, for example, had three separate “gold rush” phases from the 1860s to the 1930s.

Also, bonus content for those who are startled/fascinated by the arsenic concentrations, here’s a sample page from the Natural Resources Canada (NRCan) report by Mike Parsons et al., showing arsenic concentrations at Mooseland, which isn’t a site I’ve worked on, but is noteworthy because one soil sample was over one-quarter arsenic. The site I worked at with the “tablespoon to kill six people” calculation was less than half of that.

[Image ID: A map showing soil sample locations and numbers along the Tangier River in Nova Scotia near a historic gold mining stamp mill. The highest concentration is 256,000mg/kg, or 25.6% arsenic. To the south, a huge number of abandoned mine shafts are also shown in red.]

[the-stray-liger]

every time I see a new form of aesthetic plastic surgery I feel like we're never gonna escape white supremacy

[the-stray-liger]

Got a rec on youtube for a video about "eye color changing surgery" and it made me wanna hit myself really hard in the face with my frying pan to see if I could just knock myself out. The internalized hatred for all features that aren't white european, the way these people consider that having blue eyes somehow makes them superior. Brother we're never gonna make it

[bunjywunjy]

What's your opinion on vaccinating all of the mosquitoes?

if we can figure it out I'm all for it

[bunjywunjy]

but we have to give each individual mosquito a near-microscopic "I GOT VACCINATED" sticker. and a lollipop

[ryan-sometimes]

Today I gave myself chemical burns with the cleaning product I use for my bathroom. This would be an understandable mistake if I wasn’t literally a chemist. I have a degree. I’ve handled dangerous chemicals for years. I work in a lab. Me getting a chemical burn outside of work is on par with a professional chef accidentally burning themselves lighting a candle at home

[our-queer-experience]

[crazy-pages]

Antivaxxers who say shit like this get one chance to look at this graph, really look at it and think about it for an hour. They get one (1) singular "tHaT WAs juST sAnITATiOn imPRoviNg", and then they get to watch a 30 minute recording by an epidemiology historian explaining exactly why the timelines for that do not line up in any way shape or form.

And then if they persist they get fed into a woodchipper feet first.

[tockthewatchdog-deactivated2020]

i cant stop laughing

[redstonedust]

love when a character is a scientist and their speciality is science and they do science in a science lab. no specifics no clear goals no clue where their funding comes from. dont even worry about it. science.

[chips1977]

i wonder whats in this box of mustard gas

[zakiyah]

"ingredients you can pronounce" learn phonics. coward.

[sorryfortheraybans-deactivated2]

if i was a guy in the middle ages i would say “they’re called the four humours but i’m not laughing”

[actualized-animal]

tbh it’s a red flag that the inventor of chiropractic got the idea from a ghost. bones are like the #1 thing ghosts don’t have

[gay--dog]

punches you but my hand is coated in ibuprofen dust so it immediately cancels out and doesnt hurt