Today, we take a new look at some old pictures. The
University of Houston's College of Engineering
presents this series about the machines that make
our civilization run, and the people whose
ingenuity created them.
Who hasn't looked at
Hieronymus Bosch's pictures with the crawling
sensation that he's been shown a window into Hell?
Bosch painted his terrible visions of sin and human
folly between 1475 and 1516. We see the demons,
monsters, and fragments of beings that populate his
paintings. We wonder what drove the man. Art
historian Laurinda Dixon looks at his St. Anthony
triptych with a growing understanding of his real
We do know that Bosch drew on the folklore of his
day -- that 15th-century viewers recognized the
demons of their own mythology in his work. But
Dixon discovers something more. At least in this
St. Anthony painting, Bosch is transmuting the
pharmaceutical and medical technology of his day
The painting shows us stages of St. Anthony's life,
yet everywhere in its mad landscape we see elements
that make no sense to us: an amputated and
mummified human foot, a strange figure -- half
human, half vegetable, an egg-shaped structure
belching smoke and flame. What can be going on!
Dixon's answer is that during Bosch's life the
disease called St. Anthony's Fire was rampant.
Today we know that St. Anthony's Fire was caused by
a form of grain ergot. The symptoms included fiery
pain and gangrene that required amputations.
Furthermore, since ergot baked in bread dough forms
LSD, the disease also led to terrifying
hallucinations. Indeed, the witch-hangings that
went on in Salem, Massachusetts, a century later
occurred during an outbreak of rye ergot. Those
poor ladies, like the imagined viewers of Bosch's
triptych, were probably just high on acid.
So we dig deeper and find that amputated limbs were
saved during Bosch's time so they might be rejoined
to their owners at the last judgment. The odd
vegetable creature is painted in the shape of a
mandrake root. Mandrake was the herb used to stanch
the feverish pains of St. Anthony's Fire. The
egg-shaped building is exactly the shape of an
apothecary's retort -- the distillery used to
reduce medicinal herbs.
Element by element Dixon walks us through Bosch's
hallucinogenic scene. By the time she's done, we
don't see the ravings of a madman at all. We see
instead a wonderfully imaginative, but nevertheless
realistic, documentary. We see 15th-century medical
technology spelled out in metaphorical terms.
Bosch does what today's technical writers too often
fail to do. When he shows us the means for coping
with human misery, he shows us the nature and
texture of the misery as well. He binds a
technology to the human needs it serves.
I'm John Lienhard, at the University of Houston,
where we're interested in the way inventive minds