An Interactive Annotated World Bibliography of Printed and Digital Works in the History of Medicine and the Life Sciences from Circa 2000 BCE to 2024 by Fielding H. Garrison (1870-1935), Leslie T. Morton (1907-2004), and Jeremy M. Norman (1945- ) Traditionally Known as “Garrison-Morton”
16061 entries, 14144 authors and 1947 subjects. Updated: December 10, 2024
Diocles of Carystus, also known as "the younger Hippocrates", was one of the most prominent medical authorities in late antiquity. He wrote extensively on a wide range of areas such as anatomy, physiology, pathology, therapeutics, embryology, gynaecology, dietetics, foods and poisons. This edition largely supercedes that of Wellmann.
The first printed atlas of color computer images adapted from 3D images developed in the National Library of Medicine's Visible Human Project. Includes CD-ROM with 3D electronic images.
"PubMed Central® (PMC) is a free archive of biomedical and life sciences journal literature at the U.S. National Institutes of Health's National Library of Medicine (NIH/NLM). In keeping with NLM’s legislative mandate to collect and preserve the biomedical literature, PMC serves as a digital counterpart to NLM’s extensive print journal collection. Launched in February 2000, PMC was developed and is managed by NLM’s National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI). https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/
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In addition to its role as an archive, the value of PMC lies in its capacity to store and cross-reference data from diverse sources using a common format within a single repository. With PMC, a user can quickly search the entire collection of full-text articles and locate all relevant material. PMC also allows for the integration of its literature with a variety of other information resources that can enhance the research and knowledge fields of scientists, clinicians and others.
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NLM is collaborating internationally with other agencies that share the goals of PMC. Maintaining copies of PMC’s literature in other reliable international archives that operate on the same principles provides greater protection against damage or loss of the material. At the same time, the diversity of sites allows for the possibility of more and even greater innovation, ensuring the permanence of PMC over the long-term." (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/about/intro/, accessed 12-2016).
"The Incunabula Short Title Catalogue is the international database of 15th-century European printing created by the British Library with contributions from institutions worldwide. http://data.cerl.org/istc/_search
"You can:
perform a simple search using different kinds of keywords
find items by browsing author, title, dates, and other headings
"The database records nearly every item printed from movable type before 1501, but not material printed entirely from woodblocks or engraved plates. 30,518 editions are listed as of August 2016, including some 16th-century items previously assigned incorrectly to the 15th century. Information on each item includes authors, short titles, the language of the text, printer, place and date of printing, and format. Locations for copies have been confirmed by libraries all over the world. Many links are provided to online digital facsimiles, and also to major online catalogues of incunabula such as the Gesamtkatalog der Wiegendrucke, the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek Inkunabelkatalog and Bod-Inc online.
Study of the significance of medical diagnosis for Babylonian medicine. Analyzing the structure and contents of the Babylonian diagnostic handbook and the evolution of the diagnostic texts, the author shows that the diagnostic handbook was an integral part of the Babylonian medical tradition. Includes the transliteration, translation, and commentary of a large part of the diagnostic handbook, including copies of new texts.
Rather than a new translation from the Greek, this is a updated and usefully indexed version, in modern English, of Goodyer's paraphrase from the 17th century. See No. 8564.
"In 1662, the newly formed 'Royal Society of London for Improving Natural Knowledge' was granted a charter to publish by King Charles II and on 6 March 1665, the first issue of Philosophical Transactions was published under the visionary editorship of Henry Oldenburg, who was also the Secretary of the Society. The first volumes of what was the world's first scientific journal were very different from today's journal, but in essence it served the same function; namely to inform the Fellows of the Society and other interested readers of the latest scientific discoveries. As such, Philosophical Transactions established the important principles of scientific priority and peer review, which have become the central foundations of scientific journals ever since. In 1886, the breadth and scope of scientific discovery had increased to such an extent that it became necessary to divide the journal into two, Philosophical Transactions A and B, covering the physical sciences and the life sciences respectively."
"Most of our oldest content is now freely available, specifically, all papers older than 70 years. In addition, papers published between 10 years ago and either 12 months ago (biological sciences) or 24 months ago (physical sciences) are freely available. For Biographical Memoirsall issues are now freely available, apart from the most recent issue" (https://royalsociety.org/journals/free-content/, accessed 02-2017).
[When I created this entry I was unable to determine when this digitization project originated; therefore I arbitarily assigned the year 2000. If anyone could supply the project origination date that would be much appreciated.]
"The Libraries' physical collections comprise 1.5 million books and manuscripts, along with over 400,000 pieces of ephemera, microfilm, photo collections and a/v material, housed in over 20 locations in Washington, Maryland, New York, and Panama. Some of those collections are available via inter-library loan request through your local public, school, or organizational library. If you're with an organization interested in using one of our collections items in an exhibition, please see Exhibition Loan Services.
"Our digital collections include over 27,000 digitized books and manuscripts (available on our site and at the Biodiversity Heritage Library) as well as photo and illustration collections, seed catalogs, trade literature, and much more."
Compiled over 43 years by one man this index to every living animal discovered between 1758 and 1850 is still considered the essential reference for zoologists and paleontologists.
Portraits of scientists, engineers, and inventors collected by Bern Dibner to complement he thousands of scientific books and manuscripts in the library he founded.
After four years at sea, the U.S. Exploring Expedition returned with a bounty of data, specimens and artifacts that would later come to the Smithsonian.
Covers both magic and empirical treatment, with a particular focus on the treatment of diseases studied on the basis of texts, including the preparation of medicines.
Washington, DC: The National Academies Press, 2000.
This digital roadmap for the world's largest library was undoubtedly influential not just on other U.S. libraries but on other libraries around the world.
"Digital information and networks challenge the core practices of libraries, archives, and all organizations with intensive information management needs in many respects—not only in terms of accommodating digital information and technology, but also through the need to develop new economic and organizational models for managing information. LC21: A Digital Strategy for the Library of Congress discusses these challenges and provides recommendations for moving forward at the Library of Congress, the world’s largest library. Topics covered in LC21 include digital collections, digital preservation, digital cataloging (metadata), strategic planning, human resources, and general management and budgetary issues. The book identifies and elaborates upon a clear theme for the Library of Congress that is applicable more generally: the digital age calls for much more collaboration and cooperation than in the past. LC21 demonstrates that information-intensive organizations will have to change in fundamental ways to survive and prosper in the digital age" (https://www.nap.edu/catalog/9940/lc21-a-digital-strategy-for-the-library-of-congress).
Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 2000.
"The book vividly maps out some central areas: remedies (and how they were made credible), notions of disease, advice on preventive medicine and on healthy living, and how surgeons worked upon the body and their understanding of what they were doing. The structures of practice and knowledge examined in the first part of the book came to be challenged in the later seventeenth century, when the 'new science' began to overturn the foundation of established knowledge. However, as the second part of the book shows, traditional medical practice was so well entrenched in English culture that much of it continued into the eighteenth century...." (publisher).
Traces the first 50 years of the MLA, from its inception in 1898 in response to the unprecedented expansion of medical literature during the 19th century.
Aldershot, England & Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2000.
The Appendix is Medieval gynecological texts: A handlist. This is "a list of all gynecological texts currently known to me from western Europe written between the 4th and 15th centuries. It includes gynecological excerpts from larger texts when they circulated independently. It also includes all vernacular gynecological textes, including those in Arabic (from Muslim Spain) and Hebrew...."
"This is a practical guide to the identification of vegetative plant materials used from the early prehistoric to c.1500 AD in Europe and the southern Mediterranean. Geographic distribution and archaic names are included. Specialised methods are given for the preparation of a range of material including wood, stems, roots, leaves and fibres, with particular emphasis on samples from archaeological artefacts which have been adversely affected by their conditions of burial. Detailed anatomical descriptions of over 160 species of broadleaved herbaceous plants and trees, conifers, grasses, palms and other monocotyledons, and ferns and horsetails are fully illustrated with over 600 photomicrographs. Keys of diagnostic features also help with identification.
The history of uses and working properties of the various materials are complemented by tables listing recorded uses of specific plant materials, drawn from every aspect of daily life (construction; cult and devotional images, amulets, sculpture and ceremonial items; domestic items; dye plants; fibres, textiles, basketry and cordage; fuel; occupational and musical artefacts; tanning; transport; and weapons and hunting artefacts), some of which are illustrated. The book provides an essential working manual for botanists, archaeologists, conservators and students with ethnic, forensic, agricultural, social and economic interests. The range and scope of information are also relevant in areas well beyond Europe, extending to North America and further afield" (publisher).
Order of authorship in the original publication: Raoult, Birg, La Scola. Raoult and colleagues cultured the bacterium causing the systemic digestive tract infection Whipple's disease from a mitral valve of a patient with endocarditis due to the disease. This was the first time that the bacterium causing Whipple's disease was cultured since the Whipple first described the disease in 1907. Digital facsimile from nejm.org at this link.
(Thanks to Juan Weiss for this reference and its interpretation.)
Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000.
"Scientists by training, NSF biologists hoped in the 1950s that the new agency would become the federal government's chief patron for basic research in biology, the only agency to fund the entire range of biology—from molecules to natural history museums—for its own sake. Appel traces how this vision emerged and developed over the next two and a half decades, from the activities of NSF's Division of Biological and Medical Sciences, founded in 1952, through the cold war expansion of the 1950s and 1960s and the constraints of the Vietnam War era, to its reorganization out of existence in 1975. This history of NSF highlights fundamental tensions in science policy that remain relevant today: the pull between basic and applied science; funding individuals versus funding departments or institutions; elitism versus distributive policies of funding; issues of red tape and accountability" (publisher).
Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2000.
"Nursing and technology have been inexorably linked since the beginnings of trained nursing in the United States in the late nineteenth century. Whether or not they thought of the devices they used as technology, nurses have necessarily used a variety of tools, instruments, and machines--from thermometers to cardiac monitors--to appraise, treat, and comfort patients. Tracing the relationship between nursing and technology from the 1870s to the present, Margarete Sandelowski argues that technology has helped shape and intensify persistent dilemmas in nursing and that it has both advanced and impeded the development of the profession" (publisher).
Washington, DC: Joint Economic Committee, U.S. Senate, 2000.
According to Senator Mack's report, the economic costs of illness in the U.S. were approximately $3 trillion annually, representing 31% of the nation’s GDP. This included “direct” costs of public and private health care spending of $1.3 trillion, and “indirect” illness costs from reduced ability to work and premature death of $1.7 trillion. Available from faseb.org at this link.
In 1999, With Marina Cavazzana-Calvo and Salima Hacein-Bey, Fischer achieved the first clinical successes in the world of gene therapies for about ten bubble children,[8] two of whom unfortunately developed leukaemias after a few months, one of whom had died. The test was stopped urgently in 2002. The trial was restarted in 2004, according to a modified protocol using better retroviral vectors, and was stopped again in 2005 due to new complications.
Ramakrishnan and colleagues determined the complete molecular structure of the 30S subunit of the ribosome and its complexes with several antibiotics. " The Abstract: "Genetic information encoded in messenger RNA is translated into protein by the ribosome, which is a large nucleoprotein complex comprising two subunits, denoted 30S and 50S in bacteria. Here we report the crystal structure of the 30S subunit from Thermus thermophilus, refined to 3Å resolution. The final atomic model rationalizes over four decades of biochemical data on the ribosome, and provides a wealth of information about RNA and protein structure, protein-RNA interactions and ribosome assembly. It is also a structural basis for analysis of the functions of the 30S subunit, such as decoding, and for understanding the action of antibiotics. The structure will facilitate the interpretation in molecular terms of lower resolution structural data on several functional states of the ribosome from electron microscopy and crystallography." With Wimberly, Brian T., Brodersen, Ditlev E., Clemons, William M., Morgan-Warren, Robert J., Carter, Andrew P., Vonrhein, Clemens, Hartsch, Thomas.
See also: Ramakirshan, V., Wimberly, Brian T., Carter, et al, "Functional insights from the structure of the 20S ribosomal subunit and its interactions with antibiotics," Nature, 407 (2000) 340-348. And, Ramakirschan, Venki. Gene machine: The race to decipher the secrets of the ribsome (2018).
In 2009 Ramakrishnan shared the Nobel Prize in Chemistry with Thomas A. Steitz and Ada E. Yonath "for studies of the structure and function of the ribosome."
With Poul Nissen, Jeffrey Hansen, Nenad Ban, Peter B. Moore.
Steitz shared the 2009 Nobel Prize in Chemistry with Venkatraman Ramakrishnan and Ada Yonath "for studies of the structure and function of the ribosome."
Kornberg devoted two decades to the development of methods to visualize the atomic structure of RNA polymerase and its associated protein components. Initially, Kornberg took advantage of expertise with lipid membranes gained from his graduate studies to devise a technique for the formation of two-dimensional protein crystals on lipid bilayers. These 2D crystals could then be analyzed using electron microscopy to derive low-resolution images of the protein's structure. Eventually, Kornberg was able to use X-ray crystallography to solve the 3-dimensional structure of RNA polymerase at atomic resolution. Through these studies, Kornberg created an actual picture of how transcription works at a molecular level. According to the Nobel Prize committee, "the truly revolutionary aspect of the picture Kornberg has created is that it captures the process of transcription in full flow. What we see is an RNA-strand being constructed, and hence the exact positions of the DNA, polymerase and RNA during this process.” With P Cramer, D A Bushnell, J Fu, A L Gnatt, B Maier-Davis, N E Thompson, R R Burgess, A M Edwards, P R David. Digital facsimile from PubMedCentral at this link.
In 2006 Kornberg was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry "for his studies of the molecular basis of eukaryotic transcription."
The authors provided a molecular framework for understanding transposition phenomena at the molecular level, including molecular images at 2.3Å resolution of the Tn5 transposase complexed to its respective Tn5 transposon end DNA, its cleavage and subsequent transposition by a transposase.
(Thanks to Juan Weiss for this reference and its interpretation.)
"This work contains the bibliographic references of 1,457 published studies (from 1859 to 1997) on the history of Spanish psychiatry in all its aspects: general and local overviews, biographies and pathobiographies, evolution of ideas and theories on mental illness, treatments, organization of assistance, specific works on various hospitals, professional institutions (scientific associations, publications, chairs and teaching centers), psychiatric legislation, psychoanalysis... The references cover a wide variety of material: doctoral theses, general or monographic books, articles on magazine, chapters of collective books, presentations and communications to congresses....
"Arranged alphabetically by author, the bibliography is completed with three indices (onomastic, institutional and thematic) that make it possible to locate existing references on each specific person or topic.
"A final comment analyzes, quantitatively and qualitatively, the authors and topics of this extensive bibliography, showing a clear (and sometimes surprising) overview of what has been studied (and what remains to be studied) in the historical evolution of psychiatry" (publisher)
In 2022 Carolyn Bertozzi shared the Nobel Prize in Chemistry with Barry Sharpless and Morten Meldal for discovery of click chemistry. Bertozzi invented a biorthogonal variation of Sharpless and Meldal reactions. In this paper the authors described a novel way of manipulating the click chemistry reaction, which includes a ligation reaction modeled after the Staudinger reaction that forms two reactive partners which are abiotic and chemically orthogonal to native cellular components. In essence this transformation permitted its execution within the cell’s interior, offering new ways to investigate and follow intracellular interactions. This reaction contributed to more targeted cancer treatments and other pharmaceutical applications.
(Thanks to Juan Weiss for this reference and its interpretation.)
Working with the let-7 gene, the authors led by Ruvkun showed that microRNA encoded by the let-7 gene was highly conserved, and present throughout the animal kingdom, proving that gene regulation by microRNA is universal among unicellular organisms on Earth. This paper, published seven years after the initial discovery (No. 14301) provided the evidence to convince skeptics of the existence of microRNA.
Order of authorship in the original publication: Pasquinelli, Reinhart, Slack, Ruvkun.
(Thanks to Juan Weiss for this reference and its interpretation.)
Initial draft sequence of the human genome from the publically financed project, involving the coordinated efforts of 20 laboratories and hundreds of people around the world. The full text is available from Natureat this link.
Nature reprinted the paper in hardcover with supplementary material as Carina Davis & Richard Gallagher (eds.) The Human Genome. Foreward by James D. Watson. (Houndgroves, Basingbroke, Hampshire, England & New York: Palgrave, 2001.)
South African Journal of Science 97 (1-2), 22-22, 2001.
Living around 6 million years ago, in the Tugen hills region of central Kenya, this species, named Orrorin tugenensis, had small teeth with thick enamel similar to modern humans. It climbed trees, but also probably walked upright with two legs on the ground.
In 1998 and 1999, working in the Lake Turkana region of northern Kenya, Meave Leakey and her team found a cranium and other fossil remains of a 3.5 million year old hominin with a mixture of features unseen in other early human fossils. Noting the unusual combination of traits, Leakey and her team designated the hominin a new genus and species:Kenyanthropus platyops, or “flat-faced human from Kenya.” With F. Spoor, F. H. Brown, P. N. Gathogo, C. Kiarie,, L. N. Leakey, and I. McDougall.
The "Lindbergh operation", a complete very long distance tele-surgical gallbladder operation carried out by a team of French surgeons located in New York on a patient in Strasbourg, France using high-spreed telecommunications and Zeus surgical robot. The operation was performed successfully on September 7, 2001 by Professor Jacques Marescaux and his team from the IRCAD (Institute for Research into Cancer of the Digestive System). This was the first time that long distance elecommunications were fast enough to make this type of procedure possible. With Michel Gagner, Francesco Rubino, Didier Mutter, Michel Vix, Steven E. Butner, & Michelle K. Smith.
See also: Marescaux, J.; Leroy, J.; Rubino, F.; Vix, M.; Simone, M.; Mutter, D. "Transcontinental robot assisted remote telesurgery: Feasibility and potential applications," Annals of Surgery,235 (2002) 487-92.
Though, of course, the quality of entries, varies, and one has to read everything critically, many Wikipedia articles are the best encyclopedia entries on the subjects concerned, and, of course, they are free to all.
"ECHO (Exploring and Collecting History Online) is a portal to over 5,000 websites concerning the history of science, technology, and industry. This guide helps researchers find the exact information they need while also granting curious browsers a forum for exploration.
ECHO is also a first step into the field of digital history: since 2001 it has been a laboratory for experimentation in this new field, and it fosters communication and dialog among historians, scientists, engineers, doctors, and technologists. In addition to facilitating access to digital resources on the history of science, technology, and industry, ECHO has promoted the creation of digital history with tools like Zotero and the construction of Digital Memory Bank technology (as in preserving the memories of Hurricane Katrina). We also help scholars and institutions with their own digital history projects through workshops and consultancies.
"WordCat is world's largest network of library content and services....WorldCat.org lets you search the collections of libraries in your community and thousands more around the world. WorldCat grows every day thanks to the efforts of librarians and other information professionals."
WorldCat is a service of OCLC which originated in 1967. "As of March 2015, the OCLC database contained over 336M records with 2.2 billion cataloged items, and is the world's largest bibliographic database covering 72,000 libraries."[24]http://www.worldcat.org/
Cambridge & New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001.
"Between 1800 and 2000 life expectancy at birth rose from about 30 years to a global average of 67 years, and to more than 75 years in favored countries. This dramatic change was called a health transition, characterized by a transition both in how long people expected to live, and how they expected to die. Rising Life Expectancy examines the way humans reduced risks to their survival, both regionally and globally, to promote world population growth and population aging."
Traces development of microscopy in disease research and diagnostics, as applied in surgical, gynecological, and dermatologic pathology in the 19th and 20th centuries.
"Synaptic transmission plays a central role in the nervous system as the mechanism that allows for chemical and electrical communication between cells and thus connects discrete elements into the functioning whole. This is a broad account of anatomical, biochemical, embryological, medical, pathological, pharmacological, and physiological studies on synaptic transmission during the hundred years beginning in 1890. During this century, the process of synaptic transmission came to be recognized not only as the most fundamental neurophysiological process, but also as a seat of pathological changes, and as the predominant site of action for drugs used to treat a wide range of psychiatric and neurological disorders" (Publisher).
Oxford: Society for the Study of Medieval Languages and Literature, 2001.
An edition of just over 1500 medical receipts transmitted in three fourteenth-century compendia. The particular interest of these multilingual compilations lies in their date – earlier than most published receipts – and their showing the three languages of medieval England in vigorous and simultaneous use. There are detailed indexes, including a survey of the medical conditions covered, and the notes provide comprehensive references to analogous receipts in other published collections, so shedding light on the processes of compilation and transmission.
"Within the framework of the “Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities”, the CMG is eager to make the results of the project freely available to the scientific community and the general public.
"Consequently, special care should be taken to ensure that unavailable volumes, of which often only few copies are in circulation, be made available once again to the scientific community.
"To this end, the CMG has planned various digital projects:
Online editions Under the heading “Online editions”, visitors will find all volumes of the CMG, CML, Suppl. and Suppl. Or. series available for study. These volumes may be selected and browsed through, or opened to a specified page.
Concordances find from a reference to Kühn or Littré the corresponding page in the CMG-Edition
Manuscript Catalogue (Diels) Under this heading, visitors will find the somewhat outdated, but still authoritative, manuscript catalogue of ancient medical literature made at the Berlin Academy under the leadership of Hermann Diels in preparation for the CMG. The catalogue has been expanded and emended numerous times. The bibliographical details of the published Addenda and Corrigenda may also be viewed here. More precise information regarding the manuscript tradition may be obtained from the printed volumes, or upon inquiry at the project office.
Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 2001.
"Samuel Thomson, born in New Hampshire in 1769 to an illiterate farming family, had no formal education, but he learned the elements of botanical medicine from a "root doctor," who he met in his youth. Thomson sought to release patients from the harsh bleeding or purging regimens of regular physicians by offering inexpensive and gentle medicines from their own fields and gardens. He melded his followers into a militant corps of dedicated believers, using them to successfully lobby state legislatures to pass medical acts favorable to their cause.
"John S. Haller Jr. points out that Thomson began his studies by ministering to his own family. He started his professional career as an itinerant healer traveling a circuit among the small towns and villages of Maine, New Hampshire, and Massachusetts. Eventually, he transformed his medical practice into a successful business enterprise with agents selling several hundred thousand rights or franchises to his system. His popular New Guide to Health (1822) went through thirteen editions, including one in German, and countless thousands were reprinted without permission.
"Told here for the first time, Haller's history of Thomsonism recounts the division within this American medical sect in the last century. While many Thomsonians displayed a powerful, vested interest in anti-intellectualism, a growing number found respectability through the establishment of medical colleges and a certified profession of botanical doctors." (publisher)
Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 2001.
"...explores the concepts of physiognomy and eugenics and raises questions about what are "legitimate" sciences.[2] She describes how "the appeal of physiognomy lay not so much in any of its scientific pretension but rather in how it seemed to validate an already widespread cultural conviction" (Wikipedia article on Lucy Hartley, accessed 02-2018).
Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2001.
"... investigates the influential individuals who attended England's most important patients during a pivotal epoch in the evolution of the state and the medical profession. Over three hundred men [and a handful of women], heretofore unexamined as a group, made up the medical staff of the Tudor and Stuart kings and queens of England [as well as the Lord Protectorships of Oliver and Richard Cromwell]. The royal doctors faced enormous challenges in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries from diseases that respected no rank and threatened the very security of the realm. Moreover, they had to weather political and religious upheavals that led to regicide and revolution, as well as cope with sharp theoretical and jurisdictional divisions within English medicine. The rulers often interceded in medical controversies at the behest of their royal doctors, bringing sovereign authority to bear on the condition of medicine' (publisher).
The first book on the history of the profession of analytical psychology from its origins in 1913. Because Kirsch was personally involved in many aspects of Jungian history, he was well equipped to write the history of the 'movement', and to document its growth throughout the world, with chapters covering individual geographical areas, including the UK, USA, and Australia. He also provided new information on the ever-controversial subject of Jung's relationship to Nazism, Jews and Judaism.
Toronto, Canada: University of Toronto Press, 2001.
"... Lux takes issue with the 'biological invasion' theory of the impact of disease on Plains Aboriginal people. She challenges the view that Aboriginal medicine was helpless to deal with the diseases brought by European newcomers and that Aboriginal people therefore surrendered their spirituality to Christianity. Biological invasion, Lux argues, was accompanied by military, cultural, and economic invasions, which, combined with the loss of the bison herds and forced settlement on reserves, led to population decline. The diseases killing the Plains people were not contagious epidemics but the grinding diseases of poverty, malnutrition, and overcrowding.
"Medicine That Walks" provides a grim social history of medicine over the turn of the century. It traces the relationship between the ill and the well, from the 1880s when Aboriginal people were perceived as a vanishing race doomed to extinction, to the 1940s when they came to be seen as a disease menace to the Canadian public. Drawing on archival material, ethnography, archaeology, epidemiology, ethnobotany, and oral histories, Lux describes how bureaucrats, missionaries, and particularly physicians explained the high death rates and continued ill health of the Plains people in the quasi-scientific language of racial evolution that inferred the survival of the fittest. The Plains people's poverty and ill health were seen as both an inevitable stage in the struggle for 'civilization' and as further evidence that assimilation was the only path to good health." (publisher)
Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2001.
"Set in Memphis, home of one of the nation's first sickle cell clinics, Dying in the City of the Blues reveals how the recognition, treatment, social understanding, and symbolism of the disease evolved in the twentieth century, shaped by the politics of race, region, health care, and biomedicine. Using medical journals, patients' accounts, black newspapers, blues lyrics, and many other sources, Keith Wailoo follows the disease and its sufferers from the early days of obscurity before sickle cell's "discovery" by Western medicine; through its rise to clinical, scientific, and social prominence in the 1950s; to its politicization in the 1970s and 1980s. Looking forward, he considers the consequences of managed care on the politics of disease in the twenty-first century" (publisher).
"Collected in this volume are the author’s historical and bibliographical studies of what may be described as the British and American literature of pharmacotherapeutics. The practitioner of medicine in the period covered was intimately concerned with the selection, compounding, dispensing and operation of the materia medica. Medical theories, etiology and nosology were left to the academics, although the academics often played a dominant role in what went into the pharmacopoeia. The very first business of the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh recorded in 1682 concerned the issuance of a pharmacopoeia. Indeed, with a few exceptions the pharmacopoeia was the province, not of the pharmacist, but of the physician, well into the 19th century. The Edinburgh Pharmacopoeia, particularly, was revised almost decennially from 1699 to 1841 and provides a detailed history of the changes taking place in pharmacotherapy and the impact of developments in science upon it. Major portions of the volume are devoted to the Edinburgh Pharmacopoeia and the Edinburgh Dispensatories, but the spread abroad of the whole gamut of British literature in the genre - to the continent, to India, to Madagascar and to the United States - is covered in detail. The studies of the American literature describe the imports to the colonies, the reprinting of European originals, and the American publications prior to the appearance of the first United States Pharmacopoeia in 1820. Included also is the literature of the German population of the colonies and early united States in which the professional encountered the folk medicine of the pow-pow doctor. The studies include checklists of the Edinburgh Pharmacopoeia, the Edinburgh Dispensatories, the foreign publication of the British literature in the genre, and the American publications in German of the relevant literature" (publisher).
A fourth expanded edition of this textbook, edited by Shortliffe and James J. Cimino, was published as Biomedical informatics: Computer applications in health care and biomedicine (New York: Springer, 2014).
The core of this text is an Englished version of a 13th-century Anglo-Norman translation of the Trotula. The redactor also incorporated the "Non omnes quidem"version of Muscio, amplifying the meager obstetrical material from the Trotula.
"Each of these historical periods, in turn, has its own integral structure. Some are based on geography, some are based on chronology. There are four subdivisions that offer structure to the first four time periods, ancient times through the enlightenment. These divisions relate to how our predecessors:
rendered various medical conditions that are associated with communication;
portrayed communication, its functions and breakdowns;
regarded and treated people with disability (including communication disability); and
educated and rehabilitated those with communication disorders.
"These four subsections are used as a way of framing what was going on during the periods ranging from 3000 BC to 1800 AD that had a bearing on later speech-language pathology practices. These four domains (medicine, rhetoric, disability, and education/rehabilitation) offer us a ways to draw parallels across time using the distinctions available during these older periods. Each of these four domains are examined in its own right as well as for ideas that bear on what today would be considered to be within the scope of theory and practice in speech-language pathology.
"The history covered in these early time periods spans different areas of the world. For example, the ancient period is divided into Mesopotamia, Egypt, Greece, and Rome. Each of these regions of the world is examined for what was going on in the fields of medicine, rhetoric, disability, and education. The regions covered in medieval period were the Byzantine Empire and Europe. The early modern period and the enlightenment focus primarily on European history.
"The last two time periods (19th and 20th centuries) target American history. The focus in these centuries are various threads or historical roots that had the greatest influence on the evolution of speech pathology. For the 19th century, the section is structured chronologically beginning with a discussion of the Elocutionists, then the Scientists, and then to the rise of Professionalism.
"The 20th century section is again subdivided chronologically and has to do with American history. This period is divided into four historical subsections (1) Our Formative Years beginning just before 1900, when the first books and articles on communication disorders were published in the United States to the end of World War II in 1945, (2) The Processing Period from 1945 to 1965, during which time many therapy approaches were developed to improve internal psychological processing, (3) The Linguistic Era from 1965 to 1975 during which time we came to treat language disorders as separable from speech disorders and as being linguistic in nature, to (4) The Pragmatics Revolution from 1975 to 2000, when we reconsidered and reframed language in light of its communicative, linguistic, cultural, and everyday-life contexts.
"Yet another section of the website has information about other aspects of speech pathology history. It includes information about our Foremothers—women who have contributed to but are not always credited with founding the profession. It also includes material on John Thelwall, a British elocutionist who practiced in the early 19th century, and biographies and pictures of individuals who have contributed to speech pathology history. Other related sections include a Canadian history by Virginia Martin and therapy stories, including Margaret Hussey's story of her experiences following the stroke and aphasia of her husband Michael Hussey.
"Hyperlinks throughout the web pages tie to definitions of technical terms, biographical details of some of our intellectual forbearers, tables of contents and descriptions of cited books, and detailed information about particular clinical interventions."
"One hundred 20th century ophthalmic books arranged chronologically within each subspecialty area. The subspecialty areas themselves are arranged roughly in anatomical order from the front of the eye to the back of the eye. Click on any of these titles to go to the appropriate part of the main text below. Scroll down to reach the alphabetic checklist, and scroll further down to reach the main text."
"... an abbreviated bibliography of 915 of the best and the worst of homeopathic literature from 1810 to 2000.... the book presents the work by category (Materia Medica, Repertory, Domestic Manuals, etc.) and in chronological order. Each entry contains the date, title, author, publisher, and number of pages. Most of the entries contain more detailed descriptions of the contents, and often quotes from contemporary reviews. Many of the entries also have a personal commentary by the author, placing the book into historical context, or commenting upon its relative value. The work contains an index of all the books listed chronologically and an index of all the books listed alphabetically by author" (publisher).
The authors showed that the experimental drug (STI571) Imatinib, sold under the brand names Gleevec and Glivec, 1) was well tolerated and had very significant antileukemic activity in patients with chronic myeloid leukemia (CML). 2) Adverse effects were minimal. 3) Complete hematologic responses were observed in 53 of 54 pts. treated with doses of 300 mg. or more. Cytogenetic responses occurred in 29, and 7 of those had complete cytogenetic remissions. 4) At the end of the paper they stated, “These results show that the BCR-ABL tyrosine kinase is critical to the development of CML and demonstrate the potential for the development of anticancer drugs based on the specific molecular abnormality in a human cancer. “
Order of authorship in the original publication: Drucker, Talpaz, Resta. Full text available from nejm.org at this link.
(Thanks to Juan Weiss for this reference and its interpretation.)
Kaelin and colleagues identified aspects of the molecular machinery in Von Hippel-Landau disease that regulates the activity of genes in response to varying levels of oxygen.
In 2019 Kaelin shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Sir Peter J. Ratcliffe and Gregg L. Semenza "for their discoveries of how cells sense and adapt to oxygen availability."
See also: Jaakkola, P., Mole, D., Tian, Y., Wilson, M., Gielbert, J., Gaskell, S., Kriegsheim, A., Hebestreit, H., Mukherji, M., Schofield, C., Maxwell, P., Pugh, C. & Ratcliffe, P. 2001. Targeting of HIF-alpha to the von Hippel-Lindau ubiquitylation complex by O2-regulated prolyl hydroxylation. Science,292, 468–72.
Ratcliffe and colleagues made essentially the same discovery simultaneously with Kaelin and colleagues.
Angewandte Chemie International Edition, 40, No. 11, 2004-2021, 2001.
In 2022 Barry Sharpless shared the Nobel Prize in Chemistry with Carolyn Bertozzi and Morten Meldal for "the discovery of click chemistry."
"Barry Sharpless coined the concept of click chemistry, where molecular building blocks snap together quickly and efficiently. In 2002, Sharpless and Morten Meldal, independently of each other, developed an elegant and efficient chemical reaction: the copper catalysed azide-alkyne cycloaddition. This is now in widespread use and is utilised in the development of pharmaceuticals, for mapping DNA and creating new materials" (Nobel Prize.org).
The first paper on Sahelanthropustchadensis, dating from between 7 and 6 million years ago in West Central Africa (northern Chad). This species had a combination of ape-like and human-like features. Ape-like elements: a small brain (even slightly smaller than a chimpanzee’s), sloping face, very prominent browridges, and elongated skull. Human-like elements: small canine teeth, a short middle part of the face, and a spinal cord opening underneath the skull instead of towards the back as seen in non-bipedal apes. The research team was directed by Brunet; more than 20 scientists co-authored the paper.
Cambridge & New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002.
"This is the first comprehensive study on a national scale of the entire range of medical practitioners who flourished in preindustrial and early industrial societies. Drawing on a wide variety of sources, it provides a richly detailed examination of medical practice as it existed in France during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Professor Ramsey argues that to penetrate this world, in many ways strangely different from our own, we must join two lines of inquiry: the history of the professions and the history of popular culture. The book considers not only the immediate ancestors of the modern medical profession - university-trained physicians who followed a liberal calling and surgeons who practiced a manual craft - but also the highly diverse group of practitioners who worked without legal authorization: traveling charlatans, local 'urine scanners,' folk healers using herbs and charms, counterwitches, and a great many ordinary people in other trades" (publisher).
Cambridge & New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002.
Focuses several chapters on the debates over innoculation for smallpox, and statistical measurement of results, statistical studies of the effect of climate on disease, etc.
A key to literature on commentaries on Greek and Latin medical writers up to the 12th century— primarily Late Antique authors, who were active before 600 CE. It takes account of commentaries on Galen in particular and of later Alexandrian physicians - surviving and lost - as well as of commentaries originally composed in Greek but which only survived in Arabic translation.
This probably the most comprehensive index to digital sources concerning the history of the health sciences. Hundreds of links are arranged in the following categories:
Bibliographies/Chronologies/Histories
Blogs (arranged alphabetically)
For Children
Databases
Email Lists, Newsgroups
Figures in Health Sciences - Lives and Works
Journals
Links Pages
Oaths, Prayers and Symbols
Organizations
Organizations & Museums with History of the Health Sciences Interests
Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002.
A new translation of a new edition of the texts based on collation of 9 MSS from the second half of the 13th or early 14th century. "The Trotula was the most influential compendium on women's medicine in medieval Europe. Scholarly debate has long focused on the traditional attribution of the work to the mysterious Trotula, said to have been the first female professor of medicine in eleventh- or twelfth-century Salerno, just south of Naples, then the leading center of medical learning in Europe. Yet as Monica H. Green reveals in her introduction to this first edition of the Latin text since the sixteenth century, and the first English translation of the book ever based upon a medieval form of the text, the Trotula is not a single treatise but an ensemble of three independent works, each by a different author. To varying degrees, these three works reflect the synthesis of indigenous practices of southern Italians with the new theories, practices, and medicinal substances coming out of the Arabic world" (publisher).
Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002.
"Drawing on oral histories, archival records, and medical journals from the 1930s and 1940s, Grey finds the programs were both a rehearsal for more modern forms of medical organization and a lightning rod for critics of "socialized medicine." He assesses the compromises made to try to preserve the programs' somewhat "secret objective" of providing the poor with health care while not running afoul of conservative politicians and their colleagues in the AMA..." (publisher)
Edition and translation of the Old English Herbarium, British Library Cotton MS Vitellius C iii, the only illustrated Anglo-Saxon medical text, dating from about 1000 CE, containing information on 185 medicinal plants, the names of conditions for which they are beneficial, and directions for making remedies with them. This text was previously translated inaccurately by Cockayne (No. 6534). For a facsimile edition of the manuscript see No. 8889.
"The Herbarium, attributed wrongly to Apuleius Platonicus, was one of a number of Old English Texts--occupying some thousand manuscript pages--that mark the first flowering of vernacular medical writing in medieval Europe. It is an expanded version of a late Roman tratise that survives in Old English in four manuscripts, one of them strikingly illustrated (British Library Cotton MSS, Vitellius C. iii). This text is by no means a mindless translation of mediterranean herbal remedies; rather it displays practical knowledge of plants widely available in Anglo-Saxon England through cultivation and import. Van Arsdall adds to our understanding of the uses of this text by drawing on present-day curandera practices in the south-western United States. She makes the cogent argument that texts like the Old English Herbarium served as aide-mémoire for the apprenticeship system that trains traditional healers" (from the Foreward by Linda Ehrsam Voigts, p. x).
Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 2002.
Critical edition based on a collation of the 26 known extant manuscripts and a study of the early Latin translations. Begun by Balme in 1975, with his work towards the Loeb editio minor of books VII–X, this edition includes all ten books, including a very full apparatus criticus. Volume I of the edition contains the complete text of the Historia Animalium, the critical apparatus, and Balme's introduction to the manuscripts, expanded and updated with the assistance of Friederike Berger, and in consultation with the editors of forthcoming editions of the extant medieval translations.
Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2002.
A "technical book on macroevolution and the historical development of evolutionary theory.[1] The book was twenty years in the making,[2]published just two months before Gould's death.[3] Aimed primarily at professionals,[4] the volume is divided into two parts. The first is a historical study of classical evolutionary thought, drawing extensively upon primary documents; the second is a constructive critique of the modern evolutionary synthesis, and presents a case for an interpretation of biological evolution based largely on hierarchical selection, and the theory of punctuated equilibrium (developed by Niles Eldredge and Gould in 1972).[5]" (Wikipedia article on The Structure of Evolutionary Theory, accessed 03-2017).
"documents the historical formation and cultural foundations of the movement to conserve and protect America's natural heritage, through books, pamphlets, government documents, manuscripts, prints, photographs, and motion picture footage drawn from the collections of the Library of Congress.
The collection consists of 62 books and pamphlets, 140 Federal statutes and Congressional resolutions, 34 additional legislative documents, excerpts from the Congressional Globe and the Congressional Record, 360 Presidential proclamations, 170 prints and photographs, 2 historic manuscripts, and 2 motion pictures."
"The Online Archive of California (OAC) provides free public access to detailed descriptions of primary resource collections maintained by more than 200 contributing institutions including libraries, special collections, archives, historical societies, and museums throughout California and collections maintained by the 10 University of California (UC) campuses.
Open the virtual doors of these institutions from our home page. The key is the OAC's more than 20,000 online collection guides. You can use these to browse, locate resources, or view selected items digitally — the OAC contains more th 220,000 digital images and documents — or learn how you can gain access to the physical objects.
Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2002.
"This book examines the effects of medical publishing on the momentous theoretical and jurisdictional controversies in health care in early modern England. The simultaneous collapse of medical orthodoxy and the control of medicine in London by the Royal College of Physicians occurred when reform-minded doctors who were trained on the continent, in tandem with surgeons and apothecaries, successfully challenged the professional monopoly held by Oxbridge-educated elites. This work investigates the book trade, the role it played in medicine, and the impact of the debate itself on the public sphere. Chapters analyze the politics and religious preferences of printers and sellers, gender as a factor in medical publishing, and the location of London bookshops, for clues to the business of well-being. Advertisements for remedies and therapeutic skills, the subject of another essay, became commonplace in 17th-century England; moreover, publishers and bookshop owners sometimes held the rights to proprietary medicines, undercutting licensed doctors. The final chapter surveys a variety of medical illustrations and their influence on the relationship between patient and physician. An epilogue considers the English medical scene and the world of print after the famous Rose decision of 1702, when the House of Lords gave apothecaries the legal right to practice medicine, ratifying the reality of a changed marketplace" (publisher).
"The fourth in a series of online collections from Harvard University, Expeditions and Discoveries delivers maps, photographs, and published materials, as well as field notes, letters, and a unique range of manuscript materials on selected expeditions between 1626 and 1953....
"In the 19th and 20th centuries, Harvard University played a significant role—as underwriter, participant, collector, and repository—for pace-setting expeditions around the world. For Internet users, Expeditions and Discoveries provides selective access to Harvard’s multidisciplinary records of those expeditions.
"Created by the Harvard University Library’s Open Collections Program, Expeditions and Discoveries offers important—often unique—historical resources for students of anthropology, archaeology, astronomy, botany, geography, geology, medicine, oceanography, and zoology.
"The collection features nine major expeditions as they are reflected in the holdings of Harvard’s libraries, museums, and archives. Other materials—both published and unpublished—provide vital, contextual information on exploration in the modern age.
Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 2002.
"Copepod crustaceans are the most numerous multicellular animals on earth. They occur in every free-living and parasitic aquatic niche. Copepods have been known since the time of Aristotle, yet there has never been a history of the study of copepods. This volume, the first in a planned three-volume series, reviews the discoveries of copepods to 1832, the year that the two distinct branches, the free-living copepods (long-known as insects) and the parasitic copepods (thought to be molluscs or worms) were finally acknowledged as members of the same Class Crustacea. The narrative includes the biographies of 90 early copepodologists and recounts their most important contributions to science. Portraits are included for two-thirds of the subjects, with considerable new material as well as information and illustrations from obscure sources. Milestones include the first description of copepods (ca. 350 B.C.), the first illustration (1554), the first free-living freshwater copepod (1688), the first explanation of a free-living copepod's metamorphosis (1756), the first permanently named copepod (1758), the first free-living marine copepod (1770), and the first description of a parasitic copepod's metamorphosis (1819)" (publisher).
