Persistent interaction patterns across social media platforms and over time

Growing concern surrounds the impact of social media platforms on public discourse1-4 and their influence on social dynamics5-9, especially in the context of toxicity10-12. Here, to better understand these phenomena, we use a comparative approach to isolate human behavioural patterns across multiple social media platforms. In particular, we analyse conversations in different online communities, focusing on identifying consistent patterns of toxic content. Drawing from an extensive dataset that spans eight platforms over 34 years-from Usenet to contemporary social media-our findings show consistent conversation patterns and user behaviour, irrespective of the platform, topic or time. Notably, although long conversations consistently exhibit higher toxicity, toxic language does not invariably discourage people from participating in a conversation, and toxicity does not necessarily escalate as discussions evolve. Our analysis suggests that debates and contrasting sentiments among users significantly contribute to more intense and hostile discussions. Moreover, the persistence of these patterns across three decades, despite changes in platforms and societal norms, underscores the pivotal role of human behaviour in shaping online discourse.

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.

"I would sooner die than give up": Huxley and Darwin's deep disagreement

Thomas Henry Huxley and Charles Darwin discovered in 1857 that they had a fundamental disagreement about biological classification. Darwin believed that the natural system should express genealogy while Huxley insisted that classification must stand on its own basis, independent of evolution. Darwin used human races as a model for his view. This private and long-forgotten dispute exposes important divisions within Victorian biology. Huxley, trained in physiology and anatomy, was a professional biologist while Darwin was a gentleman naturalist. Huxley agreed with John Stuart Mill's rejection of William Whewell's sympathy for Linnaeus. The naturalists William Sharp Macleay, Hugh Strickland, and George Waterhouse worked to distinguish two kinds of relationship, affinity and analogy. Darwin believed that his theory could explain the difference. Richard Owen introduced the distinction between homology and analogy to anatomists, but the word homology did not enter Darwin's vocabulary until 1848, when he used the morphological concept of archetype in his work on Cirripedia. Huxley dropped the word archetype when Richard Owen linked it to Plato's ideal forms, replacing it with common plan. When Darwin wrote in the Origin of Species that the word plan gives no explanation, he may have had Huxley in mind. Darwin's preposterous story in the Origin about a bear giving birth to a kangaroo, which he dropped in the second edition, was in fact aimed at Huxley.

['A case of decapitation'; calamity investigation in 1822]

A case of childbirth with a fatal outcome described in the book 'The King's Court Physician: the Adventurous Life of Franz Joseph Harbaur, 1776-1822' (De lijfarts van de koning. Het avontuurlijkeleven van Franz Joseph Harbaur, 1776-1822) puts the work of the Dutch Health and Youth Care Inspectorate into an historical context by pointing out the similarities between a calamity investigation held in 1822 and the situation today. Conflicts between medical disciplinary law and criminal law, boundary disputes between various professions (in this particular case midwives and gynaecologists) and questions of openness and transparency turn out to be nothing new. By doing case studies on how to deal with calamities, it is possible to gain insight into medical failures of the past and how they were managed. It is also possible to get a better picture of the expectations that medicine had to meet in the past, and how, and under what circumstances, these have changed. This information is of value in making choices in today's healthcare system.

You shall bury him: burial, suicide and the development of Catholic law and theology

Whether physician-assisted dying should be legalised is a major debate in medical ethics and much has been written on it from both secular and religious perspectives. Less, however, has been written on one of the potential consequences of legalised physician-assisted death: whether those who undergo this procedure will be given funerals by religious groups who oppose the practice. This article investigates the Catholic Church's attitude to the burial of suicides, and how Catholic canon law has approached the question of ecclesiastic funerals for suicides throughout its history. From the sixth through the late 20th century, the Church technically did not bury anyone who willfully committed suicide. Broad shifts in the cultural attitude towards suicide, due in large part to new understandings of mental illness as disease, had a powerful effect on Catholic thought and practice in modernity, and the Church eventually dropped the ban on funerals for suicides from its law code altogether in the 1980s. The legalisation of physician-assisted death, however, raises again the possibility of a prohibition on funerals. The Church was able to drop its restrictions on funerals since suicide was seen as an act beyond the control of the deceased and thus worthy of mercy and compassion. In cases of physician-assisted dying, the patient must have consciously and willingly agreed to the procedure, undermining this understanding of suicide. The history of canon law on suicide funerals reveals the complexity of the Catholic attitude towards suicide and provides an important context to the current debate around physician-assisted death, and conflicts between medicine and religion more broadly.

