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Searcher of the dead. Searchers of the dead, also known as plague-searchers or simply searchers, were people, mostly women, hired by parishes in London, England, to examine corpses and determine the cause of people's deaths. Their written documents containing statistical data linking sickness to fatality were then turned in to parish officials ...
In the winter of 1646, Pascal's 58-year-old father broke his hip when he slipped and fell on an icy street of Rouen; given the man's age and the state of medicine in the 17th century, a broken hip could be a very serious condition, perhaps even fatal. Rouen was home to two of the finest doctors in France, Deslandes and de la Bouteillerie.
The Great Plague of London, lasting from 1665 to 1666, was the last major epidemic of the bubonic plague to occur in England. It happened within the centuries-long Second Pandemic, a period of intermittent bubonic plague epidemics that originated in Central Asia in 1331 (the first year of the Black Death ), and included related diseases such as ...
Breaking wheel. The breaking wheel, also known as the execution wheel, the Wheel of Catherine or the ( Saint) Catherine ( 's) Wheel, was a torture method used for public execution primarily in Europe from antiquity through the Middle Ages up to the 19th century by breaking the bones of a criminal or bludgeoning them to death.
e. Pascal's wager is a philosophical argument advanced by Blaise Pascal (1623–1662), seventeenth-century French mathematician, philosopher, physicist, and theologian. [ 1] This argument posits that individuals essentially engage in a life-defining gamble regarding the belief in the existence of God . Pascal contends that a rational person ...
18th-century E.O. wheel with gamblers. The first form of roulette was devised in 18th-century France. Many historians believe Blaise Pascal introduced a primitive form of roulette in the 17th century in his search for a perpetual motion machine. [1] The roulette mechanism is a hybrid of a gaming wheel invented in 1720 and the Italian game ...
Russian roulette as depicted in the 1925 movie The Night Club. Russian roulette (Russian: Русская рулетка, romanized: Russkaya ruletka) is a potentially lethal game of chance in which a player places a single round in a revolver, spins the cylinder, places the muzzle against the head or body (of the opponent or themselves), and pulls the trigger.
Resurrectionists were body snatchers who were commonly employed by anatomists in the United Kingdom during the 18th and 19th centuries to exhume the bodies of the recently dead. Between 1506 and 1752 only a very few cadavers were available each year for anatomical research. The supply was increased when, in an attempt to intensify the deterrent ...