Digital facsimile from the Internet Archive at this link.
Manchester & New York: Manchester University Press, 2002.
"Through a detailed analysis of exterior and interior images of the female body, this book examines the relationship between human reproduction and cultural representation from 1750-1910. With examples drawn from medical archives, covering engraving, photography, radiography, and microscopy, the book is interdisciplinary in approach, ranging across feminist theory, history of medicine, philosophy of science, and the history of photography" (publisher).
Cambridge & New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002.
"Moerman places the words "Placebo effect" in quotations because he believes that the placebo effect should be redefined. A placebo, he explains is inert. It has no causal effect. A more appropriate definition of the placebo effect he asserts is the "meaning response."
"It is because of our beliefs and the meaning we assocate with a placebo that determines its effectiveness. Despite this simple formula for determining who will respond to a placebo, it is not a very good predictor for a given individual at a given time. Studies show that there is no method to determine which individuals will respond to a placebo. Attempts have been made to remove placebo responders from studies. Occasionally, researchers will conduct a precursor trial run with a completely unrelated substance to indentify those who might respond to a placebo in an effort to cull these responders from the "real study". These attempts have been futile.
"No reliable indicators have ever been found that identify individual placebo responders. In fact, a person who responds to a placebo in one study has no increased likely hood of responding to a placebo in subsequent studies. More remarkably, if one eliminates the approximately one third of the populace who initially respond to a given placebo, the remaining group will contain about the same proportion of responders in subsequent studies" (David J. Kreiter).
"The Word's First Human Visualization Platform: Anatomy, Disease & Treatments— all in interactive 3D.
Web, Mobile and Augmented Reality
"the virtual body as the health equivalent of Google Maps" (New York Times)
"BioDigital was founded on the premise that 3D technology will transform the way we understand the human body. The volume and complexity of health information continues to increase, but the methods in which its communicated has not changed in centuries. Allowing people to see inside the body, using interactive 3D technology, promises to have a profound impact on the way we comprehend our health.
"To improve global health literacy using the first 3D body platform.
"Hailed as the equivalent of Google Maps for the human body, the BioDigital Human is a scientifically accurate cloud based virtual body that empowers everyone to learn about health and medicine in an entirely new visual format. Anatomy, disease and treatments - all in an engaging, interactive 3D format that resembles life itself" (https://www.biodigital.com/about).
Vol. 1: Terminology and Craniodental Morphology of Genus Homo (Europe). Vol. 2: Craniodental morphology of Genus Homo (Africa and Asia). Vol. 3: Brain endocasts—the paleoneurological evidence. Vol. 4: Crandiodental morphology of early hominds (Genera Australopithecus, Paranthropus, Orrorins) and overview. Vols. 1, 2, and 4 are by Schwartz and Tattersal. Vol. 3 is by Ralph L. Holloway, Douglas C. Broadfield and Michael S. Yuan.
Order of authorship in the original paper: Gardner, Hall, Fung.... Genome of the Plasmodium falciparum parasite carried by the mosquito that causes malaria in humans.
(Thanks to Juan Weiss for this reference and its interpretation.)
Order of authorship in the original publication: Holt, Subramanian, Halpern.... Sequence of the genome of Anopheles gambiae, the mosquito that carries the malaria parasite, Plasmodium falciparum.
(Thanks to Juan Weiss for this reference and its interpretation.)
"...listing over 15,000 imprints relating to every aspect of coffee from the past to the present. The principal writings on coffee have been identified and described in light of available source material. Represented are authors treating the cultivation, production, preparation and consumption of coffee, its economic, social and cultural significance, medical and chemical uses as a drug, and its falsifications and substitutes. The individual coffee content of the titles listed varies from monographs to works containing a chapter, or an extended reference. The term 'Coffee-house also illustrates its social and cultural impact on the period" (publisher).
Proc. Nat. Acad. Sci. (USA), 99, 15687-15692, 2002.
First publication of DeRisi's microarray assay for the detection and genotyping of viral pathogens. "To address the limitations of existing viral detection methodologies, we have developed a genomic approach to virus identification. Using available sequence data from more than 140 sequenced viral genomes, we have designed a long oligonucleotide (70-mer) DNA microarray with the potential to simultaneously detect hundreds of viruses, including essentially all respiratory tract viruses" (from the Abstract).
(Order of authorship in the original publication: Wang, Coscoy, Zylberberg....DeRisi.)
(Thanks to Juan Weiss for this reference and its interpretation.)
Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002.
"Olson, who lost his left hand and forearm to cancer while writing this book, provides an absorbing and often frightening narrative history of breast cancer told through the heroic stories of women who have confronted the disease, from Theodora to Anne of Austria, Louis XIV's mother, who confronted "nun's disease" by perfecting the art of dying well, to Dr. Jerri Nielson, who was dramatically evacuated from the South Pole in 1999 after performing a biopsy on her own breast and self-administering chemotherapy."
Carlton, Victoria: Melbourne University Press, 2002.
"An epidemic of smallpox among Aboriginal people around the infant colony of Sydney in 1789 puzzled the British, for there had been no cases on the ships of the First Fleet. Where, then, did the epidemic come from?
"As explorers moved further inland, they witnessed other epidemics of smallpox, notably in the late 1820s and early 1830s and again in the 1860s and 1870s. They also encountered many pockmarked survivors of early epidemics.
"In Invisible Invaders, Judy Campbell argues that epidemics of smallpox among Australian Aboriginals preceded European settlement. She believes they originated in regular visits to the northern coast of Australia by Macassan fishermen from southern Sulawesi and nearby islands. They were searching for trepang, for which there was a profitable market in China" (publisher).
In 2001 this report cited the following diseases with high prevalence in the United States as likely candidates for stem cell research:
Cardiovascular Disease: 58 million U.S. patients Automimmune Disease: 30 million patients Diabetes: 16 million patients Osteoporosis: 10 million patients Cancers: 10 million patients Alzheimer’s: 5.5 million patients Parkinson’s disease: 5.5 million patients
The report also cited many lower incidence diseases and conditions that would benefit such as spinal cord injuries, burns and various birth defects.
Toulouse: Éditions Privat & Pierre Fabre Dermo-Cosmétique, 2002.
"Realisé à l'initiative de la Société française d'histoire de la dermatologie. Rédigé par 76 auteurs représentant la communauté dermatologique française, cet ouvrage constitue le cadeau officiel du vingtième Congrès mondial de dermatologie tenu à Paris du 1er au 5 juillet 2002."
In 2022 Morten Meldal shared the Nobel Prize in Chemistry with Carolyn Bertozzi and Barry Sharpless for the discovery of click chemistry. Simultaneously, but independently of Sharpless, the authors discovered that copper substantially catalyzes the cycloaddition reaction between azides and terminal alkynes. The efficiency of this reaction, combined with robustness and ease of operation, quickly made this the "go to" for transformations this sort. This reaction became the very epitome of click chemistry.
Order of authorship in the original publication: Tornoe, Christensen, Meldal.
(Thanks to Juan Weiss for this reference and its interpretation.)
"Congress, in 1999, requested an IOM study to assess the extent of disparities in the types and quality of health services received by U.S. racial and ethnic minorities and non-minorities; explore factors that may contribute to inequities in care; and recommend policies and practices to eliminate these inequities.
"The report from that study, Unequal Treatment: Confronting Racial and Ethnic Disparities in Health Care, found that a consistent body of research demonstrates significant variation in the rates of medical procedures by race, even when insurance status, income, age, and severity of conditions are comparable. This research indicates that U.S. racial and ethnic minorities are less likely to receive even routine medical procedures and experience a lower quality of health services.
"The report says a large body of research underscores the existence of disparities. For example, minorities are less likely to be given appropriate cardiac medications or to undergo bypass surgery, and are less likely to receive kidney dialysis or transplants. By contrast, they are more likely to receive certain less-desirable procedures, such as lower limb amputations for diabetes and other conditions.
"The committee's recommendations for reducing racial and ethnic disparities in health care include increasing awareness about disparities among the general public, health care providers, insurance companies, and policy-makers.
"Consistency and equity of care also should be promoted through the use of "evidence-based" guidelines to help providers and health plans make decisions about which procedures to order or pay for based on the best available science. More minority health care providers are needed, especially since they are more likely to serve in minority and medically underserved communities, the report says and more interpreters should be available in clinics and hospitals to overcome language barriers that may affect the quality of care:" (http://www.nationalacademies.org/hmd/Reports/2002/Unequal-Treatment-Confronting-Racial-and-Ethnic-Disparities-in-Health-Care.aspx).
Computed tomography of the inner ear of 20 Neanderthal specimens directed by Spoor showed that the Neanderthal semicircular canal is subtly distinct in size, shape, and orientation from that of modern humans. With Marc Braun.
Exeter, England: University of Exeter Press, 2003.
Exeter Cathedral Library, established in the eleventh century, houses medical and scientific books from all periods. It includes the library of the Exeter physician Thomas Glass, which he left to the cathedral in the eighteenth century, as well as pre-1901 items from Exeter Medical Library.
The first comprehensive compendium of all known remedies and treatments used by the Hittites. The source texts are ritual descriptions and formularies from the 15th to 13th centuries BCE preserved from the archives of the Hittite capital, Hattusa. The ritual treatments often lasted for several days, and had an obvious psychotherapeutic approach which added significantly to their value as curative magic. Hittite prescriptive formulations demonstrate a close admixture of magical practices and pharmacological knowledge.
Grouped by category of experiment, and then by the name of the self-experimenter, this is a guide to their biographies and the articles that reported their results.
Washington, DC: Borden Institute, Walter Reed Army Medical Center, 2003.
SECTION 1: A Historic Perspective on the Principles of Military Preventive Medicine 1 1. Preventive Medicine and Command Authority—Leviticus to Schwarzkopf 3 2. The Historical Impact of Preventive Medicine in War 21 3. The Historic Role of Military Preventive Medicine and Public Health in US Armies of Occupation and Military Government 59 4. Preventive Medicine in Military Operations Other Than War 79 5. Conserving the Fighting Strength: Milestones of Operational Military Preventive Medicine Research 105
Besides the historographical consideration of the value of laboratory notebooks for studying the history of experimentation and discovery, this volume includes studies of notebooks by Galvani, Schwann, Pavlov, Carl Correns, and Hans Krebs and Kurt Henseleit, as well as notebooks of scientists who worked in the physical sciences, etc.
"This collection features approximately 4500 full page plates and other significant illustrations of human anatomy selected from the Jason A. Hannah and Academy of Medicine collections in the history of medicine at the Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library, University of Toronto. Each illustration has been fully indexed using medical subject headings (MeSH), and techniques of illustration, artists, and engravers have been identified whenever possible. There are ninety-five individual titles represented, ranging in date from 1522 to 1867"
"As noted, In the spring of 2003, substantial revisions of the database were made, revising its looks, and adding links to the US Department of Agriculture PLANTS database. This means that complete botanical information on useful plants, plus pictures, range maps, and endangered status, are immediately available.
The online database, and the book mentioned above, were largely completed in the late 1990s. The database now contains 44,691 items. This version added foods, drugs, dyes, fibers and other uses of plants (a total of over 44,000 items). This represents uses by 291 Native American groups of 4,029 species from 243 different plant families. About half of them are medicinal. . . ." (http://naeb.brit.org/about, accessed 02-2018).
"The philosopher K Codell Carter's authoritative study of the transition from an assumption that diseases have multiple causes to the modern belief in universal, necessary causes is such a book. For decades, historians have fruitfully explored the social history of modern medicine to the neglect of its intellectual history. Carter's careful dissection of the changing concepts that led to the germ theory of infectious diseases provides a sturdy base on which historians may rectify this imbalance and investigate previously unasked questions about the history of medicine in the last hundred years." (Medical History).
This work, which was heralded as a masterwork of scholarship when published, originally consisted of 689pp. In 2006 the publishers issued "an abridgment" to make the work accessible to a "general readership." The abridgment is "only" 561pp. long.
A highly personal but in all aspects extraordinary website/blog on the history of medical photography in the form of what Rowley calls his Cabinet Journal.
"Medicine is my lawful wife and literature my mistress; when I get tired of one, I spend the night with the other" is a well-known quote by Anton Chekhov, the Russian physician and writer. Founder of both the modern short story and modern prose drama, Chekhov practiced medicine in a sporadic manner throughout his life; doctors appear in 83 of his short stories.
First description of the scope of the outbreak dated March 21, 2003, preliminary case definition, and interim infection control guidance for the United States. Available from the CDC at this link.
One week later the CDC published "Update: Outbreak of severe acute respiratory syndrome - worldwide," MMWR, 52, 241-248.
Dated March 28, 2003, this detailed meticulous patient contact tracing on the ground and identified "patient zero" while preserving his/her anonymity. Available from the CDC at this link.
(Thanks to Juan Weiss for this entry and its interpretation.)
Dated April 19, 2003, this paper identified and reproduced microscopic images of the novel viral agent. It was the first official journal publication on SARS. Order of authorship in the published paper was Peiris, Lai, Poon,...SARS study group.
(Thanks to Juan Weiss for this entry and its interpretation.)
Ksiazek and over 40 co-authors around the world published the lead article in the May 15, 2003 issue of the New England Journal of Medicine that was nearly entirely devoted to SARS. Order of authorship in the published paper was Ksiazek, Erdman, Goldsmith,...SARS Working Group. Available from nejm.org at this link.
In an editorial entitled "SARS, the Internet, and the Journal" J. M. Drazen and E.W. Campion explained how the Internet enabled prior publication online of the papers, and that extremely fast electronic publication speeded scientific collaboration, and rapid suppression of the epidemic.
(Thanks to Juan Weiss for this reference and its interpretation.)
Dated May 30, 2003. Rota and team at the CDC determined the sequence of the complete genome of SARS-CoV, and characterized the viral genome. Order of authorship in the published paper was Rota, Oberste, Monroe....DeRisi...
(Thanks to Juan Weiss for this entry and its interpretation.)
Dated May 30, 2003 and published immediately after No. 10862 in the same issue of Science, this reported the work of Marco Marra and his team in Canada. Order of authorship in the published paper was Marra, Jones, Astell and about 40 co-authors.
(Thanks to Juan Weiss for this entry and its interpretation.)
This work is not actually a "history", rather it contains translations, with commentary, of three late nineteenth and early twentieth century treatises on coca and cocaine, plus other documents. "An exploration of the important role of the Netherlands and Indonesia to the cocaine industry at the turn of the last century. It contains annotated translations of three rare, previously untranslated late-19th and early-20th century books on the chemistry, botany and economics of the cocaine industry. One of the translations deals entirely with the Indonesian cocaine trade and contains a detailed account of coca cultivation in Java. The other two translations include general histories of the industry but are written from different perspectives" (Publisher).
"Cattle Plague: A History is the most comprehensive general study of the history of cattle plague or rinderpest yet attempted, of which there has not been a book in English since 1866. With its stranglehold on the economy of Europe until the later 19th century, rinderpest has been the most neglected study in history. The most virulent and dreaded animal disease to affect Europe and Asia from ancient times with up to 95 percent mortality of affected cattle; in the 18th century it is estimated to have carried off more than 200 million head of cattle in Europe, exclusive of Siberia and Tartary. Germany alone lost 28 million between 1711 and 1865, 3 in every 4 animals dying. Following its introduction into Britain in 1745, the losses in 1745-57 were estimated at in excess of half a million head. Its introduction in 1865 with a dozen oxen led to the death, including those which were slaughtered, of 278,943 animals, some estimates putting the loss as high as 420,000, representing 7 per cent of the national herd; according to some affecting livestock farming and the meat trade for the next 25 years. It was responsible for a major panzootic in Africa at the turn of the 19th century, devastating domestic and wild animals alike and affecting the ecology of Africa to the present" (Publisher).
"... organ transplantation has become a generally effective and routine treatment for patients with organ failure. In this book, a well-known expert in the fields of clinical transplantation and transplantation research traces the evolution of organ transplantation from its initial stirrings in the imaginations of the ancients to its status as accepted treatment for nearly 40,000 patients each year. Drawing often on his own first-hand experience, Dr Nicholas Tilney tells the story of the advances in organ transplantation, discusses how societal forces have driven its development, and reveals how its current success is marred by commercialism and exploitation of the less fortunate...." (publisher).
Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2003.
"The acceptance of risk factors has produced changes in public health and medicine as profound as those that resulted from bacteriology and the germ theory of disease. . . . The risk factor concept has been controversial because of its statistical methodology, its multifactorial concept of disease etiology, and its effect on the economic interests of commercial, professional, and health organisations." This excerpt from the preface provides an excellent summary of this book. William Rothstein, professor of sociology at the University of Maryland, explains how "the risk factor" arose in life insurance and from developments in population statistics and probability theory. Since the end of the 19th century, major U.S. life-insurance companies have collected sociodemographic data and health data about millions of their policyholders, followed these persons for long periods, and used the data to calculate premiums and benefits. Initially, the companies used information on the results of urinalysis (to detect kidney disease and diabetes), "build" (i.e., weight in relation to height), medical history, occupation, and place of residence, because their records showed that these factors were strongly associated with mortality rates. Later, blood pressure and smoking status were added. By conducting medical examinations and taking measurements for life-insurance companies, physicians became familiar with the concept of risk factors and incorporated it into their clinical practice. Risk factors are identified through correlations with diseases, rather than from laboratory evidence of biologic mechanisms. Statistical inference is used to examine associations between multiple risk factors and the probability of disease. The scientific credibility of risk factors accrues from repeated demonstration of the associations in different populations and in different settings, dose-response effects, and reductions in disease after changes to the risk factors. The second half of the book is about the rise and fall of the epidemic of coronary heart disease (CHD) in the 20th century. Rothstein examines the evidence for the main risk factors for CHD, using the standard criteria for assessing epidemiologic results -- chance, bias, confounding, reverse causation, and possible true causation. He relies heavily on life-insurance findings, because they meet many of these criteria. He is relatively skeptical about randomized clinical trials owing to concern about the generalizability of the findings. Tobacco smoking and high blood pressure meet the criteria for risk factors for CHD and other diseases. The diet-heart hypothesis is where confusion sets in. The evidence is not strong. Advice from the medical profession fluctuates. Rothstein believes that, rather than cholesterol or saturated fat, the relevant risk factor is total caloric intake. The life-insurance data have for many decades demonstrated associations between overweight and CHD and diabetes, yet reducing population levels of caloric intake is not in the interest of the food industry or within the expertise of the medical profession. In the last 20 pages of the book Rothstein claims that "personal risk factors," such as cigarette smoking and high blood pressure or lipid levels, cannot account for the epidemic of CHD. (In my view, his brief analysis is flawed by an assumption that long latency times are needed.) Rather, he argues that "social and cultural factors" are important determinants of CHD but does not explain how they might account for the major epidemic of the 20th century..."(Annette J. Dobson, New England Journal of Medicine.)
Alcalá de Henares: Universidad de Alcala de Henares, 2003.
Biographies of more than one thousand exiled veterinarians, dentists, clinicians, and pharmacists who, like Guerra, left Spain after the Civil War of 1936-39.
Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003.
"... the first in-depth study of a powerful intellectual and social influence: the radical empiricism of the Paris Clinical School. After the French Revolution, Paris emerged as the most vibrant center of Western medicine, bringing fundamental changes in understanding disease and attitudes toward the human body as an object of scientific knowledge. Between the 1810s and the 1860s, hundreds of Americans studied in Parisian hospitals and dissection rooms, and then applied their new knowledge to advance their careers at home and reform American medicine.
By reconstructing their experiences and interpretations, by comparing American with English depictions of French medicine, and by showing how American memories of Paris shaped the later reception of German ideals of scientific medicine, Warner reveals that the French impulse was a key ingredient in creating the modern medicine American doctors and patients live with today. Impressed by the opportunity to learn through direct hands-on physical examination and dissection, many American students in Paris began to decry the elaborate theoretical schemes they held responsible for the degraded state of American medicine. These reformers launched an empiricist crusade "against the spirit of system," which promised social, economic, and intellectual uplift for their profession. Using private diaries, family letters, and student notebooks, and exploring regionalism, gender, and class, Warner draws readers into the world of medical Americans while investigating tensions between the physician's identity as scientist and as healer" (publisher).
Traces the life of physician and anthropologist Paul Farmer with particular focus on his work fighting tuberculosis, especially in Haiti, Peru, and Russia.
The authors showed that mutations in lamin A (LMNA) are the cause of Hutchinson-Gilford progeria sundrom (HGPS). At the end of their abstract they stated that "The discovery of the molecular basis of this disease may shed light on the general phenomenon of human aging."
Digital facsimile from PubMedCentral at this link. Order of authorship in the original publication: Eriksson, Brown, Gordon... Collins.
See Also: Annachiara De Sandre-Giovannoli, Rafaelle Bernard, Perre Cau et al….. "Lamin A truncation in Hutchinson-Gilford progeria," Science, 300, No. 5626, 2003, page 2055. Digital facsimile from science.org at this link. This paper was accepted by the journal Science on the same day that the Collins paper was accepted by the journal Nature.
(Thanks to Juan Weiss for these references and their interpretation.)
Called, "the breakthrough in computational de novo protein design." This was the proof of concept paper that computers and AI could be used to predict protein structures accurately and much faster than with conventional cryoEM or crystallography. In 2024 Baker shared half of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry with Demis Hassabis and John Jumper for "revealing protein's secrets through computing and artificial intelligence."