Freud and Albert Moll: how kindred spirits became bitter foes

This article explores the antagonism between Sigmund Freud and the German neurologist and sexologist Albert Moll. When Moll, in 1908, published a book about the sexuality of children, Freud, without any grounds, accused him of plagiarism. In fact, Moll had reason to suspect Freud of plagiarism since there are many parallels between Freud's Drei Abhandlungen zur Sexualtheorie and Moll's Untersuchungen über die Libido sexualis. Freud had read this book carefully, but hardly paid tribute to Moll's innovative thinking about sexuality. A comparison between the two works casts doubt on Freud's claim that his work was a revolutionary breakthrough. Freud's course of action raises questions about his integrity. The article also critically addresses earlier evaluations of the clash.

The electroshock triangle: disputes about the ECT apparatus prototype and its display in the 1960s

In the early 1960s, a climate of public condemnation of electroconvulsive therapy was emerging in the USA and Europe. In spite of this, the electroshock apparatus prototype, introduced in Rome in 1938, was becoming hotly contended. This article explores the disputes around the display of the electroshock apparatus prototype in the summer of 1964 and sheds new light on the triangle of personalities that shaped its future: Karl and William Menninger, two key figures of American psychiatry in Topeka; their competitor, Adalberto Pazzini, the founder of the Sapienza Museum of the History of Medicine in Rome; and, between them, Lucio Bini, one of the original inventors of ECT, who died unexpectedly that summer.

History of the opposition between psychogenesis and organogenesis in classic psychiatry: Part 1

The question of causation in psychiatry is one of the oldest and most difficult in this field. This paper is the first of two published in this journal. First, it traces the development of psychogenic and organogenic views of mental disorders from Pinel until the early twentieth century. This includes the debate as to how a disturbance of function might create a lesion even without a visible pathological trace. The second part of the paper discusses in detail the controversy between functional and organic causes of mental disease. These concepts evolved taking into account psychological factors and also the response of the uninjured parts of the nervous system to trauma of various kinds.

Techniques for nothingness: Debate over the comparability of hypnosis and Zen in early-twentieth-century Japan

This paper explores a debate that took place in Japan in the early twentieth century over the comparability of hypnosis and Zen. The debate was among the first exchanges between psychology and Buddhism in Japan, and it cast doubt on previous assumptions that a clear boundary existed between the two fields. In the debate, we find that contemporaries readily incorporated ideas from psychology and Buddhism to reconstruct the experiences and concepts of hypnosis and Buddhist nothingness. The resulting new theories and techniques of nothingness were fruits of a fairly fluid boundary between the two fields. The debate, moreover, reveals that psychology tried to address the challenges and possibilities posed by religious introspective meditation and intuitive experiences in a positive way. In the end, however, psychology no longer regarded them as viable experimental or psychotherapeutic tools but merely as particular subjective experiences to be investigated and explained.

[May 68 as seen by the elderly]

May 68 remains etched in everybody's mind. Fifty years on, many memories remain vivid and those who lived through this turbulent period. Yesterday's adults, today's senior citizens, share their testimonies.

The 'Compleat Physician' and Experimentation in Medicines: Everard Maynwaring (c.1629-1713) and the Restoration Debate on Medical Practice in London

Restoration London saw a wave of publications by physicians advocating that the 'compleat physician' should be one who experimented and produced his own medicines. Only thus, they argued, could the medical hierarchy be restored and medical authority re-established on a defensible basis. This article seeks to explain the context for this unusual approach, and why it failed to attract mainstream physicians by the end of the century, by considering the sixty-year career of one of its leading advocates, Everard Maynwaring (c.1629-1713), a prolific medical author, and what his own failure to enter the medical establishment may show about the problems inherent in this model for the physician. A university-trained gentleman physician who converted to chymical medicine c.1660, Maynwaring published learned and relatively unpolemical texts to persuade both medical and lay audiences of the superiority of experimental medicine as a mode of learned practice, yet could not easily reconcile this with the advocacy and sale of his own chymical medicines (especially as he focused increasingly on a small group of 'universal medicines') without being branded an 'empirick'. Fragmentary evidence regarding his career suggests he became increasingly marginalised, and as an old man was reduced to advertising his cures like the 'empiricks' from whom he had sought to distance both himself and physicians in general.

Unexpected healers: Chinese medicine in the age of global migration (Lima and California, 1850-1930)

The massive waves of Chinese migrants arriving in California and Lima in the second half of the nineteenth century played a crucial role in expanding Chinese medicine in both settings. From the late 1860s on, herbalists expanded their healing system beyond their ethnic community, transforming Chinese medicine into one of the healing practices most widely adopted by the local population. This article uses a comparative approach to examine the diverging trajectories of Chinese healers in Peru and the USA, as well as the social and political factors that determined how this foreign medical knowledge adapted to its new environments.

