The Beginnings of English Paracelsian Lexicography: Two Collections of Words from Elizabethan Cambridge

This article identifies the first two collections of Paracelsian words to have been printed in England: a body of 153 new and rare words, or new senses of existing words, dispersed in the third edition of Thomas Thomas's Latin-English Dictionarium of 1592, and a list of forty-three words forming part of Joseph Hall's Latin prose satire Mundus alter et idem, published in 1605. The Paracelsian material in the Dictionarium has been practically unknown until now, and the Paracelsian material in Mundus alter et idem has been insufficiently studied. Both collections of words are edited here, with discussion of their sources and the principles on which they were selected, and with discussion of their influence for the period of more than half a century when they were the only collections of Paracelsian words printed in England.

Scale in the history of medicine

This is a history of medicine that takes its point of departure in the specimens of human bodily material used to produce medical knowledge. An ordering principle of scale prompts a material and epistemic history of 18th-21st century medicine that highlights shifts in interest towards smaller and smaller units of study: from organs in pathological collections, over microscope slides, to samples in biobanks. The account reveals a set of connected scales of the site of disease, time of diagnosis, size of cohorts, number of disease categories, and technologies of investigation. Moreover, the principle of following the scale of specimens demonstrates the continued importance of physical specimens in medicine, it synthesizes studies of important epistemic objects of medicine such as the organ specimen, the microscope slide and the blood sample, and it draws new historical connections from pathological collections to biobanks.

Airborne infection with Covid-19? A historical look at a current controversy

Since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, experts and the broader public have vigorously debated the means by which SARS CoV-2 is spread. And understandably so, for identifying the routes of transmission is crucial for selecting appropriate nonpharmaceutical interventions to control the pandemic. The most controversial question in the debate is the role played by airborne transmission. What is at stake is not just the clinical evidence, but the implications for public health policy, society, and psychology. Interestingly, however, the issue of airborne transmission is not a new controversy. It has reappeared throughout the history of western medicine. This essay traces the notion of airborne infection from its development in ancient medical theories to its manifestation in the modern era and its impact today.

Development of consensus-based aims, contents, intended learning outcomes, teaching, and evaluation methods for a history of medicine and pharmacy course for medical and pharmacy students in the Arab world: a Delphi study

BACKGROUND

History courses are "required" elements among the didactic elements of the medical and pharmacy curricula in many schools around the world. The aim of this study was to develop consensus-based aims, contents, intended learning outcomes, teaching, and evaluation methods of a history of medicine and pharmacy course for medical and pharmacy students in the Arab World.

METHODS

A systematic search of PubMed, ScienceDirect, SpringerLink, Scopus, and Google Scholar was conducted to identify course aims, contents, intended learning outcomes from the literature. The search was supplemented by semi-structured in-depth interviews with 5 educators/academicians, 3 pharmacists, and 3 physicians. The Delphi technique was used among panelists (10 educators/academicians, 4 physicians, and 4 pharmacists) to develop consensus-based course aims, contents, intended learning outcomes, teaching, and evaluation methods.

RESULTS

The vast majority of the panelists agreed on the 10 items (agreement ≥88.9%) on the importance of teaching history to medical and pharmacy students. Consensus-based aims (n = 4) and intended learning outcomes (n = 13) were developed in the 1st and 2nd iterative Delphi rounds. The panelists suggested that 16 dedicated meeting hours (1 credit hour) would be required to cover the course. Bloom's verbs were used to target the lower and higher orders of the cognitive domain. The course could be taught through face-to-face lectures, provision of reading materials, video documentaries, case studies, group discussions and debates. Multiple-choice questions, written reflections, portfolios, group projects, and engagement in discussions and debates might be used to evaluate performance of students.

CONCLUSION

Consensus-based course of history of medicine and pharmacy course was developed for medical and pharmacy students in the Arab World. Well-designed course aims, contents, intended learning outcomes, teaching, and evaluation methods are more likely to meet the accreditation requirements and might improve performance of medical and pharmacy students. Future studies are still needed to investigate if such consensus-based courses can improve performance of the students.

