Natural Remedies and Why Witches Were Burned At the Stake

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http://www.greenmedinfo.com

Written By: Sayer Ji, Founder

Posted on: Sunday, September 2nd 2018

“Unless we put medical freedom into the Constitution the time will come when medicine will organize itself into an undercover dictatorship. To restrict the art of healing to doctors and deny equal privileges to others will constitute the Bastille of medical science. All such laws are un-American and despotic.”

~ Attributed to Dr. Benjamin Rush,
Signer of the Declaration of Independence

In Benjamin Rush’s time the medical dictatorship of which he spoke had not yet come to pass, and though magical potions like mercury and questionable techniques like bloodletting were used in colonial times, herbs were still considered and employed as legitimate medicines. Even if many wise women herbalists were eliminated as competition by being branded witches and sometimes murdered, the herbs themselves were not categorically demonized because no vast armory of pharmaceutical drugs had yet been created to supplant them.

The herbs and foods themselves have now been both vilified as dangerous and lampooned as completely ineffectual, generating the ridiculous contradiction that we are supposed to be dumb enough to accept as truth: namely, that they are both impotent and unsafe.

Given these circumstances confidence in the safety and efficacy of natural substances in the prevention and treatment of disease has not only waned, but the positive association between food and healing has been outright denied by medical authorities.  It is illegal for non-doctors to make health claims for natural substances even if thousands of years of use in folk medicine and a vast emerging body of scientific research now confirms their benefits.   You can’t say cherries cure gout even if its true. (truth is no longer the criteria that decides what you can or cannot say).

I started the website GreenMedInfo.com in August 2008 in order to provide free and convenient access to the massive amounts of research that have accumulated on the health benefits of natural substances over the past 50 years.  The government database known as Medline (which is freely searchable) contains over 28 million biomedical citations from over 5,000 scientific journals, many of which focus specifically on the therapeutic action of foods, vitamins and spices on serious, even life-threatening disease.

I believe that it is only through the free, uncensored and democratic dissemination of health information that we can secure our health freedom and through speaking truth to power, expose the fraud which is strictly profit-driven pharmaceutically-based medicine.

Feel free to explore the 45,000 + biomedical citations posted on GreenMedInfo.com that vindicate the safety and efficacy of natural substances in the prevention and treatment of disease. View the Research Dashaboard here.

Are you interested in natural medicine? Make sure to sign up for the upcoming complimentary access to the documentary, and get exclusive access to GreenMedInfo founder Sayer Ji’s interview here: REMEDY: Ancient Remedies for Chronic Illness. 

Sayer Ji is founder of Greenmedinfo.com, a reviewer at the International Journal of Human Nutrition and Functional Medicine, Co-founder and CEO of Systome Biomed, Vice Chairman of the Board of the National Health Federation, Steering Committee Member of the Global Non-GMO Foundation.

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The Peasants’ Revolt Of 1381 – Part Two (Medieval History Documentary)

Tony Robinson explores the major uprising across large parts of England in 1381, its origins, motives and aftermath.

The Worst Jobs in History: Dark Ages (Dark Ages Documentary)

Tony Robinson presents a series examining some of history’s least pleasant employment opportunities. He begins in the first millennium, trying his hand at everyday tasks including back-breaking mining by ancient Roman methods, and Saxon ploughing using wooden implements and oxen. He also enters the world of the Viking egg collector, which involved scaling cliff faces in search of guillemot eggs.

Art History Tweets That Prove Nothing Has Changed In 100s Of Years

 

Art aficionados like to pretend that there’s a very specific and complex science behind interpreting paintings. But as these humorous tweets reveal, the hidden messages are often pretty obvious, not to mention pretty funny!

These modern interpretations of centuries-old paintings come courtesy of Medieval Reactions, a wryly funny Twitter account that’s making people smile with its contemporary take on traditional artwork. And as you can see, it appears that the observations and dilemmas faced by our ancestors aren’t that much different to those of today! Don’t forget to vote for your favorite!

 

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Decoded: The mysterious Voynich manuscript has finally been explained (Maybe)

Source: Decoded: The mysterious Voynich manuscript has finally been explained — Secret History — Sott.net

http://www.sott.net

Annalee Newitz
Ars Techica
Fri, 08 Sep 2017  

 

Roughly translated, many parts of the Voynich Manuscript say that women should take a nice bath if they are feeling sick. Here you can see a woman doing just that.

