Osler and the black corpuscles: profiles of three early students of phagocytosis

The discovery of phagocytosis is associated indelibly with Elie Metchnikoff, who coined the term, but more than 30 persons had observed the phenomenon (or inferred its existence) before Metchnikoff came to dominate the field. Two of these early investigators were William Osler and George Miller Sternberg. Osler recognized carbon particles within the phagocytes of patients with miner's lung and carried out experiments in kittens. Sternberg only theorized about phagocytosis but, unlike Osler, bitterly contested Metchnikoff's priority of discovery.

Bully for Apatosaurus

Thin at one end, thicker in the middle, then thin again at the other end, Brontosaurus is one of the most famous dinosaurs. So why do paleontologists call it Apatosaurus? Othniel Charles Marsh coined both names from two relatively complete specimens in the late 1870s. Additional specimens collected during the second American Jurassic dinosaur rush (1895-1905) provided the material for revisions. Henry Fairfield Osborn, who detested Marsh, systematically sought to overturn his work. Yet it was Elmer Samuel Riggs who showed that Marsh's Apatosaurus and Brontosaurus are synonymous, and Osborn who stubbornly, and inexplicably, adhered to the latter.

[Where it is shown that a quarrel about precedence can lead to the Holy Bible]

The custom to print a "synthesis", for the last part of the mastership examination, the "chef d'oeuvre" was established in most of French towns. Kind of printed programme, the "synthesis" was a sheet of paper, of poster size. It listed the practicals to perform and the members of the jury, etc. The listing of the apothecaries participating in the jury used to be accompanied by elogious formulations i.e. "celeberrimo coet-cui pharmacoporum". The physicians immeditely reacted. How was it possible? Such elogious terms should be used for medicine doctors only! Not for apothecaries! Various printed arguments were exchanged and a tumultuous process took place. A judgement occured on December 14 1656: Such terms of Honour should be avoided in the future. During this judiciary episode, Latin citations from "Ecclesistics, 38" were exchanged. This ridiculous quarell rised nevertheless some serious questions. Didn't the translation of the Bible in modern languages contain some indaquancies concerning the people in charge of preparing and dispensing the medicines? A study of original Greek texts showed that it was the case.

The repeating history of objections to the fortification of bread and alcohol: from iron filings to folic acid

The fortification of staple foods has eliminated many deficiency diseases. Despite this, "tampering" with people's food always provokes opposition, much of it from health professionals. Opposition is often based on self-interest, tunnel vision and theory rather than research. A historical perspective of the patterns of objections to fortification and its outcomes may help resolve the anxieties and opposing ethical positions of advocates and opponents of fortification.

[1848: Gregor Mendel, the monk who wanted to be a citizen]

This article proposes a previously unpublished French translation of a petition, in German, addressed by six Augustinian friars to the Constitutional Parliament of Vienna in the revolutionary year 1848. The petition states that members of religious orders are deprived of civil rights and demands that they be given citizenship ; it also contains a bitter attack on the monastic institution. We suggest that Mendel was the author of this text, which he signed and actually hand-wrote.

The protein side of the central dogma: permanence and change

There are two facets to the central dogma proposed by Francis Crick in 1957. One concerns the relation between the sequence of nucleotides and the sequence of amino acids, the second is devoted to the relation between the sequence of amino acids and the native three-dimensional structure of proteins. 'Folding is simply a function of the order of the amino acids,' i.e. no information is required for the proper folding of a protein other than the information contained in its sequence. This protein side of the central dogma was elaborated in a scientific context in which the characteristics and functions of proteins, and the mechanisms of protein folding, were seen very differently. This context, which made the folding problem a simple one, supported the bold proposition of Francis Crick. The protein side of the central dogma was not challenged by the discovery of prions if one adopts the definition of information given by Francis Crick. It might have been challenged by the discovery that regulatory enzymes exist in different conformations, and the evidence for the existence of chaperones assisting protein folding. But it was not, and folding remains what it was for Francis Crick, 'simply a function of the order of amino acids'. But the meaning of 'function' has dramatically changed. It is no longer the result of simple physicochemical laws, but that of a long evolutionary process which has optimized protein folding. Molecular mechanistic explanations have to be allied with evolutionary explanations, in a way characteristic of present biology.

Medical societies and insanity in late-eighteenth-century London: the fight between Andrew Marshal and John Hunter

In 1789, at a meeting of a small London society for the promotion of medical and surgical knowledge, Andrew Marshal (1742-1813) and John Hunter (1728-1793) engaged in heated debate regarding the association between mania and the structure of the brain. Marshal claimed to have observed abnormalities when dissecting brains of those who died insane and Hunter denied this connection. At the next meeting a scuffle between them ensued and they had to be parted. Although Marshal did not publish his observations during his lifetime, they were assembled by his assistant in 1815. Marshal's descriptions of the brains of hydrophobics and maniacs are worthy of note.

