Martyrs

Martyrs, Martyrdom, and the Comedia

Heroes & Martyrs of Quality and Safety

WASTE NOT William Edwards Deming, the first child of William Albert Deming and Pluma Irene Edwards, was born on 14 October 1900 in Sioux City, Iowa. His father worked mainly in freelance legal work and his mother gave music lessons on their grand Kimball piano. As a child, Deming grew up in meagre conditions. He and his family lived for years in a tarpaper shack. As a boy he worked at a hotel f...

The Greenock medical martyrs of 1864-65.

In the nineteenth century it was not uncommon for doctors to die from infectious diseases, but the death of five young physicians in Greenock--one third of the medical profession in a medium-sized Scottish town--from epidemic typhus, during four consecutive months in 1864-65, was an unusual event. This paper describes the lives and backgrounds of these five doctors, whose deaths in the line of ...

Martyrs in Mesopotamia: The Logic of Suicide Terrorism in Iraq

Although the tactic of suicide terrorism is thousands of years old, it has appeared in Iraq at unprecedented levels. The predominance of suicide terrorism in the insurgency has led scholars to embrace two diametrically opposed theoretical frameworks. Whereas Huntington’s framework explains suicide terrorism in Iraq as the result of a clash of civilizations between the Western and Islamic worlds...

Justifying the Christian Cult of the Maccabean Martyrs

The Maccabean martyrs were Jews killed c. 167 BCE by the Greek king Antiochus IV Epiphanes. The first of the martyrs to die was the elderly scribe Eleazar, who was beaten to death for refusing to eat pork. The rest of the martyrs (seven young brothers and their mother) were then killed for the same offense. Interestingly, these martyrs came to be venerated as Christian martyrs during late antiq...