Order of authorship in the original publication: Kuhlman, Dantas, Ireton, Varani...Baker.
(Thanks to Juan Weiss for this reference and its interpretation.)
In 2003 a joint Indonesian-Australian research team led by Michael Morwood found LB-1—a nearly complete female skeleton of a tiny human that lived about 80,000 years ago—in Liang Bua cave on the island of Flores, Indonesia. The skeleton’s unique traits such as its small body and brain size led scientists to assign the skeleton to a new species, Homo floresiensis,named after the island on which it was discovered. Nicknamed "hobbit", the individual would have stood about 3.5 feet (1.1 m) in height. With T. Sutikna, R. P. Soejono, Jatmiko, E. Wayju Saptomo, and Rokus Awe Due.
A review of the history, development and then-current applications of robotics in surgery. The paper is freely available from PubMedCentral at this link.
From the Wikipedia article on Google Books, accessed 12 -2016:
"Google Books (previously known as Google Book Search and Google Print) is a service from Google Inc. that searches the full text of books and magazines that Google has scanned, converted to text using optical character recognition (OCR), and stored in its digital database.[1] Books are provided either by publishers and authors, through the Google Books Partner Program, or by Google's library partners, through the Library Project.[2] Additionally, Google has partnered with a number of magazine publishers to digitize their archives.[3][4]
The Publisher Program was first known as 'Google Print' when it was introduced at the Frankfurt Book Fair in October 2004. The Google Books Library Project, which scans works in the collections of library partners and adds them to the digital inventory, was announced in December 2004.
The Google Books initiative has been hailed for its potential to offer unprecedented access to what may become the largest online body of human knowledge[5][6]and promoting the democratization of knowledge.[7] But it has also been criticized for potential copyright violations,[7][8] and lack of editing to correct the many errors introduced into the scanned texts by the OCR process.
As of October 2015, the number of scanned book titles was over 25 million, but the scanning process has slowed down in American academic libraries.[9][10]Google estimated in 2010 that there were about 130 million distinct titles in the world,[11][12] and stated that it intended to scan all of them.[11]"
The first comparison of medical systems of the Ancient Near East and the Greek and Roman world. The authors treat early medicine in Babylonia, Egypt, the Minoan and Mycenean world; later medicine in Hippocrates, Galen, Aelius Aristides, Vindicianus, the Talmud, focusing on the degree of "rationality" or "irrationality" in the various ways of medical thought and treatment.
"....a translation and edition of the medieval Arabic medical work entitled Imtiḥān al-alibbā' li-kāffat al-aṭibbā' ("The Experts' Examination for All Physicians"). It is a study guide for students of medicine prepared by Abd al-Azīz al-Sulami who was chief of medicine to the Ayyūbid sultan in Cairo between 596/1200 and 604/1208. It is composed of ten chapters on ten fields of medicine: the pulse, urine, fevers and crises, symptoms, drugs, treatment, ophthalmology, surgery, bonesetting, and fundamentals.
The first comprehensive account of medicinal uses of wild plants by the country folk of Britain and Ireland based on manuscript folklore sources as well as published sources. These included information gathered by the Irish Folklore Commission in more than 1000 manuscript volumes. This previously unpublished material constitutes a medical tradition that was previously overlooked by historians. The work chronicles the usage of more than 400 plant species.
"The new edition of "Histoire des Entomologistes Français" is completely revised and expanded. The author has supplemented this work with five new biographies, a chapter on Agricultural Entomology, a list of the Society's Presidents since 1989, a list of the Society's Secretaries General, and added photographs from the Archives of The Society and amateur gifts, which were missing in the first edition. It comprises two main parts on the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The main chapters of the work of J. Gouillard are the following: The foundation of the Entomological Society of France; French entomology in the nineteenth century (1832-1900); French Entomology in the 20th Century (1900-1950); Medical entomology; Tropical agricultural entomology; French palaeoentomology; Sericulture in France; Beekeeping in France; The ecology. There are also lists and indexes such as the classification of insects, arachnids and myriapods, a bibliography, a historical index of the French entomologists mentioned in the Annales et Bulletins of the Entomological Society of France (1832-1980)" (Publisher).
Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2004.
'In 1992-93, some five hundred people died from cholera in the Orinoco Delta of eastern Venezuela. In some communities, a third of the adults died in a single night, as anthropologist Charles Briggs and Clara Mantini-Briggs, a Venezuelan public health physician, reveal in their frontline report. Why, they ask in this moving and thought-provoking account, did so many die near the end of the twentieth century from a bacterial infection associated with the premodern past?
"It was evident that the number of deaths resulted not only from inadequacies in medical services but also from the failure of public health officials to inform residents that cholera was likely to arrive. Less evident were the ways that scientists, officials, and politicians connected representations of infectious diseases with images of social inequality. In Venezuela, cholera was racialized as officials used anthropological notions of "culture" in deflecting blame away from their institutions and onto the victims themselves. The disease, the space of the Orinoco Delta, and the "indigenous ethnic group" who suffered cholera all came to seem somehow synonymous" (publisher).
City of Industry, CA: Art of Medicine Press, Inc., 2004.
This book, which extends to nearly 1200 pages, and represents the work of numerous experts, is the most comprehensive modern treatise on the subject of which I am aware.
"The "About This Site" section of Livingstone Online describes some of the key elements of this site, including our goals, mission, and staff. The section also includes a set of essays detailing the history of Livingstone Online and outlines the significance of Livingstone's manuscripts, efforts by scholars to document these manuscripts, and our site's potential audiences. The guide below describes each of the pages in this part of the site.
Livingstone Online: An Introduction - introduces Livingstone Online by describing the site's goals, content, and practices. The section also outlines the site's educational value for modern audiences.
Livingstone's Manuscripts in the Digital Age- traces the history of documenting and assembling Livingstone surviving manuscripts through the Livingstone Documentation Project (1973-85), followed by the ongoing efforts of Livingstone Online (2004-present) to bring digital editions of these manuscripts to a global audience.
The Theory Behind Livingstone Online - sets out Livingstone Online's theoretical objectives. We cite our attempts to represent Livingstone's legacy in a reflective and critically-informed manner, and we discuss the challenges inherent in working with colonial source materials. The essay concludes by outlining our efforts to conduct our research in a transparent manner that invites critical interrogation and debate.
The Design of Livingstone Online - provides an overview of the Livingstone Online site design. The essay outlines the key components of the site, the site’s aesthetic objectives, and the collaborative process that led to the development of the site.
Why Should We Read Livingstone’s Manuscripts? - outlines Livingstone's importance as an imperial travel writer, the topics that he covers in his writings, the geographical extent of his travels, the potential of his manuscripts to inform research in many disciplines, and the overall importance of Livingstone's manuscripts for understanding both nineteenth-century and contemporary global events.
Reading Exploration Through the Digital Library - outlines the significance of Livingstone Online as a digital library; using examples from the site, examines the importance of the digital library in continuing the deconstruction of persistent, individual-centered histories of nineteenth-century exploration in Africa; and explores the implications of such work for the rediscovery of lost, silenced, or muted narratives in the historical record.
Livingstone Online Site Guide - provides a skeletal outline of the entire Livingstone Online site. The section enumerates all the main sections and subsections of the site and provides links to all core site data, documentation, and outreach materials.
A Brief History of Livingstone Online (2004-2013) - explores the origins of Livingstone Online, describes the goals and achievements of the project's first phase (2004-2006), considers how these goals changed as the site grew and gained more collaborators during its second phase (2007-2009), and, finally, outlines how Livingstone Online expanded into an international project while embracing advanced imaging technology for the study of Livingstone's manuscripts (2010-2013).
LEAP (2013-2017): A Project History, part I and part II - details the history of LEAP: The Livingstone OnlineEnrichment and Access Project, the initiative funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) that resulted in the development of the present Livingstone Online site and our critical edition of Livingstone's Final Manuscripts (1865-73). The essay combines text, images, and access to downloadable project documents to provide an intimate, behind-the-scenes look into the project."
"Here you can explore highlights of the College's uniquely rich and growing collections of more than 5 million archives, rare books, photographs and illustrations that span more than 500 years of world history.
"These online exhibitions describe the innovative work of King's alumni which have helped transform the modern world - discoveries which include the unravelling of the DNA double helix and the development of the telegraph and colour photography.
"They also highlight the particular strengths of the collections, which contain rich medical, dental or nursing-related material including psychiatry and hospital and public health records. Arts and humanities collections range from examples of American beat and concrete poetry to the history of modern Greece.
"The holdings of the Liddell Hart Centre for Military Archives cover more than a century of modern history, war, empire and exploration: visit 'The Serving Soldier' microsite and our online exhibitions to learn more.
"The Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) Library Collection of 80,000 volumes on war, politics and diplomacy, travel, anthropology and the natural world includes a wealth of unique content ideal for use in teaching, learning and research.
"New online exhibitions are published each year to support College programmes including academic conferences and anniversaries; or to contribute to regional or national cultural festivals such as Open House Weekend and the Story of London. Alongside digital content, major physical exhibitions are also curated and are open to the public in the Weston Room of the Maughan Library in Chancery Lane: please visit our web pages regularly for news on forthcoming exhibitions."
Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2004.
"The cholera epidemics that plagued London in the nineteenth century were a turning point in the science of epidemiology and public health, and the use of maps to pinpoint the source of the disease initiated an explosion of medical and social mapping not only in London but throughout the British Empire as well. Mapping the Victorian Social Body explores the impact of such maps on Victorian and, ultimately, present-day perceptions of space. Tracing the development of cholera mapping from the early sanitary period to the later "medical" period of which John Snow's work was a key example, the book explores how maps of cholera outbreaks, residents' responses to those maps, and the novels of Charles Dickens, who drew heavily on this material, contributed to an emerging vision of London as a metropolis. The book then turns to India, the metropole's colonial other and the perceived source of the disease. In India, the book argues, imperial politics took cholera mapping in a wholly different direction and contributed to Britons' perceptions of Indian space as quite different from that of home. The book concludes by tracing the persistence of Victorian themes in current discourse, particularly in terms of the identification of large cities with cancerous growth and of Africa with AIDS" (publisher).
Extensive book (324 pages, many color plates) issued in connection with an exhibition held in Bologna, December 2004 to March 2005, celebrating the fourth centenary of Ulisse Aldrovandi. A much-condensed guide to the exhibition, reproducing many images in color, was also published with Italian and English text, and freely distributed.
Paris: Publications scientifiques du Muséum, 2004.
"Founded in 1635, the Royal Garden of Medicinal Plants became the National Museum of Natural History during the French Revolution, with magisterial chairs which were suppressed in 1985. During this 350-year period more than 500 scientists, men and women, worked in these two successive institutions. Although some of them like Buffon, Cuvier and Claude Bernard recall something to the common layman, most of these figures are presently unknown out of a restricted set of specialists. The lives and works of these scientists of the Royal Garden and of the Museum were therefore worth of report in a biographical dictionary which includes not less than 516 entries. These men and women with quite diverse social origins, training and characters explored all aspects of physical, natural and human sciences. They widened the field of knowledge, gave rise to new disciplines and institutions, assembled collections, and contributed to the spread of knowledge. Some of them were in parallel appointed civil or military officers, sometimes very close to the French central government. Either scientists with cabinets or great travellers, distinguished persons or unpretentious civil servants, all played a role in the history of the great institution they served."
Digital edition of full text available from books.openedition.org at this link.
"The volume investigates how Paul of Aegina's medical handbook or pragmateia was transmitted and transformed through Syriac and Arabic translations, becoming one of the cornerstones of the Islamic medical tradition. It uses new manuscript evidence in order to explore the crucial impact of Paul's pragmateia, tracing its steps through different languages and cultures in the Middle East. A discussion of different Syriac and Arabic authors who quote the pragmateia such as Ibn Serapion and Rhazes is followed by detailed studies of Greek-Syriac-Arabic translation technique, examining, for instance, ophthalmologic terminology, and giving a critical appraisal of translation syntax and lexicography. Paul's influence on the development of medical theory in the Islamic world and beyond is also addressed...." (publisher).
The authors modified Koch's Postulates within the context of prion disease. To do so the followed these steps:
1) They created recombinant mouse prion proteins in an E. coli and polymerized them. 2) They proved that these prion proteins were pure, and could not have any extraneous contaminating cellular or DNA/RNA material. 3) They injected these prion proteins aseptically into the brains of normal mice, fed them, reared them, and waited. 4) The mice developed neurologic dysfunction typical of a prion disease between 380 and 660 days after the injection. 5) Extracts from the brains of the mice were confirmed by Western blot analytic technique to be prionic in nature. 6) These abnormal prion proteins extracted from the mouse brains, when inoculated into and transmitted to other healthy mice, induced the typical neuropathological findings of the same prion illness.
(Order of authorship in the original publication: Legname, Baskakov, Nguyen....Prusiner.)
(Thanks to Juan Weiss for this reference and its interpretation.)
"Until Now, there have been no books and only a few articles available in English that deal with the actual practice of medicine in nineteenth and early twentieth-century Iran. Willem Floor’s Public Health in Qajar Iran fills this lacuna, giving a broad and comprehensive survey of the state of public health, medical practice, and its practitioners in 1800-1925. Based on firsthand accounts of European travelers and doctors who practiced and observed medical treatment, the study provides an overview of the major diseases the population suffered and how these were treated. It also includes the available evidence logged by Iranian patients abroad and at home, as well as contemporary Persian texts that comment on public health and its practice in Iran.
"Floor shuns the analysis of classic Islamic medical textbooks, explaining that their medical advice was hardly ever administered and that the authors often had ideological (religious) agendas in writing these treatises. Instead, Floor investigates the commonly accepted theories of diseases, disorders, and their cures, including Islamic Galenic medicine and pre-Islamic theurgic folk medicine based on traditional herb lore and trial-and-error. The book concludes with the impact of Western medicine on the traditional medical institutions and public health in Qajar Iran..." (publisher)
The occasion of this meeting was the discovery in 1989 near Hyères (Var, France) of a human skeleton of the third or fourth century CE presenting lesions similar to those of syphilis. The volume contains fifty papers in French and in English by eighty-six authors, grouped under seven headings: (1) Theories and Men; (2) Treponematoses Today— Present Clues for Past Lues?; (3) Syphilis, Treponemes and Bone Diagnosis from Present to Past; (4–5) Syphilis in Europe and in the New World before 1493? (6) After 1493 in the Old World; and (7) Round Tables and Conclusions.
The authors in Korea, led by Woo-suk Hwang, reported the cloning of a human blastocyst using somatic cell nuclear transfer, and deriving pluripotent embryonic stem cells from that cloned blastocyst. In doing so they claimed to have cloned the first human being. Numerous extensive scientific investigations resulting from testimony of the second author, Young June Ryu, resulted in an official "Editorial Retraction" published in Science, 311, 2006, p.335. At that time only 7 of the 12 co-authors of the paper agreed to retract their claims.
(Thanks to Juan Weiss for this reference and its interpretation.)
The first report on detection of Mpox (Monkeypox) in humans in the Western Hemisphere, elaborating and expanding on cases reported in 2003 in Wisconsin and Milwaukee. These patients had been bitten by prairie dogs. At this time only zoonotic transfer was observed.
Order of authorship in the original publication: Reed, Melski, Graham, Damon.
(Thanks to Juan Weiss for this reference and its interpretation.)
In 1977 Gunther von Hagens invented plastination, a technique or process used in anatomy to preserve bodies or body parts.In the process water and fat are replaced by certain plastics, yielding specimens that can be touched, do not smell or decay, and even retain most properties of the original sample, including the original weight. During the first 20 years plastination was used to preserve small specimens for medical study. It was not until the early 1990s that the equipment was developed to make it possible to plastinate whole body specimens, each specimen taking up to 1,500 person-hours to prepare. The first exhibition of whole bodies was displayed in Japan in 1995. Over the next two years, von Hagens developed the Body Worlds exhibition, showing whole bodies plastinated in lifelike poses and dissected to show various structures and systems of human anatomy. This met with public interest and controversy in more than 50 cities around the world.
Describes the transformation of Chinese medicine from a marginal, sidelined medical practice of the early 20th century to an essential and high profile part of the national health care system under the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).
Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 2005.
The first book published on any aspect of medicine in the crusades. "Focusing on injuries and their surgical treatment, Piers D. Mitchell considers medical practitioners, hospitals on battlefields and in towns, torture and mutilation, emergency and planned surgical procedures, bloodletting, analgesia and anesthesia. He provides an assessment of the exchange of medical knowledge that took place between East and West in the crusades, and of the medical negligence legislation for which the kingdom of Jerusalem was famous" (publisher).
Previous volumes of Franz Köcher’s series on Babylonian and Assyrian medical literature provided copies of cuneiform medical tablets with extensive indices listing all known parallel passages. This volume edits all of the tablets listed in volumes 1–6 of Köcher's Babylonisch-assyrische Medizin dealing with renal and rectal diseases. Many of the British Museum sources have been known from fragments, copied by R. Campbell Thompson in his Assyrian Medical Texts (1923), but many new joins have been made since that time, thus tablets dealing with renal and rectal diseases were been copied and edited in this volume. Although some of these medical texts were previously translated by Thompson in 1929 and 1934, these translations were later considered inadequate. This book makes most of these medical texts available to Assyriologists and medical historians for the first time. One interesting feature is how seldom magic and magical rituals feature within these medical recipes.
"The Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL) is a consortium of natural history and botanical libraries that cooperate to digitize the legacy literature of biodiversity held in their collections and to make that literature available for open access and responsible use as a part of a global “biodiversity commons.” The BHL consortium works with the international taxonomic community, rights holders, and other interested parties to ensure that this biodiversity heritage is made available to a global audience through open access principles. In partnership with the Internet Archive and through local digitization efforts, the BHL has digitized millions of pages of taxonomic literature, representing over 100,000 titles and over 170,000 volumes.
"Much of the published literature on biological diversity is available in only a few select libraries in the developed world. These collections are of exceptional value because the domain of systematic biology depends, more than any other science, upon historic literature. Yet, this wealth of knowledge is available only to those few who can gain direct access to significant library collections. Literature about the biota existing in developing countries is often not available within their own borders. Biologists have long considered that access to the published literature is one of the chief impediments to the efficiency of research in the field. Free global access to digital literature repatriates information about the earth’s species to all parts of the world.
"The BHL consortium members digitize the public domain books and journals held within their collections. To acquire additional content and promote free access to information, the BHL has also obtained permission from publishers to digitize and make available significant biodiversity materials that are still under copyright.
"Because of BHL’s success in digitizing a significant mass of biodiversity literature, the study of living organisms has become more efficient. The BHL Portal allows users to search the corpus by multiple access points, read the texts online, or download select pages or entire volumes as PDF files.
"The BHL serves texts with information on over a 150 million species names. Using Global Names Recognition and Discovery (GNRD) and UBio’s taxonomic name finding tools, researchers can bring together publications about species and find links to related content in the Encyclopedia of Life. Because of its commitment to open access, BHL provides a range of services and APIs which allow users to harvest source data files and reuse content for research purposes. BHL also serves as the foundational literature component of the Encyclopedia of Life .
"Since 2009, the BHL has expanded globally. The European Commission’s eContentPlus program has funded the BHL Europe project, with 28 institutions, to assemble the European language literature. Additionally, the Chinese Academy of Sciences (BHL China), the Atlas of Living Australia (BHL Australia), Brazil (through BHL SciELO), the Bibliotheca Alexandrina(BHL Egypt), and the South African National Biodiversity Institute (BHL Africa) have created national or regional BHL nodes. Additionally, in 2014, the National Library Board of Singapore became the first institution to join BHL as both a Member of BHL and a global node (BHL Singapore). Global nodes are organizational structures that may or may not develop their own BHL portals. It is the goal of BHL to share and serve content through the BHL Portal developed and maintained at the Missouri Botanical Garden. These projects will work together to share content, protocols, services, and digital preservation practices."
"The Office of NIH History at the National Institutes of Health exists to advance historical understanding of biomedical research within the NIH and the world. Through preserving records of significant NIH achievements, innovative exhibits, and educational programs, the Office of NIH History explores the past to enhance present understanding of the health sciences and the National Institutes of Health."
Translated into English by Ann M. Hentschel as Brainwaves: A cultural history of electroencephalography. Abingdon, Oxford and New York: Routledge, 2018.
"The project began as a exhibition in the Basle University Library to commemorate the major anniversaries of the birth and death of Paracelsus (1493–1541). Not only did he work and teach in Basle, but many of his writings were first published there by his followers. Printers like Heinrich Petri and Peter Perna supported the new medicine both for its therapeutics and for its links with evangelical religion. The conjunction of medicine, science and religion was promoted by the presence in the city of many religious exiles, such as Adam von Bodenstein and Guglielmo Gratarolo, who took advantage of willing printers to publish their beliefs in treatises in German and in Latin, the universal language of scholarship. The rise of the university as a bastion of Protestant scientific learning under Zwinger and the Platter family attracted students from all over northern Europe, who took back to their homes the latest products of the Basle presses. All this is wonderfully documented in the Basle Library, whose collections of early printed books, manuscripts and autograph letters are a prime resource for students of sixteenth-century medicine and science. Not surprisingly, the 1993 exhibition was a visual and intellectual feast, and attracted large numbers of visitors.
