Menstrual extraction

The Apicius manuscript (ca. 900 AD) of the monastery of Fulda in Germany, which was acquired in 1929 by the New York Academy of Medicine

Icebox used in cafés of Paris in the late 1800s

Coat of arms of the Indies Company, with the reclining figure representing the Mississippi River taken from Law's Compagnie d'Occident , and the motto Florebo quocumque ferar taken from Louis XIV's East India Company

Radium painters working in a factory

Menstrual extraction

Menstrual extraction — a handheld suction device called a Del-Em, invented by Lorraine Rothman in 1971 — lets women remove uterine contents outside any clinic. It was built from aquarium tubing and a mason jar.

Apicius

Marcus Gavius Apicius spent a fortune building Rome's most extravagant culinary reputation, then calculated his remaining wealth and drank poison — the reduced budget made life not worth living.

Rigoberta Menchú

Before turning twenty-three, Rigoberta Menchú had memorized the name and story of every neighbor disappeared in Guatemala's civil war. She dictated her testimony in eight days to anthropologist Elisabeth Burgos-Debray — in a second language.

Liu Ziye

Liu Ziye forced his own aunts into his imperial harem, declared them imperial concubines, then was stabbed to death by a palace servant at sixteen — his ministers had arranged the blade.

Icebox

Families paid the iceman daily for a 25-pound block of lake-harvested ice just to keep butter solid and milk unturned. When ice didn't arrive, the food rotted by afternoon.

John Law's Company

John Law — a Scottish gambler who killed a man in a duel — convinced France to replace gold with paper backed by Louisiana swampland. Within two years, the word 'millionaire' was coined, then the crash.

Radium Girls

Young women at the US Radium Corporation painted watch dials with their lips to point the brush; their jaws later crumbled and fell out. Company doctors falsified medical records while executives stockpiled internal warnings.

Tom Ketchum

Black Jack Ketchum's 1901 hanging in Clayton, New Mexico was miscalculated: the drop decapitated him cleanly. His body stood headless for a moment before collapsing, and the head was displayed separately to the waiting crowd.

John J. Muccio

A 1950 letter signed by U.S. Ambassador John Muccio authorized American soldiers to fire on Korean civilian refugees approaching front lines. The paper trail survived. An ally's civilians, cleared for killing by a diplomat's signature.