Cycles and circulation: a theme in the history of biology and medicine

We invite systematic consideration of the metaphors of cycles and circulation as a long-term theme in the history of the life and environmental sciences and medicine. Ubiquitous in ancient religious and philosophical traditions, especially in representing the seasons and the motions of celestial bodies, circles once symbolized perfection. Over the centuries cyclic images in western medicine, natural philosophy, natural history and eventually biology gained independence from cosmology and theology and came to depend less on strictly circular forms. As potent 'canonical icons', cycles also interacted with representations of linear and irreversible change, including arrows, arcs, scales, series and trees, as in theories of the Earth and of evolution. In modern times life cycles and reproductive cycles have often been held to characterize life, in some cases especially female life, while human efforts selectively to foster and disrupt these cycles have harnessed their productivity in medicine and agriculture. But strong cyclic metaphors have continued to link physiology and climatology, medicine and economics, and biology and manufacturing, notably through the relations between land, food and population. From the grand nineteenth-century transformations of matter to systems ecology, the circulation of molecules through organic and inorganic compartments has posed the problem of maintaining identity in the face of flux and highlights the seductive ability of cyclic schemes to imply closure where no original state was in fact restored. More concerted attention to cycles and circulation will enrich analyses of the power of metaphors to naturalize understandings of life and their shaping by practical interests and political imaginations.

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Until the middle of the XXth century, the data conservation is encrypted in kilometers, not in mega terra bits ; their destruction by thousands of tonnes, not by computer deletion. The connection of data, on your computer scale, was not inexistent before about 1950; but was only manual and limited.

Seeing clearly through COVID-19: current and future questions for the history and philosophy of the life sciences

The role of a journal like HPLS during the novel coronavirus pandemic should serve as a means for scholars in different fields and professions to consider historically and critically what is happening as it unfolds. Surely it cannot tackle all the possible issues related to the pandemic, in particular to the COVID-19 pandemic, but it does have a responsibility to foster the best possible dialogue about the various issues related to the history and philosophy of the life sciences, and thus to solicit contributions from potential authors working in different parts of the world and belonging to different cultural traditions. Only a real plurality of perspectives should allow for a better, large-scale comprehension of what the COVID-19 pandemic is.

[COVID-19 and Its Environment: From a History of Human Medicine Towards an Ecological History of Medicine?]

This paper is part of the Forum COVID-19: Perspectives in the Humanities and Social Sciences. The history of medicine is mostly written as a history of human medicine. COVID-19 and other zoonotic infectious diseases, however, demand a reconsideration of medical history in terms of ecology and the inclusion of non-human actors and diverse environments. This contribution discusses possible approaches for an ecological history of medicine which satisfies the needs of several current and overlapping crises.

Learning the Chymical Compromise: Paracelsian and Galenic Medicine in Marburg Disputations on Chymiatria

The chair of chymiatria created at the University of Marburg was among the earliest academic initiatives aiming to integrate chymistry into the medical curriculum. If its practical applications in pharmacy and its relationship with patronage have been examined by historians, the theoretical part of the chymiatria programme still remains to be explored. In the form of student disputations and dissertations held or presided over by Heinrich Petraeus, a professor of medicine at Marburg and Johannes Hartmann's son-in-law, "chymiatric" essays expounded various medical issues. Centred on pathology, therapy, and physiology, these theoretical explanations proposed a "hermetic-dogmatic" interpretation merging the views of Paracelsus and Galen. This article examines these disputations and their stance concerning the living body, sickness, and treatment, and how they shaped the status of chymistry as an art and a science on the verge of institutionalisation.

The model crisis, or how to have critical promiscuity in the time of Covid-19

During the past forty years, statistical modelling and simulation have come to frame perceptions of epidemic disease and to determine public health interventions that might limit or suppress the transmission of the causative agent. The influence of such formulaic disease modelling has pervaded public health policy and practice during the Covid-19 pandemic. The critical vocabulary of epidemiology, and now popular debate, thus includes R₀, the basic reproduction number of the virus, 'flattening the curve', and epidemic 'waves'. How did this happen? What are the consequences of framing and foreseeing the pandemic in these modes? Focusing on historical and contemporary disease responses, primarily in Britain, I explore the emergence of statistical modelling as a 'crisis technology', a reductive mechanism for making rapid decisions or judgments under uncertain biological constraint. I consider how Covid-19 might be configured or assembled otherwise, constituted as a more heterogeneous object of knowledge, a different and more encompassing moment of truth - not simply as a measured telos directing us to a new normal. Drawing on earlier critical engagements with the AIDS pandemic, inquiries into how to have 'theory' and 'promiscuity' in a crisis, I seek to open up a space for greater ecological, sociological, and cultural complexity in the biopolitics of modelling, thereby attempting to validate a role for critique in the Covid-19 crisis.