Meredith Small > Quotes

“The idea was to measure everything and “make measurable” that which could not clearly be measured, to quote Galileo. That testable world was then subject to observation, hypotheses, and repeated experiments, forming what we now call the scientific method. And that method, we now know, can be applied to any study of nature, including the human body and its diseases.”
― Meredith Small, Inventing the World: Venice and the Transformation of Western Civilization

“I have four pelvises on my desk. One is from a human woman who died not long ago.”
― Meredith Small, Our Babies, Ourselves: How Biology and Culture Shape the Way We Parent

“Venetians constructed the first outdoor swimming pool in the early 1900s on the barrier island of the Lido. From that, the British now call any outdoor swimming area, or a beach for swimming, a “lido.”
― Meredith Small, Inventing the World: Venice and the Transformation of Western Civilization

“the baby synchronized her heart rate to that of the mother or father when they approached, but she did not synchronize her heart rate to the stranger’s.98 These data suggest that babies and their caretakers are entwined in a homeostatic relationship, with the baby clicking in with the parents to achieve some sort of balance.”
― Meredith Small, Our Babies, Ourselves: How Biology and Culture Shape the Way We Parent

“Imposed isolation began with that thirty-day rule in 1348 but was then extended to forty days in 1403. The label “quarantine” stuck because cuarànta means “forty days”
― Meredith Small, Inventing the World: Venice and the Transformation of Western Civilization

“Making an elixir out of coffee beans was probably invented in Ethiopia, where the plant is endemic. From there, beans, still in their skins, mixed with animal fat, were traded to Yemen, right across the Red Sea from Ethiopia.”
― Meredith Small, Inventing the World: Venice and the Transformation of Western Civilization