| Apocrypha Now! Archive | |
by David Emery
The naked truth about Lady Godiva
08/28/01: First, the good news: Lady Godiva, the 11th-century noblewoman who according to legend rode naked on horseback through the streets of Coventry to persuade her husband, the Earl of Mercia, to stop taxing the peasants, really existed. Fragments of a stained glass window recently unearthed from the ruins of Coventry's original cathedral are believed to depict the actual face of Godiva, the bare facts of whose life and accomplishments are documented in the historical record. The face in the glass is described as "beautiful and crowned by wavy, golden hair."
The bad news is that Lady Godiva's famous ride almost certainly never happened. Historians say there's no evidence to conclude the story is anything more than folklore. The same goes for Peeping Tom, Godiva's creepy admirer. In fact, the first known mention of the prototypical voyeur is in a 17th-century retelling of the Lady Godiva legend, 600 years after the fact.
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"Only a dope would fall for the IQ hoax" 08/27/01: The G.W. Bush IQ hoax continues to stir up media controversy worldwide. This morning, the above headline graced an editorial by Imre Salusinszky of the Sydney Morning Herald, who informs us that an adviser to Democratic Senator Natasha Stott Despoja recently posted the full text of the Bush-bashing email on a political Website without acknowledging that it's bogus. Was the perpetrator aware it was only a joke? Was the senator informed of the hoax? "Until we get answers to these questions," Salusinszky writes, "I hardly think that it is the intelligence quotient of the President of the United States that is under a cloud." Previously: |
AMA journal says it was duped by author's tall tale
08/23/01: In a touching essay published in the October 18, 2000 issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association, Dr. Shetal Shah related an experience he supposedly had as a medical student working with native Yupik patients in a remote Alaskan village. An elderly man, a whaler in his youth but now too infirm to work, walked into the clinic one day not to be healed, Shah wrote, but to bid farewell before vanishing into the arctic wilderness to die alone in accordance with the customs of his people. Forced to weigh his own cultural presuppositions and professional oath against the demands of local tradition, Shah described how he could only watch, in the end, as the elder whose usefulness to the village was gone marched off with dignity into the cold morning fog.
Unfortunately, no such thing ever happened. JAMA admitted earlier this week that it had been duped; that Shah had invented the story for publication. The deception was exposed in the current issue in a letter to the editor from Dr. Michael D. Swenson, Shah's former supervisor in the village where the incident allegedly took place. "The events described in his story never happened," Swenson writes. The "tradition" Shah documented doesn't exist. The essay was "a piece of fiction."
Shah's response — that his account was "well within the limits of artistic license" — raises more questions than it answers.
Special thanks this week to Bryan Jennings.