History researcher says that it’s a mostly plagiarized guide to women’s health.

Since its discovery in 1912, the 15th century Voynich Manuscript has been a mystery and a cult phenomenon. Full of handwriting in an unknown language or code, the book is heavily illustrated with weird pictures of alien plants, naked women, strange objects, and zodiac symbols. Now, history researcher and television writer Nicholas Gibbs appears to have cracked the code, discovering that the book is actually a guide to women’s health that’s mostly plagiarized from other guides of the era.

Gibbs writes in the Times Literary Supplement that he was commissioned by a television network to analyze the Voynich Manuscript three years ago. Because the manuscript has been entirely digitized by Yale’s Beinecke Library, he could see tiny details in each page and pore over them at his leisure. His experience with medieval Latin and familiarity with ancient medical guides allowed him to uncover the first clues.

After looking at the so-called code for a while, Gibbs realized he was seeing a common form of medieval Latin abbreviations, often used in medical treatises about herbs. “From the herbarium incorporated into the Voynich manuscript, a standard pattern of abbreviations and ligatures emerged from each plant entry,” he wrote. “The abbreviations correspond to the standard pattern of words used in the Herbarium Apuleius Platonicus – aq = aqua (water), dq = decoque / decoctio (decoction), con = confundo (mix), ris = radacis / radix (root), s aiij = seminis ana iij (3 grains each), etc.” So this wasn’t a code at all; it was just shorthand. The text would have been very familiar to anyone at the time who was interested in medicine.

Astrological images appear throughout the book too, mostly because medieval doctors thought the positions of the stars and planets could affect health

Further study of the herbs and images in the book reminded Gibbs of other Latin medical texts. When he consulted the Trotula and De Balneis Puteolanis, two commonly copied medieval Latin medical books, he realized that a lot of the Voynich Manuscript’s text and images had been plagiarized directly from them (they, in turn, were copied in part from ancient Latin texts by Galen, Pliny, and Hippocrates). During the Middle Ages, it was very common for scribes to reproduce older texts to preserve the knowledge in them. There were no formal rules about copyright and authorship, and indeed books were extremely rare, so nobody complained.

Once he realized that the Voynich Manuscript was a medical textbook, Gibbs explained, it helped him understand the odd images in it. Pictures of plants referred to herbal medicines, and all the images of bathing women marked it out as a gynecological manual. Baths were often prescribed as medicine, and the Romans were particularly fond of the idea that a nice dip could cure all ills. Zodiac maps were included because ancient and medieval doctors believed that certain cures worked better under specific astrological signs. Gibbs even identified one image-copied, of course, from another manuscript-of women holding donut-shaped magnets in baths. Even back then, people believed in the pseudoscience of magnets. (The women’s pseudoscience health website Goop would fit right in during the 15th century.)

The Voynich Manuscript has been reliably dated to mere decades before the invention of the printing press, so it’s likely that its peculiar blend of plagiarism and curation was a dying format. Once people could just reproduce several copies of the original Trotula or De Balneis Puteolanis on a printing press, there would have been no need for scribes to painstakingly collate its information into a new, handwritten volume.

Gibbs concluded that it’s likely the Voynich Manuscript was a customized book, possibly created for one person, devoted mostly to women’s medicine. Other medieval Latin scholars will certainly want to weigh in, but the sheer mundanity of Gibbs’ discovery makes it sound plausible.

See for yourself! You can look at pages from the Voynich Manuscript here.

Comment: UPDATE from Ars Technica:

Scholars have started to debunk these claims about the Voynich manuscript, noting that the translation “makes no sense” and that a lot of the so-called original findings were done by other researchers.

As soon as Gibbs’ article hit the Internet, news about it spread rapidly through social media (we covered it at Ars too), arousing the skepticism of cipher geeks and scholars alike. As Harvard’s Houghton Library curator of early modern books John Overholt put it on Twitter, “We’re not buying this Voynich thing, right?” Medievalist Kate Wiles, an editor at History Today, replied, “I’ve yet to see a medievalist who does. Personally I object to his interpretation of abbreviations.”

