Yes, and I don't know the answer to this, vison. I'm not sure whether this was intended as the grammatical expression "of humans" or as a categorical similar to the way we indicate species. Those designations are not genitive case. I can pass this along to my friend and see what he says. It is his thesis, not mine, and I brought it up here because we both had the same reaction -- how can this information not be mentioned anywhere when it stabs you in the eye to find such a thing in a shipping manifest.vison wrote:I asked a friend of mine who is a Latin scholar about "adeps humanis" and her response was: adeps soft or fat but
humanum for "of human beings", not "humanis".
A quibble, perhaps. But perhaps significant.
Regarding the makeup, though ... you see, it is very embarrassing for me to think that because of naivete I might be passing along information that is not only incorrect but patently impossible, so I spent some hours last night, in the middle of the night, trying to find either confirmation or disconfirmation of the fact that animal fat was used to cover smallpox scars.
Now this is not something that I picked up from the internet. I read it long ago in a book from our university library, before there was an internet. One of my daughters had some middle school or high school project to do on fashions in history or something like this. I routinely hunted up sources for them at our library and talked to them about their projects and discoveries and so on. I have a very clear memory of the impact this info made on us, that animal fat was used as makeup, and I thought that this at least should be confirmed or disconfirmed on the modern internet, even though I have no chance of remembering the name of the book we were reading at the time.
You know, hunting for this stuff on the internet is not as easy as it sounds, because the whole set of sources that you access is predicated on the key word that you use. I googled into the history of cosmetics, the history of smallpox, the history of animal fat ... ... trying to find the convergence between them, and for the first two hours at least I could not find any website, professional or amateur or commercial, that talked about these three things in conjunction (though I now know more about smallpox than I ever wanted to know).
But I did find it, ultimately - by knowing that it must exist somewhere if I once read it in a published source, even if what exists is a more modern discrediting of such notions.
I also found the explanation of why it was so difficult to find! - animal fat was so prevalent as a make-up base that in discussions of cosmetics as such it 'goes without mention' that this was the medium in which powders and colors were mixed. The powders were mostly metallic, which can be poisonous, as you noted, but they were not dusted on, they were painted on after being heated and then mixed into lard. The consistency of the result was that of honey, and apparently it hardened as it dried.
I located (among other things) a commercial site for an Italian cosmetics company that had a very enjoyable history of both the colors and the bases used to mix them from Roman times onward, with pics of the implements used for mixing and painting. Vegetable oils were used in some cases by the wealthy in ancient Rome; in Europe the solution of the nobility (if they eschewed animal fat for its smell) was egg white. 'Water based' makeups were achieved by having your servant spit on the powders or mix them in her mouth. But the overwhelmingly common base was animal fat.
(Fun Facts: Julius Caesar had a combover.)
What began to develop uniquely from the 16th ce to the third quarter of the 18th was the habit of plastering your face with this stuff to hide the disfigurement of smallpox. The hair-styling gel in all those tall coiffures was also lard, pure lard, and hair was rarely washed clean of it because this was considered bad for the health. When the lard would start to break down they would pour more lead powder on it.
Fat was considered more healthful than water. Did it go rancid? Yes! Did it stink? Yes! Did it attract rats? Yes!
Did it melt? Eventually, I suppose it would have, but not immediately because the powders mixed into the fat were so heavy they prevented decomposition. This is my conclusion based on reading that the makeup would break down by caking and cracking. It was not washed off, it had to be scraped off, and women had to remember not to smile (like modern models) because this would cause cracks to appear in their faces, lol!
The white powder mixed into the fat as the "foundation" for other colors was a lead powder, and the same thing was used apparently from the days of the Roman Empire through Revolutionary War times in America. They called it 'biacca' in Rome and 'ceruse' later in Europe.
Notions of hygiene in those centures were just ... really different from ours! It surprised me to read that animal fat was used as the base for all foundation makeups until quite recently, i.e. 20th ce. It was Max Factor who developed alternative oil-based make-ups for the movie industry, because the old greasepaints were too shiny under camera. And water based make-up using something other than spit was developed commercially during my lifetime, so ... very recent, historically speaking.
