Shipwrecks, dinosaurs, duels, natural disasters, revolutions, spoiled princesses, philandering popes and messy presidential elections made the news, and history, in regular contributor Angus Trumble’s 1824—the inaugural year of the first daily newspaper.
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Angus Trumble’s 1824 In Retrospect
By Angus Trumble
“‘A wonderful instrument called the Stethoscope…,’ reported The Times newspaper in London, ‘is now in complete vogue at Paris....It is quite a fashion if a person complains of a cough to have recourse to the miraculous tube which, however, cannot effect a cure but should you unfortunately perceive in the countenance of the doctor that he fancies certain symptoms exist it is very likely that a nervous person might become seriously indisposed and convert the supposition to reality....’”
Angus Trumble (1964–2022) was the director of the National Portrait Gallery in Canberra, Australia. He was also a senior research fellow at the National Museum of Australia, as well as a curator at the Yale Center for British Art and the Art Gallery of South Australia. Trumble wrote several books, including A Brief History of the Smile (Basic Books, 2004) and The Finger: A Handbook (Farrar Straus and Giroux, 2010). In 2015, he was named a fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities. In 2022, he was made an honorary fellow of his alma mater, Trinity College, Melbourne.