magiadoreal

Last October, the New York Academy of Medicine hosted a “wonder cabinet” — a day of talks and films about medicine, the human body and much more. As I took my seat for one of the sessions, I recognized two young men sitting near me. They were former students, whose senior theses I had supervised years before. It was fun to learn how they were doing, one in law and one in medical school, and to see that they still found time to hear about 18th-century anatomical models and books bound in human skin. But it was even more fun to remember them as students. During their college days my seminar read a very good — but very long — book about classical antiquity in 19th-century Germany. The two of them came in wearing enormous fake beards, switched on their laptops to play the “Ride of the Valkyries” and rose to recite a satire that began “I am the spirit of German philology.” Their cheerful mockery of me and my assigned text sparked a searching and substantive discussio...