"The Theory was Beautiful Indeed": Rise, Fall and Circulation of Maximizing Methods in Population Genetics (1930-1980)

Describing the theoretical population geneticists of the 1960s, Joseph Felsenstein reminisced: "our central obsession was finding out what function evolution would try to maximize. Population geneticists used to think, following Sewall Wright, that mean relative fitness, W, would be maximized by natural selection" (Felsenstein 2000). The present paper describes the genesis, diffusion and fall of this "obsession", by giving a biography of the mean fitness function in population genetics. This modeling method devised by Sewall Wright in the 1930s found its heyday in the late 1950s and early 1960s, in the wake of Motoo Kimura's and Richard Lewontin's works. It seemed a reliable guide in the mathematical study of deterministic effects (the study of natural selection in populations of infinite size, with no drift), leading to powerful generalizations presenting law-like properties. Progress in population genetics theory, it then seemed, would come from the application of this method to the study of systems with several genes. This ambition came to a halt in the context of the influential objections made by the Australian mathematician Patrick Moran in 1963. These objections triggered a controversy between mathematically- and biologically-inclined geneticists, with affected both the formal standards and the aims of population genetics as a science. Over the course of the 1960s, the mean fitness method withered with the ambition of developing the deterministic theory. The mathematical theory became increasingly complex. Kimura re-focused his modeling work on the theory of random processes; as a result of his computer simulations, Lewontin became the staunchest critic of maximizing principles in evolutionary biology. The mean fitness method then migrated to other research areas, being refashioned and used in evolutionary quantitative genetics and behavioral ecology.

Between Charcot and Bernheim: The debate on hypnotism in fin-de-siècle Italy

In the late 1870s, a small group of Italian psychiatrists became interested in hypnotism in the wake of the studies conducted by the French neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot. Eager to engage in hypnotic research, these physicians referred to the scientific authority of French and German scientists in order to overcome the scepticism of the Italian medical community and establish hypnotism as a research subject based on Charcot's neuropathological model. In the following years, French studies on hypnotism continued to exert a strong influence in Italy. In the mid 1880s, studies on hypnotic suggestion by the Salpêtrière and Nancy Schools of hypnotism gave further impetus to research and therapeutic experimentation and inspired the emergence of an interpretative framework that combined theories by both hypnotic schools. By the end of the decade, however, uncertainties had arisen around both hypnotic theory and the therapeutic use of hypnotism. These uncertainties, which were linked to the crisis of the neuropathological paradigm that had to a large extent framed the understanding of hypnotism in Italy and the theoretical disagreements among the psychiatrists engaged in hypnotic research, ultimately led to a decline in interest in hypnotism in Italy.

A dangerous method? The German discourse on hypnotic suggestion therapy around 1900

In the late nineteenth century, German-speaking physicians and psychiatrists intensely debated the benefits and risks of treatment by hypnotic suggestion. While practitioners of the method sought to provide convincing evidence for its therapeutic efficacy in many medical conditions, especially nervous disorders, critics pointed to dangerous side effects, including the triggering of hysterical attacks or deterioration of nervous symptoms. Other critics claimed that patients merely simulated hypnotic phenomena in order to appease their therapist. A widespread concern was the potential for abuses of hypnosis, either by giving criminal suggestions or in the form of sexual assaults on hypnotized patients. Official inquiries by the Prussian Minister for Religious, Educational and Medical Affairs in 1902 and 1906 indicated that relatively few doctors practised hypnotherapy, whereas the method was increasingly used by lay healers. Although the Ministry found no evidence for serious harm caused by hypnotic treatments, whether performed by doctors or by lay healers, many German doctors seem to have regarded hypnotic suggestion therapy as a problematic method and abstained from using it.

From transnational to regional magnetic fevers: The making of a law on hypnotism in late nineteenth-century Belgium

In May 1892, Belgium adopted a law on the exercise of hypnotism. The signing of the law constituted a temporary endpoint to six years of debate on the dangers and promises of hypnotism, a process of negotiation between medical doctors, members of parliament, legal professionals and lay practitioners. The terms of the debate were not very different from what happened elsewhere in Europe, where, since the mid 1880s, hypnotism had become an object of public concern. The Belgian law was nevertheless unique in its combined effort to regulate the use of hypnosis in public and private, for purposes of entertainment, research and therapy. My analysis shows how the making of the law was a process of negotiation in which local, national and transnational networks and allegiances each played a part. While the transnational atmosphere of moral panic had created a seedbed for the law, its eventual outlook owed much to the powerful lobby work of an essentially local network of lay magnetizers, and to the renown of Joseph Delbœuf, professor at the University of Liège, whose work in the field of hypnotism stimulated several liberal doctors and members of Parliament from the Liège region to defend a more lenient law.