The dialectics of understanding: on genres and the use of debate in medical history

Answering the call made by Frederic L. Holmes to introduce the concept of the longue durée in the history of science and medicine, this essay sets out to weigh the pros and cons of the concept for the field. It argues that four genres (or traditions) can be distinguished in medical historiography, each with their own ambitions, methods, perspectives and audiences. It concludes by calling for articulated and lively debate between the protagonists of the different genres as the royal way to historical understanding.

[A note on the technical debate between Reich/Fenichel and Theodor Reik (1932-1936)]

Wilhelm Reich's technical emphasis on the "systematic analysis of defenses" was controversial even before 1933. His main opponent in this field was Reik who expressed his criticism several times from 1932 to 1935. For Reik, the analytical process was essentially open, dependent on surprise. Fenichel, Reich's ally, defended a "scientific" approach, as opposed to "intuition", but later adopted a mediatory position.

[The health policy of the "Council of the People's Representatives": the German revolution 1918/1919 in medical historical perspective II: health policy as a factor of continuity and stability]

Most important for the events at the turn of 1918/19 was the coincidence of the revolution and the end of the war. This meant that in a very short time the troops had to be withdrawn from the front, the size of the army had to be reduced, and the wartime economy had to be transformed into a peace economy. Apart from the resulting economical and social problems, military demobilisation was closely linked with medical and health political difficulties. The revolutionary government saw itself as a provisional arrangement to ensure the unity of the state and the functioning of the German Reich. The maintenance of medical care and provision of a minimum of foodstuffs made health policy important during the months of revolution. Despite a positive balance of payments and a "health policy of continuity", the revolutionary government was unable to win the medical profession for its aims, because it failed to dispel suspicions that the medical profession was going to be socialised.

[Rokitansky and Virchow--the giants of pathology in disputatio]

On the occasion of the bicentenary of Carl Rokitanskys birth, I was kindly asked to review the relationship between the two great pathologists, Rokitansky and Virchow. As Virchow specialist and editor of the first complete edition of his work, I found the task of writing about their relationship particularly interesting. Although much has written on the subject, I tried to find new points to further illuminate their relationship.

Early reactions to Harvey's circulation theory: the impact on medicine

In early 17th century Europe, scientific concepts were still based largely on ancient philosophical and theological explanations. During this same era, however, experimentation began to take hold as a legitimate component of scientific investigation. In 1628, the English physician William Harvey announced a revolutionary theory stating that blood circulates repeatedly throughout the body. He relied on experimentation, comparative anatomy and calculation to arrive at his conclusions. His theory contrasted sharply with the accepted beliefs of the time, which were based on the 1400-year-old teachings of Galen and denied the presence of circulation. As with many new ideas, Harvey's circulation theory was received with a great deal of controversy among his colleagues. An examination of their motives reveals that many proponents agreed with his theory largely because of the logic of his argument and his use of experimentation and quantitative methods. However, some proponents agreed for religious, mystical and philosophical reasons, while some were convinced only because of the change in public opinion with time. Many opposed the circulation theory because of their rigid commitment to ancient doctrines, the questionable utility of experimentation, the lack of proof that capillaries exist, and a failure to recognize the clinical applications of his theory. Other opponents were motivated by personal resentments and professional "territorialism." Beyond the immediate issues and arguments, however, the controversy is important because it helped establish use of the scientific method.

Marcello Malpighi and his academic opponents in Bologna

Marcello Malpighi was born in Crevalcore on March 10, 1628 and died in Rome on July 25, 1694. In Bologna he had among his opponents Giovanni Gerolamo Sbaraglia and Paoli Mini who prevented him being appointed to the chair of anatomy. This paper describes the reasons for this long term debate.

Borderline science: expert testimony and the Red River boundary dispute

The 1918 discovery of oil in the bed of the Red River, which forms the border between Texas and Oklahoma, led to a U.S. Supreme Court case that involved the extensive use of expert witnesses in fields such as geology, geography, and ecology. What began as a dispute between the two states soon became a multisided controversy involving those states, the federal government, Native Americans, and individual placer-mining claimants. After the federal attorneys introduced scientific experts into the dispute, including the plant ecologist Henry Chandler Cowles and the geographer Isaiah Bowman, fresh from negotiations at the Paris Peace Conference, Texas attorneys fielded their own team of opposing experts. Charged with the task of determining the location of the border, defined as the south bank of the river at the time of the 1819 treaty with Spain, the scientific experts presented the court with volumes of evidence and elaborate arguments, much of it contradictory and involving creative interpretations of existing theories. The case exhibited all the now-familiar features of a trial using expert witnesses, for which it represents an early, overlooked, and particularly complex example.