The small catalogue then took on a life of its own, and expanded in concept and content. The list of imprints by Paracelsus and his followers, the basis for Part 2, nos. 175–210, was extended to cover medicine and science, interpreted broadly to include mathematics, geography and even rhetoric, as well as the role of the printers in supporting, and at times directing, evangelical reform in a godly city. In all, 766 items are listed; 174 in Part 1, covering the period before 1550; 36 in Part 2; 506 in Part 3, non-Paracelsian imprints after 1550; and 10 additions in the Introduction. Excluding the introduction and index, this bibliographical cornucopia runs to 3694 pages, an average of five pages per printed book. When the strictly bibliographical description rarely runs to more than ten lines, and the concluding paragraph giving details of the provenance of each copy (or often copies) usually to less than that, one may wonder how Dr Hieronymus has managed to fill so many pages.
Each entry begins with a short listing of the author, title, place and date of printing, the name of the printer, and the size of the book. This is then followed by a description of the book's contents, composition, history, and significance in the history of medicine and science. Often there are comments about the place of the book in the history of printing in Basle, and the entry ends with a description of exemplars in the Basle Library. Often a reproduction of the title page is given, sometimes in half-page length, but usually full-page, and even as folding plates attached to the inside back cover. But these reproductions range widely to show some of the illustrations, manuscript notes of ownership or commentary, and even some of the manuscript documentation and drafts that reveal the history of the book's publication. No copy of 413, John Caius' very rare edition of some minor works of Galen, 1557, survives in Basle. But in the collections of the Frey-Grynaeum Institute there exists the copy of the fourth of these works, De ossibus, that Caius prepared for his printer, Oporinus. The illustrations show how Caius inserted his corrections into the 1543 Paris edition before sending the volume to Basle. These abundant reproductions provide a remarkable visual resource for the history of medicine and of printing (one illustration, I know, has already helped in identifying a damaged volume in a London library). An electronic version of some of the entries, incorporating still more illustrations, can be found on the Library's website: www.ub.unibas.ch/kadmos/gg/; or via their ‘Virtuelle Bibliothek’ (Handschriften/Griechische Geist)."
"It tells one story if one begins at the beginning, and another if one begins at the end, with the seven indexes that form volume 5. A mere glance at its first six indexes, of dates, authors and titles, printers and their location, addressees, owners, and the composers of commentary, dedications or liminal poems, opens windows onto the early modern republic of letters. But this information is dwarfed by that in index 7, a gallimaufry of names and topics ranging from God and ruins to brain disease, the rhinoceros and the wondrous Johannes Baptista Campofulgosus. As with Zwinger's Theatrum vitae humanae, 1571, the subject of possibly the longest notice in the catalogue, all human life is here. Anyone with an interest in early modern science who looks up any name or word is likely to find unexpected information or a new context for familiar material. But, I suspect, not even 134 pages of double-columned index will reveal everything." (quotations from the review by Vivian Nutton, "Basel, printing, and the early modern intellectual world," Med. Hist. 2007 Apr 1; 51(2): 246–249.
Order of authorship in the original paper: Leroy, Kumulungui, Pourrut. The authors showed that fruit bats, while asymptomatic, act as reservoirs and potential carriers of Ebola virus in Africa. These bats are eaten by people in Central Africa.
(Thanks to Juan Weiss for this reference and its interpretation.).
Order of authorship in the original paper: Taylor, Makunde, McGarry.... The authors treated infection by the parasitic worm Wuchereria bancrofti, cause of elephantiasis (lymphatic filariasis), by killing the Wolbachia bacteria inside the worm with the antibiotic doxycycline. Since the worm requires the Wolbachia (a symbiont) to live, killing the Wolbachia bacteria eliminates the worm and cures the disease.
(Thanks to Juan Weiss for this reference and its interpretation.)
Order of authorship in the original publication: Tumpey, Basler, Aguilar... Taubenberger. Reconstruction of the genome of the 1918 Spanish Influenza virus from frozen tissue samples from a mass grave of victims of the 1918 epidemic unearthed from the permafrost at Brevig Mission, Alaska. This and the following paper published in Nature were the culmination of a series of papers published on the pathogenomics of this exceptionally virulent virus by Taubenberger and colleagues from 1997 to 2005.
The authors published a paper in Nature simultaneously with the above-cited 2005 paper in Science: Taubenberger, Ann H. Reid, Rain M. Lourens et al, "Characterization of the 1918 influenza virus polymerase gene," Nature, 437 (2005) 889-893.
In January 2005 Taubenberger, Ann H. Reid, and Thomas G. Fanning also published a paper in Scientific American recounting the unusual history of this research, entitled "Capturing a killer flu virus."
The CDC provided an informative history of this research by Douglas Jordan with contributions from Terrence Tumpey and Barbara Jester: "The deadliest flu: The complete story of the discovery and reconstruction of the 1918 pandemic virus," https://www.cdc.gov/flu/pandemic-resources/reconstruction-1918-virus.html
(Thanks to Juan Weiss for this reference and its interpretation.)
Order of authorship in the original publication: Fredricks, Fiedler, Marrazzo. Using molecular methods, the authors confirmed that absence or greatly reduced number of Lactobacilli was associated with vaginosis. They also identified the primary infecting bacteria as Prevotella, Sneathia, Megashera, and Atropobium.
(Thanks to Juan Weiss for this reference and its interpretation.)
Order of authorship in the original publication: Sonnenberg, Xu, Leip....The authors showed that complex plant carbohydrates (glycans), which the human body cannot digest, provide food for benign bacteria in the microbiome, and that feeding them appropriately maintains our symbiotic relationship with these benign bacteria. This glycan material that provides food for benign bacteria in the microbiome was later called Prebiotics.
(Thanks to Juan Weiss for this reference and its interpretation.)
Order of authorship in the original publication: Mojica, Díez-Villaseñor, Jesus García-Martínez. In this paper Mojica and colleagues showed the the CRISPR system is a bacterial immune system against viral attack. This was the first evidence that bacteria have an immune system. A consequence of this discovery is the implication that the human immune system could have begun evolving billions of years ago in bacteria.
(Thanks to Juan Weiss for this reference and its interpretation.)
Wolfe and colleagues analyzed blood of bushmeat hunters in Cameroon and discovered two novel viruses previously unknown: Human T-lymphopic virus-3 HTLV-3 and HTLV-4. They also reported that HTLV-3 is genetically similar to STLV-3 of monkeys and posited that this virus mutated and jumped from humans to monkeys. Available from pnas.org at this link.
(Thanks to Juan Weiss for this reference and its interpretation.)
Addresses 1: The beginning of life, 2: Embryonic stem cells, 3: Societal, ethical and religious views on genetic intervention in humans, 4: Genetics-From in vitro to in vivo, 5: Fetal surgical and pharmacological intervention, 6: Fetal imaging and monitoring, 7: Law and justics, 8: Extreme prematurity
Proc. Nat. Acad. Sci. (USA), 102, 12891-12896, 2005.
Discovery of the first Human Bocavirus (HBoV1), a new virus species associated with lower respiratory infection almost always in children. (Order of authorship in the original publication: Allander, Tammi, Eriksson).
"Allander and colleagues at the Karolinska Institutet in Stockholm, Sweden, first cloned the coding sequence of this new member of the family of Parvoviridae in 2005 from pooled nasopharyngeal aspirates (NPA, collection of aspirated fluid from the back of the nasal cavity).[3] They used a novel technique called molecular virus screening, based on random cloning and bioinformatical analysis. This technique has led to the discovery of new viruses such as polyomavirus KI (Karolinska Institute)[4] and WU (Washington University),[5] which are closely related to each other and have been isolated from respiratory secretions.
"The name bocavirus is derived from bovine and canine, referring to the two known hosts for the founder members of this genus; bovine parvovirus which infects cattle, and minute virus of canines which infects dogs.[9] " (Wikipedia article on Human bocavirus, accessed 5-2020).
Karikó and Weissman discovered the nucleoside modifications that suppress the immungenicity of RNA, leading to their patents for the application of non-immunogenic, nucleoside-modified RNA (modRNA). This technology was licensed by Pfizer BioNTech and Moderna to develop their mRNA COVID-19 vaccines. Order of authorship in the original publication: Karikó, Buckstein, Ni, Weissman.
In 2023 Karikó and Weissman shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine "for their discoveries concerning nucleoside base modifications that enabled the development of effective mRNA vaccines against COVID-19."
Digital facsimile from sciencedirect.com at this link.
"... emphasizes the importance and interrelationships of geological processes to the health and diseases of humans and animals. Its accessible format fosters better communication between the health and geoscience communities by elucidating the geologic origins and flow of toxic elements in the environment that lead to human exposure through the consumption of food and water. For example, problems of excess intake from drinking water have been encountered for several inorganic compounds, including fluoride in Africa and India; arsenic in certain areas of Argentina, Chile, and Taiwan; selenium in seleniferous areas in the U.S., Venezuela, and China; and nitrate in agricultural areas with heavy use of fertilizers. Environmental influences on vector borne diseases and stormflow water quality influences are also featured...." (publisher).
Südhof is credited with discovering much of the machinery mediating neurotransmitter release and presynaptic plasticity, beginning with the discovery of symaptotagmins and their role in neurostrasmitter release from the presynaptic neuron.
In 2013 Südhof shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with James E. Rothman and Randy W. Schekman "for their discoveries of machinery regulating vesicle traffic, a major transport system in our cells."
May-Britt Moser and Edvard Moser and colleagues discovered grid cells, specialized types of neurons that respond to specific locations in space. They are main components of the brain's GPS. Order of authorship in the original publication: Hafting, Fyhn, Moden, Moser, Moser.
In 2014 May-Britt Moser and Edvard Moser shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with John O'Keefe “for their discoveries of cells that constitute a positioning system in the brain.”
Catalogue of an exhibition held at the National Library of Medicine from October 9, 2002 to July 21, 2003. In May 2015 the website built for the exhibition was available at http://www.nlm.nih.gov/dreamanatomy/.
Chapters on controversial government experimental programs in Senegal, in Germany under the Nazi regime, including in concentration camps and in aerospace research, and also the Tuskegee syphilis experiment in Tuskegee, Alabama.
A popular history, with excellent illustrations; probably the first history of anatomy to include a chapter (by Ackerman, project director for the National Library of Medicine's Digital Human Project) on "Anatomy in the digital age."
Tucson, AZ: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2006.
"Gilbertus's Compendium medicinae was translated into Middle English in the early 15th century.[4] The gynecological and obstetrical portions of that translation were soon excerpted and circulated widely as an independent text known in modern scholarship as The Sickness of Women. That text was then modified further in the mid-15th century by the addition of materials from Muscio and other sources on obstetrics; this is known as The Sickness of Women 2.[5] Between them, the two versions of The Sickness of Women were the most widely circulated Middle English texts on women's medicine in the 15th century, even more popular than the several Middle English versions of the Trotula texts" (Wikipedia article on Gilbertus Anglicus, accessed 01-2017).
"By examining the lives and visions of natural philosophers, spectacular showmen, religious preachers and medical therapists, he shows how electrical experiences of wonder, terror, and awe were connected to a broad array of cultural concerns that defined the American Enlightenment. The history of lightning rods, electrical demonstrations, electric eels, and medical electricity reveals how early American science, medicine, and technology were shaped by a culture of commercial performance, evangelical religion, and republican politics from mid-century to the early republic" (publisher).
Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 2006.
"An interdisciplinary study of why a disease that is so difficult to catch has caused such alarm. It examines how the fear of leprosy was part of nineteenth-century imperial expansion, as colonial officials and missionaries were thought exposed to the risk of infection, which might be carried back to Britain" (publisher)
This book was born digital in 2004, and later published in print. See www.momscancer.com. "Winner of the 2005 Eisner Award in the category of Best Digital Comic for the original Web version"
"Brian Fies is a freelance journalist whose mother was diagnosed with lung cancer. As he and his two sisters struggled with the effects of her illness and her ongoing recovery from treatment, Brian processed the experience in his journal, which took the form of words and pictures.
"The story that came to be known as “Mom’s Cancer” first gained notice on the internet. It was posted anonymously, with the intention of sharing information and insights gained from his family’s experience. Thanks to the words and illustrations of Brian Fies, readers have already responded that they were surprised and gratified to realize that they weren’t alone" (publisher).
"First deployed in 2006, Archive-It is a subscription web archiving service from the Internet Archive that helps organizations to harvest, build, and preserve collections of digital content. Through our user friendly web application Archive-It partners can collect, catalog, and manage their collections of archived content with 24/7 access and full text search available for their use as well as their patrons. Content is hosted and stored at the Internet Archive data centers.
We work with over 400 partner organizations in 48 U.S. states and 16 countries worldwide. Types of organizations we work with include:
College and University Libraries
State Archives, Libraries, and Historical Societies
"This collection of articles is the first collection of studies on the specific subject of disease in Babylonia, based upon actual medical texts, with contributions by senior scholars who have spent years working on published and unpublished cuneiform medical texts. The volume contains editions of unpublished materials as well as syntheses of information about specific diseases in Babylonia, such as fever, published here for the first time" (publisher).
Order of authorship in the original paper: Keele, Van Heuverswyn, Li, Hahn. Definitive proof that SIVcpz circulated and existed in wild chimps in a given area of Africa, and that a mutation of this specific SIV in Africa ignited the epidemic/pandemic of HIV-AIDs.
"Three worldwide (pandemic) outbreaks of influenza occurred in the 20th century: in 1918, 1957, and 1968. The latter 2 were in the era of modern virology and most thoroughly characterized. All 3 have been informally identified by their presumed sites of origin as Spanish, Asian, and Hong Kong influenza, respectively. They are now known to represent 3 different antigenic subtypes of influenza A virus: H1N1, H2N2, and H3N2, respectively. Not classified as true pandemics are 3 notable epidemics: a pseudopandemic in 1947 with low death rates, an epidemic in 1977 that was a pandemic in children, and an abortive epidemic of swine influenza in 1976 that was feared to have pandemic potential. Major influenza epidemics show no predictable periodicity or pattern, and all differ from one another. Evidence suggests that true pandemics with changes in hemagglutinin subtypes arise from genetic reassortment with animal influenza A viruses."
Full text available from PubMedCentral at this link.
Order of authorship in the original publication: Raoult, Fenollar, Birg. Raoult and colleagues cultured the infectious agent of Whipple's disease from the stool of a patient with the disease. In the process the authors learned that this particular bacillus is resistant to glutaraldehyde, a disinfectant that was then used to decontaminate endoscopes used for colonoscopy and other procedures.
(Thanks to Juan Weiss for this reference and its interpretation.)
Translated into French by the author as À la cure, les coloniaux ! Thermalisme, climatisme et colonisation française, 1830-1962. Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2011.
"...the first comprehensive study of Samoan medicine. Cluny and La‘avasa Macpherson have carried out intensive investigation into the practice and beliefs of contemporary indigenous healers, or fofo, in Western Samoa ....They explain convincingly why traditional Samoan medicine and its skilled practitioners continue to flourish alongside Western medical practice both in Samoa and in Samoan immigrant communities.The first part of the book gives a history of Samoan indigenous medicine, showing its capacity to adapt to change and to absorb foreign elements. In the second part the authors describe contemporary Samoan practice. They explore the role of the healer in Samoan society and discuss recruitment, training, and specialization. This is followed by a summary of Samoan beliefs about health, illness, and the nature of the human organism; and a detailed account of diagnostic methods and major treatments used" (publisher).
The authors showed that the absence of the CCR5 receptor, which provides immunoresistance to HIV increases susceptability to West Nile virus. (Order of authorship in the original publication: Glass, McDermott, Lim et al.)
(Thanks to Juan Weiss for this reference and its interpretation.)
"... a comprehensive,well-illustrated study of the organization of the white matter pathways of the brain. Schmahmann and Pandya have analyzed and synthesized the corticocortical and corticosubcortical connections of the major areas of the cerebral cortex of the rhesus monkey. The result is a detailed understanding of the constituents of the cerebral white matter and the organization of the fiber tracts. The findings from the 36 cases studied are presented on a single template brain, facilitating comparison of the locations of the different fiber pathways. The summary diagrams provide a comprehensive atlas of the cerebral white matter. The text is enriched by close attention to functional aspects of the anatomical observations. The clinical relevance of the pathways is addressed throughout the text and a chapter is devoted to human white matter diseases. The introductory account gives a detailed historical background. Translations of seminal original observations by early investigators are presented, and when these are considered in the light of the authors' new observations, many longstanding conflicts and debates are resolved." (publisher).
Though this book is intended for clinical and neurosurgical applications, the authors take an historical approach. Chapter 1 is "Historical review of cross-sectional anatomy of the brain."
Archives d'histoire doctrinale et littéraire du Moyen Âge, 73, 63-163, 2006.
"Abstract "This index of medical medieval texts is the first result of a collective work started in the 60s. It is deliberately limited to medical works (to the exclusion of veterinary art, alchemy, and natural philosophy) and to texts composed before 1500; it includes almost 2300 headwords, divided among anonymous (about 740) and authors (about 1540), and this total reflects the examination of more than 500 manuscripts."
Takahashi and Yamanaka reprogrammed mice fibroblast cells, which can produce only other fibroblast cells, to become pluripotent stem cells, which have the capacity to produce many different types of cells. This they achieved by altering the expression of four genes. Full text available from Cell.com at this link. See also No. 14063.
In 2012 Yamanaka shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Sir John B. Gurdon "for the discovery that mature cells can be reprogrammed to become pluripotent."
Anatomical Record (Pt. B: New Anat.), 2898, 225-240, 2006.
Abstract: "Although the late 17th century witnessed the recognition of fossils as the remains of extinct organisms—because they could be incorporated into the creation story embodied in the Great Chain of Being—acceptance of human antiquity through the indisputable demonstration of the contemporaneity of human bones, stone tools, and accepted fossils was not forthcoming for nearly 2 centuries thereafter. When it did occur, however, ancient humans were not seen as presenting a pattern of diversity similar to that seen in the fossil records of nonhuman organisms. Instead, human evolution then, as now, has typically been interpreted as being unilinear. This belief can be traced to Huxley (1863), who argued that the Feldhofer Grotto Neanderthal skullcap was merely an extension into the past of morphology seen in the Australian Aborigine, whom he took to represent the primitive end of an extreme range of variation he thought characterized Homo sapiens. During the mid-20th century, Mayr and Dobzhansky (mis)used their clout as founders of the evolutionary synthesis to cement in paleoanthropology the idea that human evolutionary history was characterized by nonspeciation. As such, anything that could be interpreted as potentially representing taxic diversity was relegated to the status of individual variation. Lack of understanding of the history of human paleontology, and the biases that constrained its perspective on human evolution, continue to affect the ways in which most paleoanthropologists pigeonhole human fossils."
A politician, Gore was one of the first to draw popular attention to climate change. He supplemented the best-selling book with a film and DVD with the same title. Ten years later, recognizing that in spite of its wide circulation, his first effort had not had sufficient impact on governmental or social policies, Gore issued An inconvenient sequel, truth to power. Your action handbook to learn the science, find your voice and help solve the climate crisis. New York: Rodale Press, 2017. In spite of the social urgency expressed in the sequel, no film or DVD version was produced, and the impact of the sequel was limited.
For An inconvenient truth Gore shared the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize with the United Nation's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change "for their efforts to build up and disseminate greater knowledge about man-made climate change, and to lay the foundations for the measures that are needed to counteract such change."
(Thanks to Juan Weiss for this reference and its interpretation.)
Through their more than 40 year study of Darwin's finches on the Island of Daphne Major in the Galapagos, the Grants demonstrated how natural selection can drive rapid changes in body and beak size in response to changes in the food supply. In the process the Grants elucidated the mechanisms by which new species arise and how genetic diversity is maintained in natural populations. Their results, which show that the effects of natural selection can be seen within a single lifetime, or sometimes within a couple of years, are in distinct contrast to the theories of Charles Darwin who thought that natural selection required extensive periods of time for its operation.
(Thanks to Juan Weiss for this reference and its interpretation.)
In 2004 Shubin, Daeschler and Jenkins discovered the first well-preserved Tiktaalik fossils in on Ellesmere Island in Nunavut, Canada. Tiktaalik is a non-tetrapod member of Osteichthyes (bony fish) from the late Devonian period about 375 million years before present. It is complete with scales and gills, but has a triangular, flattened head and unusual, cleaver-shaped fins. Its fins have thin ray bones for paddling like most fish, but they also have sturdy interior bones that would have allowed Tiktaalik to prop itself up in shallow water and use its limbs for support as most four-legged animals do. The fins and other mixed characteristics mark Tiktaalik as a crucial transition fossil, a link in evolution from swimming fish to four-legged vertebrates.
Order of authorship in the original publication: Shubin, Daescher, Jenkins.
(Thanks to Juan Weiss for this reference and its interpretation.)
