The conference was held in a famous old building, which is the oldest hospital in Venice and is still in use. The room we were in used to be the library. Right across the hall was the office of the WHO for the European region!!! I include some photos of the building below.

The conference:

Tom Harrington’s talk about the Brownstone Institute and a proposal to form a Brownstone Italy begins at 37 minutes.

My talk starts at 6 hrs 38 minutes, and is mostly in Italian. My wonderful translator was kind enough to take my slides and convert them to Italian. But she also read many of them to the audience as we did not think people in the back could read them, as well as doing a bang-up job translating what I said.

Look at the structure, which has been repaired at various times, while trying to retain as many original features as possible—or improve on them. Look at the inlaid marble floor, reminiscent of some of Italy’s most elaborate cathedrals. It is also worth noting that higher powers are being invoked to assist with the healing efforts of the hospital. Seems like that should be brought back, though in our post-modern world, not sure what it would take to do so.

Unfortunately the conference was on a Saturday, so no WHO apparatchiks were at work. Had they been, I would have asked them what they were up to. My impression is that the WHO is basically a narrative factory, and does not do a whole lot more than publish position papers constantly, leaving the actual work mostly to (free) staffers from the BMGF and similar industry hacks.

Below is the ceiling of the conference room we were in. I don’t think there is anything to compare with it in the US.

Below is another room in the hospital (Ospedale) with another fantastic 3D ceiling and painted murals on all the walls.

And in yet another area was a medical museum, with old instruments, but many priceless medical texts from the 1500s and 1600s. I wonder how they have been preserved. When I first studied anthrax, I read everything I could about it—which included some individual cases reported in the Boston Medical Journal, from the 1830s, that were in the basement of Harvard’s Countway medical library—and they were crumbling in my hands. The collection has since been moved.

The quality of the printing and the accuracy of the anatomic drawings impressed me.

But also the humor. Don’t let anyone tell you these people were not advanced.

According to Wikipedia, by 1600, Italy had over 3,000 active print shops. Gutenberg invented the printing press around 1440. You’d be hard pressed to find books today whose illustrations show this degree of precision. Are we going forwards or backwards?