The letter: private text or public place? The Mattioli-Gesner controversy about the aconitum primum

From 1555 to 1565, Pietro Andrea Mattioli and Conrad Gesner were locked in controversy over the veracity of Mattioli's picture of aconitum primum. This dispute led to numerous vehement publications and to intensive exchanges of letters, not only between the protagonists but also within their own and sometimes inter-connected networks of correspondence. This dispute illustrates how 16th-century scholars played upon the ambiguous place of these letters between private and public space to deal with controversy in the Republic of Letters.

Duverney's skeletons

In 1730, shortly before his death, the Paris anatomist Joseph-Guichard Duverney wrote his will, leaving his anatomical specimens to the Académie des Sciences, of which he was a member. But the will was disputed by Pierre Chirac, supervisor of the Jardin du Roi where Duverney, as professor of anatomy, had performed most of the dissections that produced the specimens. The ensuing debate between Chirac and René-Antoine Ferchault de Réaumur, arguing for the Académie, reveals the tensions surrounding both the concept of intellectual property in this period and the collective enterprise in natural philosophy. The differing roles and audiences of the Académie and the Jardin were central to this debate. In addition, this essay explores the origins and significance of the anatomical specimens themselves and their changing role in instruction and display, as well as the transition from the cabinet of curiosities to the natural history museum.

The creation of prehistoric man. Aimé Rutot and the Eolith controversy, 1900-1920

Although he died in obscurity, the Belgian museum conservator Aimé Rutot (1847-1933) was one of the most famous European archaeologists between 1900 and 1920. The focus of his scientific interest was stone flints, which he claimed to be the oldest known human tools, so-called eoliths. Skeptics maintained that the flints showed no marks of human workmanship, but Rutot nevertheless managed to spread his "Eolithic theory" in an important part of the scientific community. This essay demonstrates how material objects--series of stone flints and sets of statues that purported to reconstruct prehistoric "races"--were given scientific meaning by Rutot. Rutot diffused his ideas by disseminating his stones and statues, thus enlarging his networks of influence. For a time he managed to be at the material center of a trade network as well as at the intellectual center of archaeological debate. The essay shows how Rutot achieved this status and how he eventually fell from favor among serious scientists.

Feud and fable: the Sherrington-Horsley polemic and the delayed publication

In the February and March 1894 pages of The Lancet and in private letters, Charles Sherrington and Victor Horsley exchanged angry accusations pertaining to primacy of research on the course of the pyramidal fiber tract as determined from studies in monkeys. The polemics appear not to have ended in a manner satisfactory to either one. Moreover, the dispute allegedly led to a remarkable delay in publication of one of Sherrington's major contributions, which pertained to the localization of the motor cortex in apes that was published in 1917. Here we examine the argument in detail including the comments of an intermediary, Professor Rubert Boyce. We also examine the evidence for the supposed delay in publication, and conclude that the account of the delay originated in John Fulton's 1952 obituary of Sherrington, and is not true. We suggest it has become a fable that should no longer be repeated.

A chapter in the history of nurse education: learning disability nursing and The Jay Report

This paper is a discussion of the Jay Report into mental handicap nursing and care that was published in 1979. Following a brief discussion of the report itself, the paper considers material from the period that was published in the nursing press. This material gives an insight into the way in which nurses reacted to Jay's recommendation that mental handicap nursing be replaced with a professional grouping based on the Certificate in Social Services. Whilst this was not the first time that the continuation of mental handicap nursing had been questioned, it was the first occasion in which there was a public debate about the issue. Although the Jay Report was concerned with a minority of nurses it is argued that lessons can be drawn about nurse education generally. Conclusions are drawn about the way in which changes to nurse education and service need to be linked in order to be effective. Furthermore the discussion places the Jay Report within the broad political concerns of the day. It is argued that the report is a further example of the way in which change within nursing takes place when it corresponds with central government policy concerns.

In the sign of Galileo: pictorial representation in the 17th-century Copernican debate

After Galileo had discovered the four moons of Jupiter in 1609 he became increasingly convinced that the Copernican, heliocentric system of the world was correct. However, this ran against the opinions of the Church and a large number of contemporary astronomers and natural philosophers. The ensuing development culminated in the condemnation of the Copernican system by the Church in 1616 and of Galileo himself, who had propagated the Copernican system in his Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems (1632), in 1633. Nevertheless, there was a constant debate about the right world system during the whole 17th century. Pictorial representation played an important role in it and the illustrations used as book frontispieces were a significant medium for the dispute.