The authors showed that: 1) This transitional species had a set of features representing a major departure from the pattern in more primitive sarcopterygian fishes. 2) They presented data to indicate that Tiktaalik lived in a low gradient, meandering fluvial system within a subtropical to tropical climactic belt. 3) In this setting this species developed new mechanisms of head movement, respiration and body support; it could lift itself from the ground, enabling it to emerge from the water and ambulate on the ground, since it was endowed with an abundance of chest muscles. 4) The species had expanded gular plates and robust branchial elements that provided it with a mechanical basis for buccal pumping for lungs as well as gills. These elements assumed a predominant respiratory function for air breathing. 5) Tiktaalik, unlike a fish, had a flat head, and eyes on top of its head and a neck. Thus Tiktaalik’s head architecture resembled that of the present day crocodile.
Order of authorship in the original publication: Daeschler, Shubin, Jenkins.
(Thanks to Juan Weiss for this reference and its interpretation.)
Extensively annotated and well-illustrated catalogue of books, prints, sculptures, and anatomical models from the 15th to 20th centuries, written by Jeremy Norman for the auction sale of Dean Edell's library sold at Christie's, New York, on October 5, 2007.
In May 1940 the Boucher de Perthes Museum in Abbeville was destroyed by bombing. However, in the years before the war Leon Aufrère made copies of archives and correspondence, which became the source material for this book on the circle of scientific amateurs associated with Boucher de Perthes. The book was published posthumously by Aufrère's daughter.
The first biography of Jackson, the physician and geologist who discoverered of the anesthetic effects of ether, and also played an important role in the discovery of the American electro-magnetic telegraph. Forms a supplement to Wolfe's Tarnished idol: William Thomas Green Morton and the introduction of surgical anesthesia. A chronicle of the ether controversy (2001; No. 6903).
Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 2007.
Through an examination of original economic documents, as well as scientific documents, Ilardi discovered that Florence rather than Venice was the 15th-century center for making eye glasses and that lenses for farsightedness were in use a half-century earlier than had been believed.
The operation, which took place on April 2, 2007 at the University Hospital of Strasbourg, in which Marescaux and team removed the gallbladder (cholecystectomy) of a patient through the vagina using a flexible endoscope without making an incision in the skin was believed to be the first operation operation of its kind. "Anubis was the ancient god in Egyptian mythology who presided over mummification and accompanied the dead to the hereafter. Anubis restored Osiris to life through mummification using long, flexible instruments. The project was named after this reference" (from the press release available from the Institut de Recherche contre les Cancers de l'Appraeil Digestif (IRCAD) at this link.
Cold Spring Harbor, NY: Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press, 2007.
Explains how to establish the framework for an experimental project, how to set up all of the components of an experimental system, design experiments within that system, determine and use the correct set of controls, and formulate models to test the veracity and resiliency of the data. Second edition, revised and enlarged, 2014.
St. Andrews, Fife, Scotland: University of St. Andrews, 2007.
"The USTC is a collective database of all books published in Europe between the invention of printing and the end of the sixteenth century" (http://ustc.ac.uk/index.php, accessed 12-2016). It is hosted by the University of St. Andrews.
Critical Arabic edition, annotated English translation, introductory study, and two-way glossaries of the dispensatory composed around the middle of the 12th century CE by the Nestorian physician Ibn at-Tilmīḏ. The dispensatory, recognized as a masterpiece already by mediaeval contemporaries, soon after its appearance became the pharmacological standard work in the hospitals and pharmacies of Baghdad and the wider Arab East, replacing, after almost 300 years, the vademecum of Sābūr ibn Sahl.
The Colonial Medical Service was the branch of the Colonial Serice responsible for healthcare provision in the British overseas territories. This book profiles Colonial Medical Officers (MOs) serving in Kenya, Uganda and Tanzania from from the beginnings of British colonial rule to the start of World War II.
The compendium that King studied is Caspar Wolff's Gynaeciorum (1566, 1586-1588; Nos. 6011 and 6022). She concentrated on its reception, looking at a range of different uses of the book in the history of medicine from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century.
Includes on pp. 185-188, and 211-13, Monica H. Green, "Reconstructing the oeuvre of Trota of Salerno." Also, on pp. 15-60, Monica H. Green, “Rethinking the manuscript basis of Salvatore De Renzi’s Collectio Salernitana: The corpus of medical Writings in the ‘long’ twelfth century,"
Alphita, farina ordei idem, an anonymous collection of glosses, documents the linguistic renewal of the medical and botanical technical lexicon, derived from Greco-Latin as well as Arabic sources, at the School of Salerno from the 11th to the 12th centuries. This is the first critical edition of the glossary, accompanied by a thorough analysis its origins, period of composition, major sources, different versions, textual transmission, and an identification and comment on each entry in the glossary.
Glasgow: The Hunterian, University of Glasgow & London: Paul Holberton Publishing, 2007.
A beautiful book on Hunter's art collection, and how he assembled it, as well as a study of the representation of art in Hunter's library. The book also describes and illustrates Hunter's collection of anatomical art, and publishes the text of his lecture on anatomy to the Royal Academy.
Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2007.
"As many as 20,000 women worked in Union and Confederate hospitals during America's bloodiest war. Black and white, and from various social classes, these women served as nurses, administrators, matrons, seamstresses, cooks, laundresses, and custodial workers. Jane E. Schultz provides the first full history of these female relief workers, showing how the domestic and military arenas merged in Civil War America, blurring the line between homefront and battlefront.
"Schultz uses government records, private manuscripts, and published sources by and about women hospital workers, some of whom are familiar--such as Dorothea Dix, Clara Barton, Louisa May Alcott, and Sojourner Truth--but most of whom are not well-known. Examining the lives and legacies of these women, Schultz considers who they were, how they became involved in wartime hospital work, how they adjusted to it, and how they challenged it. She demonstrates that class, race, and gender roles linked female workers with soldiers, both black and white, but became sites of conflict between the women and doctors and even among themselves.
"Schultz also explores the women's postwar lives--their professional and domestic choices, their pursuit of pensions, and their memorials to the war in published narratives. Surprisingly few parlayed their war experience into postwar medical work, and their extremely varied postwar experiences, Schultz argues, defy any simple narrative of pre-professionalism, triumphalism, or conciliation" (Publisher).
In a review for The Washington Post, Peter D. Kramer wrote, "In Musicophilia, Sacks turns to the intersection of music and neurology -- music as affliction and music as treatment." Kramer wrote, "Lacking the dynamic that propels Sacks's other work, Musicophilia threatens to disintegrate into a catalogue of disparate phenomena." Kramer went on to say, "What makes Musicophilia cohere is Sacks himself. He is the book's moral argument. Curious, cultured, caring, in his person Sacks justifies the medical profession and, one is tempted to say, the human race." Kramer concluded his review by writing, "Sacks is, in short, the ideal exponent of the view that responsiveness to music is intrinsic to our makeup. He is also the ideal guide to the territory he covers. Musicophilia allows readers to join Sacks where he is most alive, amid melodies and with his patients."[1]
"In the decade from 1935-1945, while the Second World War raged in Europe, a new class of medicines capable of controlling bacterial infections launched a therapeutic revolution that continues today. The new medicines were not penicillin and antibiotics, but sulfonamides, or sulfa drugs. The sulfa drugs preceded penicillin by almost a decade, and during World War II they carried the main therapeutic burden in both military and civilian medicine. Their success stimulated a rapid expansion of research and production in the international pharmaceutical industry, raised expectations of medicine, and accelerated the appearance of new and powerful medicines based on research. The latter development created new regulatory dilemmas and unanticipated therapeutic problems. The sulfa drugs also proved extraordinarily fruitful as starting points for new drugs or classes of drugs, both for bacterial infections and for a number of important non-infectious diseases...." (Publisher).
New York: Thieme & Rolling Meadows, IL: American Association of Neurological Surgeons, 2007.
"... features 800 of Cushing's surgical drawings and photographs of patients and tumor specimens. Preserved untouched for sixty years in the Yale University Library, the images provide the earliest catalog of neurological and neuropathological disease and reveal the techniques employed by the founder of modern neurosurgery. The editors have carefully integrated these high-quality photographs and illustrations into a compelling narrative constructed from patients' hospital records and Cushing's meticulous notes at preoperative and postoperative stages of management. Discharge notes, letters from the family of patients, photographs of patients years after surgery, and death reports further humanize each clinical case and speak to Cushing's lasting dedication to his patients" (publisher).
Madrid: Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas, 2007.
Reproduction, transcription, translation into German, and edition of the Muššuɔu unction handbook— a collection of Sumerian and Akkadian incantations of the 1st century BCE.
"How involved should the government be in American healthcare? Ronald Hamowy argues that to answer this pressing question, we must understand the genesis of the five main federal agencies charged with responsibility for our health: the Public Health Service, the Food and Drug Administration, the Veterans Administration, the National Institutes of Health, and Medicare. In examining these, he traces the growth of federal influence from its tentative beginnings in 1798 through the ambitious infrastructures of today - and offers startling insights on the current debate.
The author contends that until the twentieth century, governmental involvement in health care policy was nominal. With the sweeping food and drug reforms of 1906 and the Medicare amendments to Social Security in 1965, a whole new system of health care was brought to the American public. A careful analysis of the various programs generated by this legislation, however, shows a different picture of pet projects, budgetary lobbying, competitive bureaucracy and discord between the agencies and their opposition" (publisher).
"Advances in the History of Psychology is a news and notes aggregator pertaining to the history of the discipline.
"AHP notifies readers of resources, publications, conferences, and other events or issues of interest to researchers and students of the history of psychology. We make a particular effort to draw attention to content that is “off the beaten track” — i.e., that is in journals or sponsored by scholarly societies beyond those with which most members of the discipline are already familiar. In addition, there’s occasional commentary on topics that are pertinent to the community, as well as series of guest posts. Readers are encouraged to engage with the materials and submit their own comments" (https://ahp.apps01.yorku.ca/?page_id=17, accessed 03-2018).
Berkeley & Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2007.
"Among the most far-reaching effects of the modern environmental movement was the widespread acknowledgment that human beings were inescapably part of a larger ecosystem." This book provides a "history of “ecological” ideas of the body as that history unfolded in California’s Central Valley. Taking us from nineteenth-century fears of miasmas and faith in wilderness cures to the recent era of chemical pollution and cancer clusters, Nash charts how Americans have connected their diseases to race and place as well as dirt and germs. In this account, the rise of germ theory and the pushing aside of an earlier environmental approach to illness constituted not a clear triumph of modern biomedicine but rather a brief period of modern amnesia. As Nash shows us, place-based accounts of illness re-emerged in the postwar decades, galvanizing environmental protest against smog and toxic chemicals" (publisher).
A biography of Michael Dillon, who in the 1940s was the first successful case of female-to-male gender reassignment surgery--operations done by Sir Harold Gilles. Dillon established himself as a medical student. The book describes how Dillon later fell in love with a male-to-female transsexual, Roberta Cowell, who was at the time the only other transsexual in Britain.
Digital facsimile from the Internet Archive at this link.
"A century ago, the third bubonic plague swept the globe, taking more than 15 million lives. The book tells the story of ten cities on five continents that were ravaged by the epidemic in it's initial years: Hong Kong and Bombay, the Asian emporiums of the British Empire where the epidemic first surfaced; Sydney, Honolulu and San Francisco, three 'pearls' of the Pacific; Buenos Aires and Rio de Janiero in South America; Alexandria and Cape town in Africa; and Porto in Europe. This book examines the plague's impact in each of these cities, on politicians, the medical and public health authorities, and especially on the citizenry, many of whom were recent migrants crammed into grim living spaces" (publisher).
Proc. Nat. Acad. Sci. (USA), 104, 7617-7621, 2007.
Order of authorship in the original publication: Corr, Li, Reidel...Hill. The authors discovered that Lactobacilli produce a bacteriocin, a peptidic toxin that inhibits the growth of similar or closely related bacterial strains. This particular bacteriocin, identified as Abp118, provides the protective value of Lactobacillus salivarius against pathogenic bacteria in the human microbiome.
(Thanks to Juan Weiss for this reference and its interpretation.)
Horvath and his team provided key details of the extremely complex mechanisms involved in CRISPR's function as an immune system for bacteria against bacteriophages. Analogous to Pasteur's heroic role in saving the French wine industry 150 years earlier, Drs. Horvath and Barrangou were called upon by a high-tech food company that was using the bacterium Streptococcus thermophilus in the production of yogurt, mozzarella cheese and other dairy products, commandeering a mine of Strep cultures worth more than 40 billion dollars. This collection of cultures was under attack from bacteriophages, and at eminent risk from being wiped out.
To solve this problem Horvath and colleagues explored sections in the bacterial genome with clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats (CRISPR). The CRISPR system in the strep had highly variable 'space' sequences that would vary in between different strep strains. The researchers obtained two of the principal attacking bacteriophages and mixed them with the strep in test tubes. They found that although the highly efficient killing bacteriophage machines killed about 99.9% of the bacteria, evolution intervened and created a few rare spontaneous mutant strains that were immune to phage attack. They then looked closely at the CRISPR sequences in the immune mutants, and found that they differed from the killed bacterial strains. Those bacterial sequences had acquired new snipets of DNA spliced between the CRISPR repeats, and now matched genome sections of the DNA of the killer phages, thus binding to the phage nucleic acid, and inactivating it using an inherent nuclease cutting tool that could remove a predetermined nucleic acid sequence. This tool, embedded into the CRISPR system is called the "Cas" /Cas9 system. Furthermore, since these "new" sequences were in the bacterial DNA they were being passed on automatically in a genetic manner to following generations.
(Thanks to Juan Weiss for this reference and its interpretation.)
The authors described an organism resembling, but different from, Bartonella bacilliformis (Oroya fever) on a patient returning from Peru. The patient recalled numerous insect bites on her legs and feet during her trip to Peru. The authors identified a "Bartonella isolate BMGH DQ683199" nearly identiical to a Bartonella species identified in a pulex flea from Cuzco, Peru, and posited this as the probable vector. The organism was named Bartonella Rochalimaea Eremeeva in honor of the first author. Digital facsimile from nejm.org at this link.
(Thanks to Juan Weiss for this reference and its interpretation.)
Smith "was the first African American to hold a medical degree and graduated at the top in his class at the University of Glasgow in Scotland. After his return to the United States, he became the first African American to run a pharmacy in that nation.
"In addition to practicing as a doctor for nearly 20 years at the Colored Orphan Asylum in Manhattan, Smith was a public intellectual: he contributed articles to medical journals, participated in learned societies, and wrote numerous essays and articles drawing from his medical and statistical training. He used his training in medicine and statistics to refute common misconceptions about race, intelligence, medicine, and society in general. Invited as a founding member of the New York Statistics Society in 1852, which promoted a new science, he was elected as a member in 1854 of the recently founded American Geographic Society. But he was never admitted to the American Medical Association or local medical associations" (Wikipedia article on James McCune Smith, accessed 5-2020).
The first genome sequence of a single human (Craig Venter), including analysis and comments on his genetic markers, and their possible medical and prognosticating implications. (Order of authorship in the original publication: Levy, Sutton, Ng....Venter). It has been estimated that the cost of sequencing the first human genome using first generation machines may have reached $100 million. Within a year the costs of sequencing a genome declined substantially. James Watson's genome, the second human genome sequenced, was accomplished in 2008 at a cost of $1.5 million. (Thanks to Juan Weiss for this reference and its interpretation.)
Vol. 1: Introduction Vol. 2: Europe, Arctic & Asia. Anton Rolandsson Martin, Johan Peter Falck Vol. 3: Europe, North & South America. Pehr Kalm, Pehr Löfling, Daniel Rolander Vol. 4: Europe, Middle East, North East & West Africa. Göran Rothman, Fredrik Hasselquist, Peter Forsskäl, Andreas Berlin, Adam Afzelius. Vol. 5: Southern Africa, Oceania, Antarctica & South America. Anders Sparrman. Vol. 6: Europe, Southern Africa, East, Southern & Southeast Asia. Carl Peter Thunberg. Vol. 7: Europe, Southern Africa, Oceania, South America, East, Southern & Southeast Asia. Pehr Osbeck, Olof Torén, Carl Fredrik Adler, Christopher Tärnström, Daniel Solander. Vol. 8: Encyclopedia, Bibliography, Index
"Making babies was a mysterious process in 17th-century England. Fissell uses popular sources—songs, jokes, witchcraft pamphlets, prayerbooks, popular medical manuals—to recover how ordinary men and women understood the processes of reproduction. Because the human body was so often used as a metaphor for social relations, the grand events of high politics such as the English Civil War reshaped popular ideas about conception and pregnancy. This book is the first account of ordinary people’s ideas about reproduction, and offers a new way to understand how common folk experienced the sweeping political changes that characterized early modern England" (publisher).
Yamanaka (Nobel Prize 2012) and colleagues demonstrated the generation of Induced Pluripotent Stems Cells (iPS) from adult human dermal fibroblasts with the same 4 mice factors they used in GM 13287. By overexpressing these transcription factors in the human fibroblasts they report having isolated human pluripotent stems cells that resemble human embryonic stem cells by all measured criteria. At the end of their paper they stated, "Our study has opened an avenue to generate patient and disease-specific pluripotent stem cells." See also No. 13287.
Order of authorship in original publication: Takahashi, Tanabe, Ohnuki, Yamanaka.
(Thanks to Juan Weiss for this reference and its interpretation.)
A finely written and superbly illustrated and produced study of Retzius's life and published works, issued in the style of Retzius's magnificent publications.
President Carter devoted half of this book to Guinea worm disease, nature of the illness, its epidemiology, its cause and the current importance from a public health and human suffering standpoint. Carter's leadership was highly influential in the near complete eradication of this disease. He then explained his plan for prevention leading to the virtual eradication of this illness from the earth. The main instrument of prevention is a straw like ‘pipe filter’ which is handed out along with education to millions in all the endemic areas of Africa. This filter carries a cord like necklace, that is worn by each individual on a 24/7 basis, and utilized each time they drink water from their water holes, all of which are contaminated by the copepod that carries the larvae of this parasite in the water. The filter has a sieve size that does not allow the copepod to pass through, and thus the water ingested is never contaminated. This effort brought the number of cases from at least 3.5 million new cases per year to near zero.
In 2002 Jimmy Carter was awarded the Nobel Prize for Peace "for his decades of untiring effort to find peaceful solutions to international conflicts, to advance democracy and human rights, and to promote economic and social development."
(Thanks to Juan Weiss for this reference and its interpretation.)
Includes a study of Gessner's library in the context of libraries in 16th-century Zurich, and a catalogue of the library, with listings of lost books and lost manuscripts, known from Gessner's correspondence or from annotations in other books. The catalogue of 395 items describes the detailed annotations that Gessner wrote in many of the volumes. As Gessner's library was eventually dispersed after his death, this catalogue is the result of the scholars' many years' of efforts at its reconstruction by identifying surviving volumes.
Probably the largest and most comprehensive history of a medical specialty published in the 21st century. Expanded and revised English translation: Pantheon of Dermatology: outstanding historical figures by Löser, Plewig and Walter H. C. Burgdorf (Berlin & Heidelberg: Springer, 2013). The English translation was expanded to 1280 pages and 2273 illustrations (many in color).
Oxford: The Arcadian Library in Assoc. with Oxford University Press, 2008.
The Kitāb al-Musta'īnī by Ibn Biklarish, written in the Moorish Spain province of al-Andalus at the end of the 11th century, includes the first tables of simple medicines written in the region, "concentrating on facing pages for each medicinal substance, all the information transmitted by the treatises on synonyms, substitutes and materia medica. To the practical advantage of rapid consultation—the reader can look up the names of the simple drugs alphabetically—is added the great diversity of the material presented, particularly where the substances of mineral and animal origin are concerned. The Tables, moreover, are preceded by an Introduction in four chapters containing the theories of simple and compound medicines" (Joëlle Ricordel, "The manuscript transmission of the Kitāb al-Musta'īnī...." p. 27 of this edition).
Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 2008.
Explores why two countries that were very similar in many ways, struck out on radically divergent paths to public health insurance. Canada developed a universal single-payer system of national health care, while the United States opted for a dual system that combines public health insurance for low-income and senior residents with private, primarily employer-provided health insurance--sometimes no insurance-- for most other people.
"HathiTrust began in 2008 as a collaboration of the universities of the Committee on Institutional Cooperation (now the Big Ten Academic Alliance) and the University of California system to establish a repository to archive and share their digitized collections. HathiTrust quickly expanded to include additional partners and to provide those partners with an easy means to archive their digital content.
The initial focus of the partnership has been on preserving and providing access to digitized book and journal content from the partner library collections. This includes both in copyright and public domain materials digitized by Google, the Internet Archive, and Microsoft, as well as through in-house initiatives. The partners aim to build a comprehensive archive of published literature from around the world and to develop shared strategies for managing and developing their digital and print holdings in a collaborative way.
The primary community that HathiTrust serves is the members (faculty, students, and users) of its partner libraries, but the materials in HathiTrust are available to all to the extent permitted by law and contracts, providing the published record as a public good to users around the world" ( https://www.hathitrust.org/, accessed 12-2016).
Contains 130,000 very brief biographical notes compiled from nearly 200 references (which are cited) on roughly 95,000 people from Europe and the Middle East during the 1000 years of the Middle Ages. The text is searchable through Google Books. In English, German and French.