A fragile assemblage: Mutant bird flu and the limits of risk assessment

This paper examines the recent public controversy sparked by the laboratory creation of a strain of highly pathogenic avian influenza transmissible among mammals. The contours of the controversy can be understood by tracking the assemblage of actors, institutions and devices gathered together in response to the governmental problem of how to manage emerging diseases. The grouping is tenuously held together by a shared commitment to the project of 'pandemic preparedness'. However, as the controversy unfolds, it becomes clear that the main actors involved do not share a common understanding of the problem to be addressed by pandemic preparedness, and the assemblage threatens to decompose. At the center of the dispute is the question of how to assess the risks and benefits of research in a field characterized by urgency and uncertainty.

Of patents and patent disputes: The TNFα patent files. Part 1: Humira

This article discusses the patent strategy underlying the world's best selling drug, AbbVie's Humira®. Despite a non-optimal starting position, AbbVie has established an extensive portfolio to fend off biosimilar competition. This article is the first part of a trilogy that discusses IP issues related to anti-Tumor Necrosis factor α (TNFα) biologics.

"Plants that Remind Me of Home": Collecting, Plant Geography, and a Forgotten Expedition in the Darwinian Revolution

In 1859, Harvard botanist Asa Gray (1810-1888) published an essay of what he called "the abstract of Japan botany." In it, he applied Charles Darwin's evolutionary theory to explain why strong similarities could be found between the flora of Japan and that of eastern North America, which provoked his famous debate with Louis Agassiz (1807-1873) and initiated Gray's efforts to secure a place for Darwinian biology in the American sciences. Notably, although the Gray-Agassiz debate has become one of the most thoroughly studied scientific debates, historians of science remain unable to answer one critical question: How was Gray able to acquire specimens from Japan? Making use of previously unknown archival materials, this article scrutinizes the institutional, instrumental, financial, and military settings that enabled Gray's collector, Charles Wright (1811-1885), to travel to Japan, as well as examine Wright's collecting practices in Japan. I argue that it is necessary to examine Gray's diagnosis of Japan's flora and the subsequent debate about it from the viewpoint of field sciences. The field-centered approach not only unveils an array of historical significances that have been overshadowed by the analytical framework of the Darwinian revolution and the reception of Darwinism, but also places a seemingly domestic incident in a transnational context.

Conservation Compromises: The MAB and the Legacy of the International Biological Program, 1964-1974

This article looks at the International Biological Program (IBP) as the predecessor of UNESCO's well-known and highly successful Man and the Biosphere Programme (MAB). It argues that international conservation efforts of the 1970s, such as the MAB, must in fact be understood as a compound of two opposing attempts to reform international conservation in the 1960s. The scientific framework of the MAB has its origins in disputes between high-level conservationists affiliated with the International Union for the Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources (IUCN) about what the IBP meant for the future of conservation. Their respective visions entailed different ecological philosophies as much as diverging sets of political ideologies regarding the global implementation of conservation. Within the IBP's Conservation Section, one group propagated a universal systems approach to conservation with a centralized, technocratic management of nature and society by an elite group of independent scientific experts. Within IUCN, a second group based their notion of environmental expert roles on a more descriptive and local ecology of resource mapping as practiced by UNESCO. When the IBP came to an end in 1974, both groups' ecological philosophies played into the scientific framework underlying the MAB's World Network or Biosphere Reserves. The article argues that it is impossible to understand the course of conservation within the MAB without studying the dynamics and discourses between the two underlying expert groups and their respective visions for reforming conservation.

From academic laboratory to the market: Disclosed and undisclosed narratives of commercialization

This paper examines how the Weizmann Institute of Science has been telling the story of the successful commercialization of a scientific invention, through its corporate communication channels, from the early 1970s to today. The paper aims to shed light on the transformation processes by which intellectual-property-based commercialization activities have become widely institutionalized in universities all over the world, and on the complexities, ambiguities and tensions surrounding this transition. We look at the story of the scientific invention of Copolymer-1 at the Weizmann Institute of Science and its licensing to Teva Pharmaceutical Industries, which subsequently developed the highly successful drug Copaxone for the treatment of multiple sclerosis. We argue that, in its tellings and retellings of the story of Copolymer-1, the Weizmann Institute has created narratives that serve to legitimize the institution of academic patenting in Israel.

