Category: H

The number of years a person is expected to live in good health.  

German archaeologist and excavator of Mycenae and Tiryns, but best known for his discovery of Troy. He began his career as an agent for an Amsterdam firm and, through the connections he built up, started his own business, very soon amassing a large fortune by selling arms during the Crimea War. Retiring at the age…

Theoretical fourth-dimensional space that allows space travelers to circumvent the absolute speed of light. In 1887, U.S. scholars Albert A. Michael- son (1852-1931) and Edward Morley (1838-1923) showed that the speed of light in a vacuum was a constant. In 1905, Albert Einstein (1879-1955) further demonstrated that the speed of light was an absolute in…

An immortal race of people living in a peaceful paradise high in the mountains of the Himalayas, as recounted by ancient Asian legends at the end of the 19th century. Novelist James Hilton based his book Lost Horizon on these legends. During the period of the British Raj in India, explorers in the far northeast…

A modern myth of the new age movement. The story of the hundredth monkey was first told by Lyall Watson in his book Life-tide: A Biology of the Unconscious (1979). According to Watson, four primatologists were observing monkeys living on the islands off Japan. They began to leave food for the monkeys to find and…

The ancient doctrine that elemental body fluids or humours (blood, phlegm, yellow bile, and black bile) are the physiologic and pathologic basis of health and disease. Also called humorism, fluidism, humoralism. Stressing the unity of the body and the strong interaction between mental and physical processes, humoral theory suggests that, provided one can discover the…

One of many cancer cures that became available in the United States in the 20th century. It was devised and marketed by a medically unqualified licensed naturopathy practitioner, Harry Mathias Hoxsey and practiced in his Dallas, Texas, Hoxsey Cancer Clinic from 1936. Hoxsey’s father had devised a cancer tonic, and his son, realizing that there…

The most famous escape artist in the history of stage magic. He is also the key figure in the conjuring profession’s long history of antagonism to spiritualism’s claims to demonstrate spirit contact. Born Ehrich Weiss on March 24, 1874, he grew up in Wisconsin, joined the circus, and began adult life as a trapeze artist,…

A Viennese mining engineer and co-author in 1913 of a massive tome, Glazial-Kosmogonic. The thesis of this magnum opus was that Earth, because it was first formed, has had several moons six or more in succession. Each of the moons had a catastrophic effect that accounts for Earth’s geological features. During the time human beings…

One of the many pseudoscientific ideas about Earth’s form size and shape. Some hollow Earth theories suppose Earth to be flat like a flapjack, and others suppose it to be spherical. But the most bizarre theory must be that we humans, along with the flora and fauna, are living on the inside shell of a…