The Candy Land Game and Its Link to Polio

We all remember playing Candy Land, following the brightly colored path through the peppermint stick forest and gumdrop mountains, past the lollipop woods to get to Home Sweet Home. However, few people realize that this game would never have been invented if not for...

Tennessee Williams and How Illness Affected What He Wrote

The Glass Menagerie launched Tennessee Williams’ Broadway career. You may remember the character Laura, the abnormally shy, dreamy sister of Tom, the protagonist. She spent her time escaping from life, drawn into a world of glass figurines. It’s a largely...

How Illness Changed Robert Louis Stevenson’s Life

Robert Lewis Stevenson (1850-1894) was one of the best-known authors of his day. He was a paradox; he traveled widely, yet was weak and sickly all of his life. He spent much of his life in bed or in a sickroom, yet he wrote wonderful adventures like Kidnapped and...

Do You Need a Mad Stone in Your First Aid Kit?

First of all, what in the world is a mad stone? Smooth, odd-shaped, unusually colored, of almost any size, mad stones are miraculous objects possessing healing powers. They are actually bezoars, hairball-like concretions found in the stomachs of animals such as deer...

How Did Edgar Allan Poe Really Die?

Famous writer Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849) was the first American writer to fully support himself by his writing. He single-handedly started the detective genre, as well as the science fiction genre. He is famous for his mysteries and Gothic horror stories. When we...