"Albertus Magnus (ca. 1200 – 1280) is one of the most important medieval philosophers and theologians, and one of the very few to have been recognized as an auctoritas in his lifetime. Despite this fact, his ideas remain relatively understudied. There are a number of philosophical and historical reasons for this, but problems such as scarce or incomplete modern editions, as well as the sheer number and volume of his works, play a part.
The aim of the Alberti Magni e-corpus project is to support research on Albert the Great by providing scholars the possibility : 1) to download image files of Albert’s works that can be found in editions no longer covered by copyright laws; 2) more importantly, to search 40 of those works electronically, using a Boolean search engine which gives access to a corpus of approximately 14,700 pages in print or 6.3 million words.
The free, searchable corpus should prove useful to scholars both with and without an access to the commercial online database of Aschendorff Verlag. The majority of the works included in the Alberti Magni e-corpus have not yet been edited by the Albertus-Magnus-Institut, whose critically-edited texts constitute the corpus of Aschendorff Verlag."
Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2008.
Traces cocaine's history from its origins as a medical commodity in the nineteenth century to its repression during the early twentieth century and its dramatic reemergence as an illicit good after World War II. Connecting the story of the drug's transformations is a host of people, products, and processes: Sigmund Freud, Coca-Cola, and Pablo Escobar all make appearances, exemplifying the global influences that have shaped the history of cocaine. But Gootenberg decenters the familiar story to uncover the roles played by hitherto obscure but vital Andean actors as well--for example, the Peruvian pharmacist who developed the techniques for refining cocaine on an industrial scale and the creators of the original drug-smuggling networks that decades later would be taken over by Colombian traffickers" (publisher).
Comprehensive and detailed catalogue of Turkish medical writings produced during the Ottoman period from the 14th to early 20th centuries. "The main body of the book lists the medical works in chronological order under the names and biographies of their authors. The last section lists the books of which the authors and/or translators are not known. The first three volumes have illustrations at the end, such as reproductions of manuscripts, drawings or photographs of hospital buildings, laboratories, etc., and the fourth volume ends with indexes of personal names, book titles, place names, names of institutions, names of copyists, names of places mentioned in colophon, book ownership registers and waqf registers. The book covers 5607 treatises and articles on medicine, dentistry, pharmacology and veterinary sciences by 1430 authors" (publisher).
This critical edition, based upon the 1601 edition, the last edition published in Mercuriale's lifetime, includes the Latin text and English translation, reproductions of the woodcuts attributed to Coriolan and the original drawings by Pirro Ligorio for the illustrations, a full bibliography of Mercuriale's writings, translator's notes, and Jean-Michel Agasse's, "Girolamo Mercuriale—Humanism and physical culture in the Renaissance", a treatise of about 150 pages.
"... the first extended study of the pharmacological recipes included in the Hippocratic Corpus. The recipes, found mostly in the gynaecological and nosological treatises, are here examined both from a philological and a sociocultural point of view. Drawing on studies in the fields of classics, social history of medicine, and anthropology, this book offers new insights into the production and use of pharmacological knowledge in the classical world. In particular, it assesses the deep interactions between oral and written traditions in the transmission of this knowledge. Recipes are addressed as texts, but the existence of ‘missing links’ in the written tradition are acknowledged" (publisher).
"The collections held in the Western Manuscripts section of the Bodleian Libraries are a vast treasure house of historical records and literary papers from all periods and from across the globe. The purpose of this particular blog is to highlight aspects of the post-medieval historical collections: to share interesting discoveries made during the course of cataloguing or answering enquiries, and to ask for opinions from our users about ‘problem’ items that turn up from time to time. The complexity and extent of archives and manuscripts acquired over 400 years means that there is still a great deal to be discovered among the historical collections that has never found its way into the Bodleian’s catalogues, let alone into the history books.
Further information on the Bodleian’s post-medieval historical archive and manuscript collections:
"This collection establishes that efforts to produce scientific explanations for same-sex desires and sexual behaviours are not a modern invention, but have long been characteristic of European thought. The sciences of antiquity had posited various types of same-sexual affinities rooted in singular natures. These concepts were renewed, elaborated, and reassessed from the late medieval scientific revival to the early Enlightenment. The deviance of such persons seemed outwardly inscribed upon their bodies, documented in treatises and case studies. It was attributed to diverse inborn causes such as distinctive anatomies or physiologies, and embryological, astrological, or temperamental factors" (publisher).
"The Sloane Printed Books catalogue lists books which belonged to Sir Hans Sloane (1660-1753). Bibliographical records are enhanced with Sloane's own numbers or other identifying marks, and with information about previous owners. A number of records include information on the physical state and condition of the items.
You can use the catalogue in many different ways, including:
identifying individual books from his library
displaying a range of items in the order in which Sloane kept them
searching for items from one of the other libraries from which Sloane acquired books"
"The Sloane Printed Books Catalogue
The Sloane Printed Books catalogue lists books which belonged to Sir Hans Sloane (1660-1753). His was one of the largest libraries in Europe of its time, and particularly significant for its holdings of medical and scientific material. In this catalogue, bibliographical records are enhanced with Sloane's own numbers or other identifying marks, and with information about previous owners. A number of records include information on the physical state and condition of the items.
This catalogue opens up Sloane’s library for research into what he owned, how he used it, from whom he acquired items, and how the collection was managed. It is a resource for the historian of science or medicine, the intellectual historian, and the historian of information.
"The Sloane Printed Books Project
A two-year project, which runs from April 2008 to April 2010, led by the Wellcome Trust Centre for the History of Medicine at University College London in collaboration with the British Library, and funded by the Wellcome Trust Research Resources in Medical History, is enabling a research team to enlarge substantially an existing database which was not previously publicly available. In July 2008 it was launched as one of the Library’s special catalogues, with over 13000 records. Additions to the catalogue will be made regularly throughout the period of the project.
The project team will report on developments and events, and welcomes comment and correspondence about all aspects of the catalogue and studies based on it. Information about the progress of the project will be posted on an interactive blog, to be set up in the near future.
Montrouge, France: Éditions John Libbey Eurotext, 2008.
Translated and significantly revised and enlarged as Vaccination: A history from Lady Montagu to genetic engineering (Montrouge: John Libbey Eurotext: 2011).
Toronto, Canada: University of Toronto Press, 2008.
Concerns indigenous and non-indigenous people in five Arctic regions: Greenland, Northern Canada, Alaska, Arctic Russia, and Northern Fennoscandia (Scandinavia).
" the first-ever human development report for a wealthy, developed nation. It introduces the American Human Development Index, which provides a single measure of well-being for all Americans, disaggregated by state and congressional district, as well as by gender, race, and ethnicity. The Index rankings of the 50 states and 436 congressional districts reveal huge disparities in the health, education, and living standards of different groups. Clear, precise, objective, and authoritative, this report will become the basis for all serious discussions concerning the realization of a fair, just, and globally competitive American society" (publisher).
"The Casebooks Project offers a tool for searching and reading the medical records of the astrologers Simon Forman and Richard Napier. The project is ongoing: 48,500 cases are now live. When complete, it will contain 80,000 cases and images of the manuscripts. Our editors transcribe the formulaic material at the beginning of each entry, and categorise and tag it using historically sensitive analytic categories. Full transcriptions of the casebooks are not provided, but other information in the records, including information about individuals and their associates, is tagged and can be searched."
Images of human embryos are everywhere. We see them in newspapers, clinics, classrooms, laboratories, family albums and on the internet. Debates about abortion, assisted conception, cloning and Darwinism have sometimes made these images hugely controversial, but they are also routine. We tend to take them for granted today. Yet 250 years ago human development was still nowhere to be seen.
Developing embryos were first drawn in the eighteenth-century Enlightenment. Modern medicine and biology exploited technical innovations as pictures and models communicated new attitudes to childbirth, evolution and reproduction. The German universities dominated research in the nineteenth century, the United States in the twentieth. After World War II embryo images became the dominant representations of pregnancy and prominent symbols of hope and fear. Wherever we stand in today's debates, it should enrich and may challenge our understandings to explore how these icons have been made.
"EXHIBITION
Eight sections are arranged in roughly chronological order. Each focuses on an era and an issue. By contextualizing images that have become iconic or were especially widely distributed in their own time, the exhibition aims to illuminate key questions and concerns. By depicting imaging technologies and people engaged in image production, it emphasizes the work of making visible embryos.
Each page consists of a main section and a ‘box’ on the right, highlighting an important issue, person or object. Click on a thumbnail for a larger image and the full caption. The ‘Resources’ buttons offer suggestions for exploring further."
A gynecological treatise from the Hippocratic Collection. This one is supposed to come from the School of Cnidus or to use Cnidian material and is generally dated to mid 4th century BCE.
Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008.
"The second half of the twentieth century witnessed the emergence of a new model of chronic disease―diagnosed on the basis of numerical deviations rather than symptoms and treated on a preventive basis before any overt signs of illness develop―that arose in concert with a set of safe, effective, and highly marketable prescription drugs. Physician-historian Jeremy A. Greene examines the mechanisms by which drugs and chronic disease categories define one another within medical research, clinical practice, and pharmaceutical marketing, and he explores how this interaction has profoundly altered the experience, politics, ethics, and economy of health in late-twentieth-century America. His provocative analysis sheds light on the increasing presence of the subjectively healthy but highly medicated individual in the American medical landscape, suggesting how historical perspective can help to address the problems inherent in the program of pharmaceutical prevention" (publisher).
Full color facsimile of the illuminated manuscript with translation and commentary in an accompanying volume. The two volumes boxed. The translation was originally published by the Folio Society in 1992, and the Boydell Press in 1993.
"Similar to the British Library bestiary Harley MS 4751 but with richer colors. Full color illustrations appear on 123 pages. A peculiarity in this manuscript is an illustration found in only one other bestiary: barnacle geese hanging from trees, as described by Gerald of Wales. The illustrations are masterfully executed; they are some of the best bestiary paintings to be found anywhere.
The descriptions of the barnacle goose, the osprey and the dipper are taken from Topographia Hibernica by Gerald of Wales. Also includes exerpts from the Aviarium of Hugh of Fouilloy (chapters 18-22 with variants, 49-52, 56, 58). Clark aviary group: Aberdeen.
Albuquerque, NM: The University of New Mexico Press, 2008.
"Called the Mvskoke in their language, the Creek Indians of Oklahoma continue to practice traditional medicine. In Creek Indian Medicine Ways, David Lewis, a full-blood Mvskoke and practicing medicine man, tells about the medicine tradition that has shaped his life. Born into a family of medicine people, he was chosen at birth to carry on the tradition. He shares his memories here about his childhood training and initiation as a medicine man as well as his remembrances about his father and grandmother, who trained him. Lewis reveals part of the sacred story of the origin of plants and he identifies some of the plants he uses in his cures. He also describes several of the ceremonies his teachers taught him, stressing throughout the sacredness and importance of Mvskoke medicine.
"Ann T. Jordan, a Euroamerican anthropologist, documents the place of Lewis's medicine family in the written record. Lewis is the great grandson of Jackson Lewis, who was interviewed in 1910 by anthropologist John Swanton. Jackson Lewis is mentioned numerous times in Swanton's classic works on Mvskoke medicine and culture, published by the Bureau of American Ethnology in the 1920s. David Lewis is the direct inheritor of his great grandfather's medicine knowledge" (publisher).
",,, an ethnographic study of midwifery in Canada in the wake of its historic transition from the margins as a grassroots social movement devoted to low-tech, woman-centered care to a regulated profession within the public health care system. In January 1994, after decades of lobbying by midwives and their supporters, the province of Ontario recognized midwifery as a profession for the first time in more than a century.
"Through stories about becoming and being a midwife and stories about receiving midwifery care, this book describes how fundamental tenets of midwifery philosophy and practice--the meaning of tradition, natural birth, and home birth, and the place of medical technology in midwifery--are being reworked by the practical and ideological challenges of midwifery's new place within the formal health care system.
Abstract: "Traditional medicine use is common in developing countries and increasingly popular in the western world. Despite the popularity of traditional medicines, scientific research on safety and efficacy is limited. However documented fatalities and severe illness due to lead poisoning are increasingly recognized to be associated with traditional medicine use. As society becomes more globalized, it is imperative for pharmacists and health care providers to learn about the safety of traditional medical practices. The information presented educates and alerts pharmacists and health care providers about the potential of traditional medicines to cause lead encephalopathy. Case reports were located through systematic literature searches using MEDLINE, CINAHL, AMED, CISCOM, EMBASE and The Cochrane library from 1966 to the February 2007. Reference lists of identified articles and the authors' own files were also searched. Inclusion criteria were cases of human lead encephalopathy associated with traditional medical practices. There were no restrictions regarding the language of publication. Data were subsequently extracted and summarized in narrative and tabular form. We found 76 cases of lead encephalopathy potentially associated with traditional medicine. Ayurvedic medicines were associated with 5 cases (7%), Middle eastern traditional medicines with 66 cases (87%) and 5 cases (7%) with other traditional medicines. Of the 76 cases, 5% were in adults and 95% were in infants and young children. Of the 4 adult cases, at least one was left with residual neurological impairment. In infants and young children, among 72 cases 8 (11%) were fatal, and at least 15 (21%) had residual neurological deficits. Traditional medicine users should be screened for lead exposure and strongly encouraged to discontinue metal–containing remedies. Therefore, the United States Food and Drug Administration and corresponding agencies in other countries should require and enforce heavy metal testing for all imported traditional medicines and “dietary supplements”.
Ley and collaborators decoded all the genes of a person with cancer (acute myeloid leukemia (AML)) and found a set of mutations that might have caused the disease or aided its progression.
"This on-going project aims to locate, digitise, catalogue, transcribe, interpret and publish the surviving correspondence and other manuscripts of the important 19th century scientist Alfred Russel Wallace (1823-1913). Wallace has very many claims to fame, not least that he is the 'father' of evolutionary biogeography and the co-discoverer with Charles Darwin of the process of evolution by natural selection. With the exception of Darwin, probably no one else in the history of the life sciences has made as many seminal contributions as Wallace, especially to evolutionary biology the foundation of the entire discipline (CLICK HERE). For more information about his life and work CLICK HERE. A selection of noteworthy letters and other manuscripts are listed HERE.
"Our project has so far obtained electronic copies of 5,688 letters, of which 2,748 were written by Wallace and 2,159 were sent to him. The remaining 781 are third party letters which either pertain to him, or were written by Wallace's close relatives and contain information useful to scholars interested in his life. The letters were found in 245 public and private collections around the world, and in 245 articles and books" (accessed 10-2021).
The authors applied click chemistry to previously inaccessible biologic environments. Towards that end, they used a modified azide and clicking it onto an alkyne but without using copper ions which are toxic to cells, they invent a reaction between azides and alkynes that reacts in a vigorous manner and totally without the help of copper. With this they invent a copper free click reaction called the “strain-promoted alkyne-azide cycloaddition’ or the ‘SPAAC’ reaction. By adding fluorophores (see Green Fluorescent Protein GM- 13564) to the reaction platform, they could illuminate glycans in the cell surface and the emerging glycome of the zebrafish.
Order of authorship in the original publication: Laughlin, Baskin, et al, Bertozzi.
(Thanks to Juan Weiss for this reference and its interpretation.)
A visually spectacular panorama of extraordinary color photographs, with significant historical and interpretive text, of the Vrolik Museum at the University of Amsterdam, collected by Gerard Vrolik and his son Willem. This museum has been preserved intact, from its formation by the Vroliks in the 19th century, and with additions afterwards. Includes a bibliography of prior published literature about the museum.
Arabic edition and English translation of Sābūr ibn Sahl's famous dispensatory as preserved in a recension made by the physicians of the ʿAḍudī hospital in Baghdad around the middle of the 11th century CE.
"...the first detailed analysis of an immensely popular 13th c. Arabic guide for pharmacists, from a time in which Jewish physicians and pharmacists worked alongside Muslim and Christian practioners. Minhāj al-dukkān ("How to manage a pharmacy"), by Abū ʾl-Munā al-Kūhīn al-ʿAṭṭār (fl. 1260) is the first attempt to explore the full spectrum of pharmacy in the medieval Arabic world: identification of the materia medica and methods of preparation; pharmacy's place within the sciences and particularly its relationship with medicine; the social position of the pharmacist and his role in the marketplace and the hospital; the economics of pharmacy; legal aspects of pharmacy; and the image of the pharmacist in literature and drama."
First printed edition of the Therapeutics of John the Physician is a medical handbook from the thirteenth century, holding important new evidence on medicine as craft in the Byzantine world. Of particular interest is a vernacular version of the text, which also contains a commentary. Here, an unknown reviser vividly describes cases and medical procedures, a type of knowledge rarely encountered in scholarly texts.
Bartholomaeus Mini de Senis, probably active in the 14th century, was the copyist of British Library Ms Egerton 747, Tractatus de herbis. The identity of the author of the original work, probably written a century earlier, remains unknown.
"The WDL has stated that its mission is to promote international and intercultural understanding, expand the volume and variety of cultural content on the Internet, provide resources for educators, scholars, and general audiences, and to build capacity in partner institutions to narrow the digital divide within and among countries.[1] It aims to expand non-English and non-western content on the Internet, and contribute to scholarly research. The library intends to make available on the Internet, free of charge and in multilingual format, significant primary materials from cultures around the world, including manuscripts, maps, rare books, musical scores, recordings, films, prints, photographs, architectural drawings, and other significant cultural materials.[2][3][4]" (Wikipedia article on World Digital Library, accessed 01-2017)
Partners in the World Digital Library project include:[18]
First published 1979, with a very informative introduction and notes. The paperback edition (2009) contains an extensive supplementary note discussing scholarship relating to Physiologus since 1979.
Falls Church, VA: Office of the Surgeon General & Washington, DC: Borden Institute, Walter Reed Army Medical Center, 2009.
The development of military dentistry in the United States, from beginnings in the early 17th century, through the professionalization of dentistry in the 19th century, dental care on both sides of the Civil War, the establishment of the US Army Dental Corps in 1909, and the expansion of the Corps through World War I and afterward, to the verge of the Second World War.
First edition of the earliest Old French herbal in verse— "a surprisingly comprehensive work (3188 octosyllables), based on an eleventh-century Latin treatise 'De viribus herbarum' attributed to a certain 'Macer'. It occupies a significant place in the development of herbals and is an interesting witness to writing in Western France in the thirteenth century and to the unusual syntax and concentrated style of its author. Some one hundred and twenty-five plants are described together with their medicinal uses, which cover a remarkable range of ailments. For ease of recognition the sections of text which do not seem to be based on the received text of 'Macer' are printed in italics. Quotations from the principal source and from parallels are given in the notes" (publisher).
"...The book takes as its specific focus seventeenth-century London, in a significant study encompassing the period from the incorporation of the Worshipful Company of Barber-Surgeons (1540) to the staging of Edward Ravenscroft’s adaptation of a French farce as The Anatomist: or, The Sham Doctor (1696). Cregan is concerned with ‘how practices and subjectivities of modernity began to take hold within and across three fields of expertise’ , three concretely interconnected arenas in London: the dramatic theatre of the playhouses, the anatomy theatre of the Barber-Surgeons, and the exercise of law in the city’s court houses" (http://www.northernrenaissance.org/kate-cregan-the-theatre-of-the-body-staging-death-and-embodying-life-in-early-modern-london-brepols-2009/, accessed 2-2018).
"A History of Total Health invites you to join in a discussion of today’s health care as we draw links to relevant events in the history of Kaiser Permanente and the industrial constellation under Henry J. Kaiser.
"The blog takes its name from Kaiser Permanente founding physician Sidney R. Garfield’s last research project “Total Health” which sought to understand and treat the body, mind, and spirit of our members.
"Throughout his career, Garfield (1906-1984) wanted to build a system of care that focused on keeping people healthy in addition to caring for them when they get sick. His ideas resonated with industrialist Henry J. Kaiser (1882-1967) who was “greatly restless and restlessly great” for a new health care system. Together they founded Kaiser Permanente for the employees of Kaiser Industries in 1942, and opened the health plan to the public on July 21, 1945."
Of all the blogs produced by history of medicine departments at university libraries that I had seen in February 2018 this appeared to be one of the most active.
'Brought to Life', is a website provided by the Science Museum, London. It offers access to images of thousands of fascinating objects from the Museum’s great medical collections. The site also incorporates detailed descriptions, introductions to major themes in the history of medicine and engaging multimedia.
"This site is not only a valuable resource for teachers and students working on the history of medicine, and related subjects, in schools and universities. It also engages people of all ages and interests in the story of medicine.
"Creation of the site has been made possible through the generous financial support of the Wellcome Trust and the loan of the Trust’s great collections to the Science Museum. The Museum is most grateful for their support."
Detailed study of documentation (papyri, ostraca and mummies) followed by a list of pathologies by types and some considerations on medicines and their materia medica.
"...Wood and Fels begin by observing that while almost everyone now admits that maps showing such things as zoning lines or national boundaries are ideological constructions, they view any map as inherently ideological: “The map is not a picture. It is an argument” (p. xvi). These arguments are made using systems of signs, and the most central semiological function of the map is what Wood and Fels call a “posting.” This is Charles Pierce’s index, a direct pointing to, the statement that “this piece of the world (represented by a symbol) is here (represented by the symbol’s location on the sign plane of the map).” The map, then, is a whole series of arguments, that “this is here,” and “this other thing is here,” and “that is there.” Their second major point is that our long experience with maps that validate these manifold propositions “endows the map with an intrinsic factuality whose social manifestation is the authority the map carries into public action” (p. xvi).
