Every year on August 13, it is 'Left-Handers Day'. This day for left-handers was established in 1976 to draw attention to the minor and major inconveniences left-handers face in our right-handed world. In...
My wife has diabetes and injects insulin every day. This medication lowers blood sugar levels. Diabetes is characterized by a deficiency of insulin. This year marks the 100th anniversary of the discovery of insulin. Fortunately for all patients, because...
June 12 is the 'International Day Against Child Labour'. During the Golden Age, the cloth industry flourished in Leiden. Children as young as 6 were also employed in this industry. They had to spin and were called 'Spinning Children'. The famous Van Houten Child Labor Act from...
Someone who is involved in guiding pregnancy and childbirth is called a midwife. In the past, it was 'vroedkundige'. A woman was a midwife, but a man was not a male midwife, but a master midwife. I could not have foreseen that....
Leiden has been awarded the title of European City of Science for the year 2022. A prestigious title that entails that Leiden will be the host city in 2022 for the tenth edition of the largest biennial multidisciplinary science congress of...
England experienced one of its most turbulent periods in history during the 17th century. Between 1642 and 1651, the English Civil War raged between Parliament on the one hand and the Royalists on the other. A plague epidemic ravaged London in 1665–1666 while the...
When I first saw the Royal Mail Europa stamps, issued on September 27, 1994, I had to think for a moment about what the images were supposed to represent. But the leaflet accompanying the first-day envelope immediately provided the solution: the...
Greek medicine reached such heights as early as antiquity that it remained the scientific basis of all medical science without significant changes well into the 19th century. The poems of Homer already show...
Skeletons have been quite in the news lately. First came the report that a skeleton at a school in New Zealand turned out to be made of real human bones. A week later, it was about a skeleton again. In a te...
The Queen Wilhelmina Fund was established on August 29, 1949. Queen Wilhelmina had received a National Gift a year earlier on the occasion of her Golden Jubilee. She decided to spend this amount, approximately 2 million guilders, on the fight against cancer. About cancer...
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