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| This reminded me of something! by Zsenitan 02/13/2009, 3:16pm PST | ||||
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| There was a guy in the 1640's or 1650's or so whose life was a hilarious joke: Nicholas Culpeper. He was a herbalist and a genuine all-original medical crank with at least three hairs up his ass:
1. local medical people should use local medical cures 2. local medical people are by and large scamming you 3. Nicholas Culpeper is not scamming you (4. Astrology rules all medicine!) These are not immediately unsound ideas, except the last, nor was Culpeper completely insane. Consequently Culpeper did something that ticked off the entire medical establishment of England at the time (doctors, all): he translated their book of cures from Latin to vulgar English, and published it. This had the ultimate effect of 1. Disclosing all the cool medical secrets to every literate Average Joe Plumber on the street 2. Highlighting how stupid and insane-o many of the cures were, like pounded sparrows and piss and whatnot. If you like plants and medical cranks and catalogs, you will probably enjoy Culpeper's Herbal, which is the colloquial name for his book The English Physitian (Expanded), and which contained everything from the Big Book Of English Doctors' Cures with all of what Culpeper considered wank removed, and a lot of other information about herbs put in. It's a very funny book! Mostly because it's liberally laced with Culpeper's invective vis a vis the state of medicine in 17th c. England, and what completely ignorant dickheads all doctors were at that time. And of course it's full of lush descriptions of herbs and ridiculous Harry-Potter-worthy depictions of their virtues and planetary alignments. The most famous of these herbal entries is, for lunacy entire, that of Wormwood. (there are 4 pages to leaf through, sorry guys.) I am getting to the part where this intersects with piracy now: first Culpeper pirated the Big Book etc., in a sense, and then his English Physitian was pirated by other publishers. In the 1653 edition of the E.P. there is a long foreword inveighing against pirates and their naughty antics and how to tell his book from the nasty mean fakes. Indeed piracy was incredibly widespread at this point in time, and nobody hoped to contain it. What I mean to say is that we are returning to piracy rather than developing it anew, but the difference here is that BitTorrent pirates are not for the most part pirating with the intention to make money off the pirated product. I think anyone who isn't pro-piracy is like an abused wife, as it is obvious that every extension of copyright has no impact on creativity except to make more of it illegal. |
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Those fucking Russians by 02/10/2009, 10:42pm PST  SNEAKY FUCKIN RUSSIAN by 02/10/2009, 11:26pm PST "There is no honour among gays" -- new saying I'm working on. by 02/11/2009, 1:44am PST The concept of a torrent site going pay is the funniest. by 02/11/2009, 9:54am PST They couldn't because it's super-rare and especially valuable to collectors. NT by 02/11/2009, 10:06am PST especially when all the seeders can't pay for the service and don't provide file NT by 02/13/2009, 11:55pm PST I'm admin of a torrent site specializing in a specific sub-genre of video games NT by 02/11/2009, 8:26am PST This reminded me of something! by 02/13/2009, 3:16pm PST |