The reason that wholesale plastering of the face with a lead/animal fat mixture stopped in the late 18th ce was because variolation against smallpox (predecessor to vaccination) had taken hold in both Europe and the US and the incidence of smallpox, particularly the most virulent strain, fell dramatically.
I did find other sites that talked about the poor woman's alternative, which was bacon grease, used both as a cosmetic and as a moisturizer.
You know .... there's a lot of information that just ... goes against our grain, and is very hard to accept on first viewing. I am not generally of the temperment to dismiss things just because I never heard them before. I usually ask myself whether they violate other information that I've acquired from other sources (and I know you do this too!), and sometimes that means going back to the other sources and asking whether they can possibly be right, and sometimes finding that they were not.
One of the things I gleaned from the interview with Jackson about his book (summarized briefly above) is that "astonishment" is a kind of political statement too ... and so have I experienced it as such on many occassions.
Jackson talked about one incident that Stokely Carmichael relates on page ~400 of a 500-page book, that when he would tell people he suspected the US government had given him cancer, their response would be that the US government does not have the technology to do this. (Not unlike our response to Rev. Wright's charges about AIDS.) And he would think, so what does that mean? That you basically agree with me that if they did have the technology they would do it? (And we see in the Tuskegee study, and hundreds of other such studies I found reported in academic literature advertised on the web, that when they have the technology to do it they do do it. So on what basis, exactly, are we astonished?)
We've had a similar discussion once before about the population of the Americas just before European colonization, and I mentioned the estimates I had heard from anthropologists, based on the number of languages known to be extant and the amount of area covered, that it must have been around 200 million. This was met with "astonishment." Outside estimate of historians is 80 million. Median estimate is 20-30 million. But then you'll go into the very same academic sources, and discover that a 15th century Spanish census in Mexico reports 20 million people living there (which included modern Belize, Guatemala, and parts of Honduras as well as much of the southwest US) ... and something about this can't be right! Either the Spanish census is wrong or the historical estimates for the two continents plus bridge are wrong, because it can't be that everyone in North and South America lived in the area known then as Mexico!
There is a strong bias to conclude that all those people cannot have died because all those people did not exist in the first place. I take this bias into account when I conclude what to believe and what not to believe, because I know from personal experience that if one compares, for example, the counts of indigenous peoples living on one island of Indonesia, taken by visiting anthropologists, and the counts taken by the government, one of them is either under-reporting or over-reporting by a factor of 6. The next question becomes: what other information can we bring to bear that might decide which estimate is more reasonable? In the case of Indonesia (where I was involved in an economic white paper for the Interior ministry), the area over which the population was spread was much too large to support a contention that a few thousand people were living there in contiguous, viable tribes. The estimates of the anthropologists were far more likely to be correct, as was their estimation of territorial distribution. (We were attempting to estimate potential costs of transmigration.)
I run into this kind of discrepancy all the time - or did when I was doing this kind of work - because nearly all of my "official" data is self-reported by governments, and they have a vested interest in painting a particular kind of picture. Independent social scientists can have that kind of bias too, and that same vested interest just with a different objective, and these things have to be considered in the conclusions one draws. If I multiply the outside estimates for the Americas by six, I get a number that "feels" to me way too high - half a billion - but if I multiple the median estimate by six, I get a number that feels to me much more plausible, and consistent with the amount of time it takes languages to evolve, the amount of territory involved and the land needs of hunter-gatherer populations (given that carrying capacity is the main determinant of population), and the small regional census figures that are more likely to be accurate than the ones that supposedly covered vast charter areas.
We have Spanish census data from Belize and from Haita/Dominican republic (Hispanola) that both report approximately 2 million people living in those area. This is probably an exaggeration, for purposes of impressing the King! - it can easily be double the actual population. But even if doubled, the numbers suggest to me the same conclusion, that 20 million would be much, much too low an estimate for the entire western hemisphere. This is just an example of official "astonishment" that serves, ultimately, a political purpose, a cultural self-perception that is likely biased.
Anyway, I don't know how I got off onto that!! Well ... part of it is being astonished myself at some of the "conclusions" being passed around in this campaign that seem to me totally off the wall, while far more likely scenarios are dismissed as impossible because they do not fit our cultural self-perceptions.