"In terms of methodology, Wood and Fels rely, first, on extremely thorough and systematic “unpacking” of the map, the kind of analysis they famously directed at a North Carolina state highway map in The Power of Maps. And to assist in this process, they’ve adapted some terms from literary analysis that allow them to talk about a map’s context. They speak of the parimap as the verbal and physical expressions that surround and embody the map, everything from titles and legends to paper stock and typography. They also recognize an epimap, constituting information not physically a part of the map, but circulating freely around it. Elements of an epimap would include advertising, commentary, and packaging, like the issue of National Geographic that holds a given map. Together, parimap and epimap constitute the paramap, “everything that surrounds and extends a map in order to present it.” " (https://muse.jhu.edu/article/363422).
"Through an analysis of twenty-four examples of female-owned herbals supplemented by case studies of the herbal references in the writings of Margaret Hoby, Grace Mildmay, Elizabeth Isham, and Isabella Whitney, Rebecca Laroche seeks to uncover the myriad ways that women engaged herbal texts along with the multiple contexts of their usage. She investigates the texts for their practical value, rather than as reference texts to help modern scholars understand allusions in early modern literary works.
"Her work is firmly within the revisionist critique of the concept of the medical marketplace and the tripartite division of medical authority into physicians, surgeons, and apothecaries, a model that excludes and subjugates women. Beginning with an examination of herbals written by men, she shows how these intentionally authoritative and comprehensive texts aimed to bring a more complete herbal knowledge to a projected audience of learned men, and to masculinize the herbal tradition. John Parkinson, for example, produced two books on herbals: one for women that demonstrated the delights to be found in plants and one for men that incorporated more intellectual debates and medicinal remedies. The published herbals, through their construction of the female reader, attempted to limit the medical activities of women, but the extensive information they supplied enabled gentlewomen in particular to acquire considerable medical knowledge" (https://muse.jhu.edu/article/522314, accessed 05-2018).
Gero Hütter and co-authors reported the first long-term remission or "cure" of HIV/AIDS in a human. The patient, Timothy Ray Brown also known as "The Berlin Patient" also suffered from myeloid leukemia and underwent stem-cell transplanation (bone marrow transplant) as treatment for his leukemia. The stem-cell donor lacked the CCR5 HIV virus receptor on his cells. When these cells were transplanted into the "The Berlin Patient" the donor's cells totally replaced the patient's bone marrow cells with cells that lacked the CCR5 HIV virus receptor and made the recipient "immune" to HIV. Thus "The Berlin Patient" was "cured" of both AIDS and leukemia. Digital edition of this paper from nejm.org at this link.
Order of authorship in the original publication: Patel, Shortliffe, Stefanelli, Szolovits, Berthold, Bellazzi, Abu-Hanna. "Abstract: This paper is based on a panel discussion held at the Artificial Intelligence in Medicine Europe (AIME) conference in Amsterdam, The Netherlands, in July 2007. It had been more than 15 years since Edward Shortliffe gave a talk at AIME in which he characterized artificial intelligence (AI) in medicine as being in its "adolescence" (Shortliffe EH. The adolescence of AI in medicine: will the field come of age in the '90s? Artificial Intelligence in Medicine 1993;5:93-106). In this article, the discussants reflect on medical AI research during the subsequent years and characterize the maturity and influence that has been achieved to date. Participants focus on their personal areas of expertise, ranging from clinical decision-making, reasoning under uncertainty, and knowledge representation to systems integration, translational bioinformatics, and cognitive issues in both the modeling of expertise and the creation of acceptable systems."
"Despite the global spread of Western medical practice, traditional doctors still thrive in the modern world. In Recipes for Immortality, Richard Weiss illuminates their continued success by examining the ways in which siddha medical practitioners in Tamil South India win the trust and patronage of patients. While biomedicine might alleviate a patient's physical distress, siddha doctors offer their clientele much more: affiliation to a timeless and pure community, the fantasy of a Tamil utopia, and even the prospect of immortality. They speak of a golden age of Tamil civilization and of traditional medicine, drawing on broader revivalist formulations of a pure and ancient Tamil community.Weiss analyzes the success of siddha doctors, focusing on how they have successfully garnered authority and credibility. While shedding light on their lives, vocations, and aspirations, Weiss also documents the challenges that siddha doctors face in the modern world, both from a biomedical system that claims universal efficacy, and also from the rival traditional medicine, ayurveda, which is promoted as the national medicine of an autonomous Indian state. Drawing on ethnographic data; premodern Tamil texts on medicine, alchemy, and yoga; government archival resources; college textbooks; and popular literature on siddha medicine and on the siddhar yogis, he presents an in-depth study of this traditional system of knowledge, which serves the medical needs of millions of Indians.Weiss concludes with a look at traditional medicine at large, and demonstrates that siddha doctors, despite resent trends toward globalization and biomedicine, reflect the wider political and religious dimensions of medical discourse in our modern world. Recipes for Immortality proves that medical authority is based not only on physical effectiveness, but also on imaginative processes that relate to personal and social identities, conceptions of history, secrecy, loss, and utopian promise" (publisher).
Berkeley & Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2009.
"In The Road to Yucca Mountain, Walker covers the U.S. government's controversial attempts to address the engineering and social issues associated with high-level radioactive waste repository (HLRWR) management and spent reactor fuel (SRF). He starts with the Manhattan Project and works through the policy debate. In 1987, Yucca Mountain, Nevada emerged as the most likely candidate for a repository. He explicates the United States Atomic Energy Commission's flop with its first attempt to build a HLRWR in a Kansas salt mine. He addresses deep geological disposal and surface storage of HLRW and SRF as well as fuel reprocessing" (Wikipedia article on J. Samuel Walker, accessed 3-2020).
"The Environment & Society Portal is a gateway to open access resources about human participation in, and understandings of, the environment. It addresses the community of teachers and researchers in environment-related humanities, as well as the interested public.
"The Portal is the digital publication platform and archive of the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society (RCC), a nonprofit joint initiative of the LMU (University of Munich) and the Deutsches Museum. As such, it reflects the research themes of the RCC and its fellows, who are international experts in related fields. Fellows are involved in contributing to the Portal and curating its content.
"What kinds of content can I find on the Environment & Society Portal?
"Written and peer-reviewed by experts in environmental history and related fields,Arcadiaarticles tell stories about sites, events, persons, organizations, or species as they relate to nature and society. For example, in her article “The Constitution of the Republic of Ecuador: Pachamama has Rights,” María Valeria Berros discusses the recognition of nature’s rights in Ecuador; in his article “Corridors, Concessions, and the Extraction of Natural Resources in Liberia,” Emmanuel K. Urey describes the export of iron ores as part of an “open door policy.” Individual Arcadia articles make up thematic collections on topics like water histories, global environmental movements, “nature states,” and national parks and conservation. A joint project of the RCC and the European Society for Environmental History, the project provides visibility for new research in the field and helps forge connections, especially among early career scholars.
"Despite a recent resurgence in studies of death and disease in native peoples of the Western Hemisphere, little work has been done on death and disease in Native Americans during the reservation period of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Forgotten Voices: Death Records of the Yakama, 1888-1964 begins a discussion of the health of the people on the Yakama Reservation in Washington using statistical data. This is the first detailed work that focuses on the causes of death on American Indian reservations. It contains an extensive introduction to Yakama history and lifestyle, and tables that present statistical information on the major causes of death. Each chapter highlights a different cause of death on the Yakama Reservation, including
• Tuberculosis • Pneumonia • Heart Disease • Gastrointestinal Problems • Influenza • Cancer • Birth Complications • Old Age • Stroke" (publisher)
"This impressive monograph by Edward Holmes opens with a quotation from La Peste, by Albert Camus: “Everyone knows that pestilences have a way of recurring in the world; yet somehow we find it hard to believe in ones that crash down on our heads from a blue sky.” This apt quotation might lead the reader to believe that the evolution and emergence of RNA viruses in causing new diseases would be discussed, but in fact the book, as its title suggests, concentrates on how RNA viruses evolve and emerge at the molecular level, not how they cause disease.
"In addition to explaining what is currently known about the origins of RNA viruses, the book describes the mechanisms of RNA virus evolution, RNA virus quasispecies, and comparative genomics, as well as interesting new concepts, such as phylogeography. This term refers to the spatial movement of a phylogenetic species, which can be described in various ways (Holmes lists 5), two of which are the gravity model and the strong spatial subdivision model. In the former, patterns of transmission are driven by major population centers before moving out to smaller populations (influenza virus). In the spatial subdivision model, no clear evidence of migration among populations is presented (hepatitis C virus), and genomic diversity is partitioned into a series of clades (types and subtypes)" (from the review by Brian W.J. Mahy, Emerg. Infect. Dis., 16, p. 899.)
Accounts of writers, artists, and scientists: James Boswell, Charlotte Brontë, Darwin, Florence Nightingale, Alice James Daniel Paul Schreber, Marcel Proust, Glenn Gould, and Andy Warhol.
Frazer and Zhou invented and patented the first Papillomavirus vaccine. In 2020 it was marketed as Gardasil and Cervarix. Developed beginning in 1991, about 20 years after Blumberg and Millman's vaccine against viral hepatitis (1972), this was the second cancer preventing vaccine, and the first vaccine designed to prevent a cancer.
The U.S. application was filed on 19 January 1994, but claimed priority under a 20 July 1992 PCT filing to the date of an initial [AU] Australian patent application filed on 19 July 1991. Patent was granted on 13 January 2009.
"Abstract: A method of providing papilloma virus like particles which may be used for diagnostic purposes or for incorporation in a vaccine for use in related to infections caused by papilloma virus. The method includes an initial step of constructing one or more recombinant DNA molecules which each encode papilloma virus L1 protein or a combination of papilloma virus L1 protein and papilloma virus L2 protein followed by a further step of transfecting a suitable host cell with one or more of the recombinant DNA molecules so that virus like particles (VLPs) are produced within the cell after expression of the L1 or the combination of L1 and L2 proteins. The VLPs are also claimed per se as well as vaccines incorporating the VLPs.
"FIELD OF INVENTION: "THIS INVENTION relates to papillomavirus and in particular antigens and vaccines that may be effective in treatment of infections caused by such viruses. "BACKGROUND OF THE INVENTION: "Papillomavirus infections are known not only in humans but also in animals such as sheep, dogs, cattle, coyotes, wolves, possums, deer, antelope, beaver, turtles, bears, lizards, monkeys, chimpanzees, giraffes, impala, elephants, whales, cats, pigs, gerbils, elks, yaks, dolphins, parrots, goats, rhinoceros, camels, lemmings, chamois, skunks, Tasmanian devils, badgers, lemurs, caribou, armadillo, newts and snakes (see for example, “Papillomavirus Infections in Animals” by J P Sundberg which is described in Papillomavirus and Human Disease, edited by K Syrjanen, L Gissman and L G Koss, Springer Verlag 1987)."
"It is also known (eg. In Papillomavirus and Human Cancer edited by H Pfister and published by CRC Press Inc 1990) that papillomavirus are included in several distinct groups such as human Papillomavirus (HPV) which are differentiated into types 1-56 depending upon DNA sequence homology. A clinicopathological grouping of HPV and the malignant potential of the lesions with which they are most frequently associated may be separated as follows...."
Full text and images of the patent is available from patents.google.com at this link.
"This book focuses on the entwinement of politics and medicine and power and knowledge in India during the age of empire. Using the powerful metaphor of ‘pathology’ - the science of the origin, nature, and course of diseases - the author develops and challenges a burgeoning literature on colonial medicine, moving beyond discussions of state medicine and the control of epidemics to everyday life, to show how medicine was a fundamental ideology of empire. Related to this point, and engaging with postcolonial histories of biopower and modernity, the book highlights the use of this racially grounded medicine in the formulation of modern selves and subjectivities in late colonial India. In tracing the cultural determinants of biological race theory and contextualizing the understanding of race as pathology, the book demonstrates how racialism was compatible with the ideologies and policies of imperial liberalism" (publisher).
Bethesda, MD: U.S. National Institutes of Health, 2009.
In 2009 The National Instiututes of Health announced that it would fund a five year program called the Human Connectome Project to build a "network map" (connectome) to will shed light on the anatomical and functional connectivity within the healthy human brain, as well as to produce a body of data that will facilitate research into brain disorders such as dyslexia, autism, Alzheimer's disease, and schizophrenia. As of 2020 the project was not complete.
"This volume catalogues Cassiano dal Pozzo’s copy of the Codex Cruz-Badianus, an Aztec herbal prepared for the son of the Viceroy of Mexico in 1552 and the earliest medical text to have survived from the New World. The original codex was presented to Cassiano’s patron, Cardinal Francesco Barberini, during a papal legation to Spain in 1626, and was copied on the Cardinal’s return to Rome for Cassiano’s fellow members of the Accademia dei Lincei, who at that time were completing their own vast illustrated natural history of Central America.
"Cassiano’s copy of the Codex Cruz-Badianus is preserved in the Royal Library at Windsor Castle together with the larger surviving part of his ‘Paper Museum’, an encyclopaedic collection of prints and drawings of antiquities, architecture and natural history subjects, acquired by George III in 1762.
"Each folio of the Windsor manuscript is reproduced in colour together with full comparative illustrations of the Codex Cruz-Badianus. The Latin text is transcribed with a parallel English translation, and each of the 184 drawings of plants is analysed. The catalogue is preceded by general introductions to the Paper Museum and to the natural history drawings, and by two thematic essays: Luigi Guerrini discusses the Windsor copy in the context of the Lincei’s researches into the natural history of the New World; and Alejandro de Ávila reviews the current state of research into the original Codex Cruz-Badianus, including the fieldwork and linguistic researches in Mexico that are changing our understanding of the manuscript" (publisher).
"... the first comprehensive reference for this subspecialty, ranging from the historic and cultural to the clinical and basic science components....More than 600 full-color photographs of preoperative and postoperative photographs foster the visual recognition of dermatologic diagnostics, and the text proves an excellent diagnostic reference for clinicians presented with puzzling dermatologic lesions."-JAMA.
"... documents the history of the Medical Committee for Human Rights (MCHR), a group of health professionals who delivered health care to wounded protesters and victims of police violence during the Civil Rights Movement and the anti-war movement in the United States in the 1960s, at a time when the health care system in the South was still segregated.[1][2]
"Physician Walter Lear founded the Medical Committee for Civil Rights (MCCR) in 1963 to address the entrenched racism in the policies of the American Medical Association (AMA) which enabled Southern states to deny African American physicians the same rights as whites. The group originally protested the AMA in Atlantic City in 1963, but widened their reach when hundreds of health professionals representing MCCR participated in the August 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom.
"Out of this momentum, a new group, the Medical Committee for Human Rights (MCHR) was created in 1964 by Tom Levin, who was asked by the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) to organize a group of health care workers to support activists during Freedom Summer in Mississippi, a ten-week effort to register disfranchised African American voters. MCHR was needed because there were few black physicians and whites would not treat the injuries of civil rights activists in Mississippi.
"MCHR made several discoveries while supporting activists during the Freedom Summer. They found that the public health system for African Americans was virtually nonexistent in Mississippi. Due to segregation, white physicians would not treat black patients. Most blacks had received almost no health care, and most had never visited a doctor. With access to health care so limited, MCHR was imbued with a new purpose. They became a permanent organization and founded field offices. Soon after, community health care clinics began to emerge. MCHR expanded from Mississippi into Alabama and Louisiana. Their mission expanded further, treating veterans from the Vietnam War for PTSD, and calling for a non-profit national health care system" (Wikipedia aritcle on The Good Doctors, accessed 7-2020).
"During the seventeenth century, England was beset by three epidemics of the bubonic plague, each outbreak claiming between a quarter and a third of the population of London and other urban centers. Surveying a wide range of responses to these epidemics—sermons, medical tracts, pious exhortations, satirical pamphlets, and political commentary—Plague Writing in Early Modern England brings to life the many and complex ways Londoners made sense of such unspeakable devastation" (publisher).
Order of authorship in the original publication: Sato, de Vries, .... Clevers. Clevers and postdoc Toshiro Sato took adult stem cells from the mouse intestine and created the first mini-guts they called organoids—three-dimensional organized clusters of cells.
Abstract: "The intestinal epithelium is the most rapidly self-renewing tissue in adult mammals. We have recently demonstrated the presence of about six cycling Lgr5+ stem cells at the bottoms of small-intestinal crypts1. Here we describe the establishment of long-term culture conditions under which single crypts undergo multiple crypt fission events, while simultanously generating villus-like epithelial domains in which all differentiated cell types are present. Single sorted Lgr5+ stem cells can also initiate these crypt-villus organoids. Tracing experiments indicate that the Lgr5+ stem-cell hierarchy is maintained in organoids. We conclude that intestinal crypt-villus units are self-organizing structures, which can be built from a single stem cell in the absence of a non-epithelial cellular niche."
Abstract "Seasonal influenza epidemics are a major public health concern, causing tens of millions of respiratory illnesses and 250,000 to 500,000 deaths worldwide each year1. In addition to seasonal influenza, a new strain of influenza virus against which no previous immunity exists and that demonstrates human-to-human transmission could result in a pandemic with millions of fatalities2. Early detection of disease activity, when followed by a rapid response, can reduce the impact of both seasonal and pandemic influenza3,4. One way to improve early detection is to monitor health-seeking behaviour in the form of queries to online search engines, which are submitted by millions of users around the world each day. Here we present a method of analysing large numbers of Google search queries to track influenza-like illness in a population. Because the relative frequency of certain queries is highly correlated with the percentage of physician visits in which a patient presents with influenza-like symptoms, we can accurately estimate the current level of weekly influenza activity in each region of the United States, with a reporting lag of about one day. This approach may make it possible to use search queries to detect influenza epidemics in areas with a large population of web search users."
Full text available from Nature.com at this link. Order of authorship in the original publication: Ginsburg, Mohebbi, ... Brilliant.
Berkeley & Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2009.
"Icons of Life tells the ... story of ... the Carnegie Institution of Washington's project to collect thousands of embryos for scientific study. Lynn M. Morgan blends social analysis, sleuthing, and humor to trace the history of specimen collecting. In the process, she illuminates how a hundred-year-old scientific endeavor continues to be felt in today's fraught arena of maternal and fetal politics. Until the embryo collecting project-which she follows from the Johns Hopkins anatomy department, through Baltimore foundling homes, and all the way to China - most people had no idea what human embryos looked like. But by the 1950s, modern citizens saw in embryos an image of “ourselves unborn,” and embryology had developed a biologically based story about how we came to be. Morgan explains how dead specimens paradoxically became icons of life, how embryos were generated as social artifacts separate from pregnant women, and how a fetus thwarted Gertrude Stein's medical career. By resurrecting a nearly forgotten scientific project, Morgan sheds light on the roots of a modern origin story and raises the still controversial issue of how we decide what embryos mean" (publisher).
The authors provide evidence that Ardipithecus may be the beginning of the evolutionary pathway that eventually led to hominids. This pathway was distinct from the evolutionary pathway that led to extant African apes.
"Ar. ramidus, first described in 1994 from teeth and jaw fragments, is now represented by 110 specimens, including a partial female skeleton rescued from erosional degradation. This individual weighed about 50 kg and stood about 120 cm tall. In the context of the many other recovered individuals of this species, this suggests little body size difference between males and females. Brain size was as small as in living chimpanzees. The numerous recovered teeth and a largely complete skull show that Ar. ramidus had a small face and a reduced canine/premolar complex, indicative of minimal social aggression. Its hands, arms, feet, pelvis, and legs collectively reveal that it moved capably in the trees, supported on its feet and palms (palmigrade clambering), but lacked any characteristics typical of the suspension, vertical climbing, or knuckle-walking of modern gorillas and chimps. Terrestrially, it engaged in a form of bipedality more primitive than that of Australopithecus, and it lacked adaptation to “heavy” chewing related to open environments (seen in later Australopithecus). Ar. ramidus thus indicates that the last common ancestors of humans and African apes were not chimpanzee-like and that both hominids and extant African apes are each highly specialized, but through very different evolutionary pathways" (Conclusion of the authors' introduction). Digital facsimile from academia.edu at this link.
Order of authorship in the original publication: White, Asfaw, Beyene, Haile-Selassie...
(Thanks to Juan Weiss for this reference and its interpretation.)
J. Allergy & Clinical Immunology, 123, 426-433, 2009.
Discovery of mammalian meat allergy (MMA) or Alpha-gal syndrome (AGS), also called Alpha-gal allergy, a type of meat allergy characterized by delayed onset of symptoms (3-8 hours) after ingesting mammalian meat. The allergy is a reaction to the carbohydrate galactose-alpha-1,3-galactose ("alpha-gal") in which the body is overloaded with immunoglobulin E (IgE) antibodies on contact with the carbohydrate. Bites from specific tick species, such as the lone star tick (Amblyomma americanum) in the US, and the paralysis tick (Ixodes holocyclus) in Australia have been implicated in the development of this delayed allergic response.
Full text available from PubMedCentral at this link. Order of authorship in the original publication: Commins, Sharma,....Platts-Mills.
(Thanks to Juan Weiss for this reference and its interpretation.)
Clark