Vaccines are all the buzz these days. Saturated with news coverage, we’ve absorbed new terms like spike protein and messenger RNA, and learned that some vaccines, like Pfizer-BioNTech’s and Moderna’s, are really a new breed. Without recent advances in biotechnology, we wouldn’t have these vaccines at all. Did you know that the polio vaccine, which...Read More

Susan Smith was born in 1847 into a farming family that raised pork in Weeksville, a section of Brooklyn, New York sandwiched between Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brownsville and Crown Heights. Her nine siblings became school teachers and principals, but she went into medicine, graduating as valedictorian from New York Medical College for Women in 1870. When she...Read More

I first saw these women at the Penobscot Marine Museum in Searsport, Maine. The obvious whimsy of the picture appealed to me, but I found myself thinking about it long after I had left the museum. Did that mean there was some deeper meaning for me and my work? Ida Crie took the photograph. She...Read More