Evolutionary ethics from Darwin to Moore

Evolutionary ethics has a long history, dating all the way back to Charles Darwin. Almost immediately after the publication of the Origin, an immense interest arose in the moral implications of Darwinism and whether the truth of Darwinism would undermine traditional ethics. Though the biological thesis was certainly exciting, nobody suspected that the impact of the Origin would be confined to the scientific arena. As one historian wrote, 'whether or not ancient populations of armadillos were transformed into the species that currently inhabit the new world was certainly a topic about which zoologists could disagree. But it was in discussing the broader implications of the theory...that tempers flared and statements were made which could transform what otherwise would have been a quiet scholarly meeting into a social scandal' (Farber 1994, 22). Some resistance to the biological thesis of Darwinism sprung from the thought that it was incompatible with traditional morality and, since one of them had to go, many thought that Darwinism should be rejected. However, some people did realize that a secular ethics was possible so, even if Darwinism did undermine traditional religious beliefs, it need not have any effects on moral thought. Before I begin my discussion of evolutionary ethics from Darwin to Moore, I would like to make some more general remarks about its development. There are three key events during this history of evolutionary ethics. First, Charles Darwin published On the Origin of the Species (Darwin 1859). Since one did not have a fully developed theory of evolution until 1859, there exists little work on evolutionary ethics until then. Shortly thereafter, Herbert Spencer (1898) penned the first systematic theory of evolutionary ethics, which was promptly attacked by T.H. Huxley (Huxley 1894). Second, at about the turn of the century, moral philosophers entered the fray and attempted to demonstrate logical errors in Spencer's work; such errors were alluded to but never fully brought to the fore by Huxley. These philosophers were the well known moralists from Cambridge: Henry Sidgwick (Sidgwick 1902, 1907) and G.E. Moore (Moore 1903), though their ideas hearkened back to David Hume (Hume 1960). These criticisms were so strong that the industry of evolutionary ethics was largely abandoned (though with some exceptions) for many years. Third, E.O. Wilson, a Harvard entomologist, published Sociobiology: The New Synthesis in 1975 (Wilson E.O. 1975), which sparked renewed interest in evolutionary ethics and offered new directions of investigation. These events suggest the following stages for the history of evolutionary ethics: development, criticism and abandonment, revival. In this paper, I shall focus on the first two stages, since those are the ones on which the philosophical merits have already been largely decided. The revival stage is still in progress and we shall eventually find out whether it was a success.

Louise Andreas-Salomé: at the high noon of culture, in the shadows of psychoanalysis

Although Louise Andreas-Salomd has been the focus of biographical interest the essence of her theoretical ideas is mostly overlooked. Indeed, only a smattering of her total body of writing has been translated into English and in her native German her works are rarely available. This essay examines LAS's figurative role in the Freud/ Jung split, hypothesizing that it was she whom Jung referred to as the anti-oedipal ‘sterile mother goose with a sagging belly and varicose veins’; the mother whom the son (Jung) could never love. The way in which Lou's relationship with Freud was sealed in their mutual analysis of ‘daughter Anna’, and the development of her crucial relationship with Freud are examined. Finally, Lou's own maturing critique of Freud is discussed in the context of her ideas about dual-orientated narcissism and the centrality of the infant's pre-oedipal relationship with mother. Lou's ideas - which ran ahead of Melanie Klein, Anna Freud, Helene Deutsch and Karen Homey - are considered in terms of the first wave of psychoanalytic feminism.

[The frontiers of 'abnormality': psychiatry and social control]

The article examines some of the main aspects governing psychiatry's role in the Brazilian political and social context at the close of the nineteenth century and beginning of the twentieth. It analyzes certain themes - civilization, race, labor, fanaticism, political dissent, sexuality - that were emphasized by specialists in their construction of a very broad notion of 'mental illness'. Through the analysis of texts produced by psychiatrists and legal experts (including dissertations written at the Faculdade de Medicina do Rio de Janeiro, reports from the Serviço de Assistência a Alienados, and works and articles by specialists), the relation between the psychiatric definition of the frontiers of 'abnormality' and efforts to implement new strategies of social control is discussed.

[Positivism and medical science in Rio Grande do Sul: the Faculdade de Medicina de Porto Alegre]

The article analyzes conflicts and interests at one of Rio Grande de Sul's main centers for medical science, the Faculdade de Medicina de Porto Alegre. It explores the meaning and impact of the emergence of this specific, exclusive field of knowledge in a state where positivist principles of professional freedom were adopted by successive administrations during the early period of the Republic. Physicians there launched an entrenched war to uphold the principles of science over faith and politics, challenging the positivism of the party which held power in Rio Grande do Sul throughout the years. This perspective grew and developed in a climate of conflict and doubts among physicians, within a political context that differed from the rest of Brazil.