[…]

However, this isn’t sitting well with people who actually read medieval Latin. Medieval Academy of America director Lisa Fagin Davis told The Atlantic‘s Sarah Zhang, “They’re not grammatically correct. It doesn’t result in Latin that makes sense.” She added, “Frankly I’m a little surprised the TLS published it…If they had simply sent to it to the Beinecke Library, they would have rebutted it in a heartbeat.” The Beinecke Library at Yale is where the Voynich Manuscript is currently kept. Davis noted that a big part of Gibbs’ claim rests on the idea that the Voynich Manuscript once had an index that would provide a key to the abbreviations. Unfortunately, he has no evidence for such an index, other than the fact that the book does have a few missing pages.

The idea that the book is a medical treatise on women’s health, however, might turn out to be correct. But that wasn’t Gibbs’ discovery. Many scholars and amateur sleuths had already reached that conclusion, using the same evidence that Gibbs did. Essentially, Gibbs rolled together a bunch of already-existing scholarship and did a highly speculative translation, without even consulting the librarians at the institute where the book resides.

Pakistani Christian sentenced to death for sending Islam-insulting poem via WhatsApp

I hate to break it to you but if your God /religion permits you to kill others who don’t believe, you have a fake God.

Source: Pakistani Christian sentenced to death for sending Islam-insulting poem via WhatsApp — RT News

RT News

15 Sep, 2017

FILE PHOTO Pakistani Christians © Mohsin Raza / Reuters

A Pakistani Christian has been handed a death sentence for allegedly sending a poem insulting Islam, in particular Prophet Mohammed, to a Muslim friend via WhatsApp. The friend reported him to police, annoyed by the Christian man’s affair with a Muslim girl, the defendant’s lawyer said.

“[Nadeem] James was handed a death sentence by the court Thursday on blasphemy charges,” James’ defence lawyer Anjum Wakeel told AFP Friday. Wakeel said James will “appeal the sentence in the high court as he has been framed by his friend [Yasir Bashir] who was annoyed over James’ affair with a Muslim girl.”

Read more

Pakistan to blame for its own ‘bad name’ – Malala Yousafzai

James was held inside the prison for safety reasons as local Muslim clerics repeatedly threatened his family, the lawyer added.

The story of James from the town of Sarai Alamgir in Punjab province hit the headlines in summer 2016.

James, 28, is “illiterate and works as a tailor”, according to the Rescue Christians charity group which fights persecution of Christians.

The group said Pakistani police also “intimidated” James’s family and arrested his sisters-in-law. “They were threatened with prosecution if they did not give up their brother,” the group said, adding that the women were later released.

In July 2016, James shared the details of the incident to the Rescue Christians group.
“… One of my friends sent me a WhatsApp message. I forwarded it to the Muslim friends as I was not educated and unaware of the contents written in the messages. [Now] they are after me to kill me as they believe that I have committed blasphemy against their prophet,” he stated.

Read more

Pakistani Christian burnt with rods after ‘befriending’ Muslim woman – report (GRAPHIC PHOTO)

The man continued, saying his Muslim friends “wanted to kill him” and sent a complaint to police who later raided his home and eventually arrested him.

“Nadeem is uneducated and could not have possibly sent that text message. I’m certain that Yasir Bashir downloaded the supposedly blasphemous text onto Nadeem’s phone and then forwarded it to his cell number to build a case against my brother,” the man’s sibling Shahbaz James, told the Morning Star News, an independent news service focusing on persecution of Christians.

The charge of blasphemy can carry heavy sentences in Pakistan. According to Amnesty International, “Pakistan’s blasphemy laws are often used against religious minorities.”

A 2016 Amnesty report ”shows how once a person is accused, they become ensnared in a system that offers them few protections, presumes them guilty, and fails to safeguard them against people willing to use violence.”

Medieval Disease Documentary: The Syphilis Enigma (49 min)

Timeline – World History Documentaries

Published on 7 Aug 2017 

In 1495 a new disease hit Europe. It was deadly, devastating and attacked those who were promiscuous, well-heeled and well-traveled. But what was Syphilis and where had it come from? The traditional view has been that syphilis was part of “the Columbian exchange” – one of the things, along with tobacco and the potato, that the New World gave the Old. Arriving in Spain in the 1490s with Columbus and his crew, this destructive new plague spread quickly across Europe, leaving no country, no city, no royal household untouched. But what if this assumption is wrong? There is evidence of syphilis in skeletons dug from sites in France, Italy and England. Bones found in a medieval graveyard in Hull show signs of the ravages of syphilis. But if syphilis was present in Europe before Columbus went to America, why was the 1495 outbreak so deadly? And why did everyone see it as an entirely new plague?