David Ferrier's Experimental Localization of Cerebral Functions and the Anti-Vivisection Debate

While representing one of the most important developments in the knowledge of the brain, both for its theoretical advances and its medical consequences, the work of David Ferrier met with strong criticism from conservative circles in Victorian society. At the end of 19th century certain British neurologists and neurosurgeons – including Ferrier – faced vehement public attacks by those aristocrats who, under the banner of antivivisectionism and “natural theology”, expressed their fears of the reorganization of medicine into a scientific discipline. The debate that developed in Victorian society after these events led not only to the diffusion of Ferrier’s ideas and public recognition of the advanced neurosurgical practices that stemmed from his work, but also contributed to the affirmation of the medical community in the scientific world of the time.

On the Function, Utility, and Fragility of the Nose: Early Modern Patients and Their Surgeons

This paper presents how rhinoplasty as a surgical technique with a particular social impact developed, and how motivated patients and courageous surgeons contributed to the process before Gaspare Tagliacozzi published his seminal work De curtorum chirurgia in 1597. The few sources that provide evidence of people having their noses reconstructed enable us to understand how this technique gradually spread across Europe from the south of Italy northwards. They also give information about the fate of some individual patients and their surgeons. While patients considered rhinoplasty a painful but worthwhile procedure, liberating them from having to wear a prosthesis, scholars’ and physicians’ opinions on the subject were polarized.

Soups and Sparks Revisited John Eccles’ Path from the War on Electrical Transmission to Mental Sparks

In the famous debate whether neurons communicate via chemical mediators or electrical signals, Henry Dale and Otto Loewi mounted powerful evidence on the mediation of nervous activity by chemical transmitters, while John Eccles led the campaign for the electrophysiologists. Eventually, Eccles converted to chemical transmission, when he identified excitatory and inhibitory postsynaptic potentials initiated by the release of chemical neurotransmitters in the synaptic cleft. This well-known episode from the history of neurophysiology counts as a rare instance of philosophy of science advancing scientific research, because the philosopher Karl Popper had encouraged Eccles to theorize an experiment proving the falsity of his own interpretation – according to Popper’s philosophy of science progressing by falsification. The paper shows how Eccles’ intellectual mobilization was grounded in a series of geographical moves, technological adaptations and re-arrangements of his group. This massive travel of people, ideas, instruments, and techniques mediated between the contradictory views, long before Popper kindled Eccles to reflect about the conflicting paradigms and the new theorizing did hardly change his experimental practice. Popper’s immediate effect was a critical and reflexive distance that enabled Eccles to present his evidence more persuasively, as can be shown from archival sources. The exchanges between Eccles and Popper thus shaped the philosophy of falsification to a powerful strategy for writing science.

The Creativity of Natural Selection? Part I: Darwin, Darwinism, and the Mutationists

This is the first of a two-part essay on the history of debates concerning the creativity of natural selection, from Darwin through the evolutionary synthesis and up to the present. Here I focus on the mid-late nineteenth century to the early twentieth, with special emphasis on early Darwinism and its critics, the self-styled "mutationists." The second part focuses on the evolutionary synthesis and some of its critics, especially the "neutralists" and "neo-mutationists." Like Stephen Gould, I consider the creativity of natural selection to be a key component of what has traditionally counted as "Darwinism." I argue that the creativity of natural selection is best understood in terms of (1) selection initiating evolutionary change, and (2) selection being responsible for the presence of the variation it acts upon, for example by directing the course of variation. I consider the respects in which both of these claims sound non-Darwinian, even though they have long been understood by supporters and critics alike to be virtually constitutive of Darwinism.

The Accuracy of Ancient Cartography Reassessed: The Longitude Error in Ptolemy’s Map

This essay seeks to explain the most glaring error in Ptolemy’s geography: the greatly exaggerated longitudinal extent of the known world as shown on his map. The main focus is on a recent hypothesis that attributes all responsibility for this error to Ptolemy’s adoption of the wrong value for the circumference of the Earth. This explanation has challenging implications for our understanding of ancient geography: it presupposes that before Ptolemy there had been a tradition of high-accuracy geodesy and cartography based on Eratosthenes’ measurement of the Earth. The essay argues that this hypothesis does not stand up to scrutiny. The story proves to be much more complex than can be accounted for by a single-factor explanation. A more careful analysis of the evidence allows us to assess the individual contribution to Ptolemy’s error made by each character in this story: Eratosthenes, Ptolemy, ancient surveyors, and others. As a result, a more balanced and well-founded assessment is offered: Ptolemy’s reputation is rehabilitated in part, and the delusion of high-accuracy ancient cartography is dispelled.

Dobzhansky and Montagu's Debate on Race: The Aftermath

Dobzhansky and Montagu debated the use and validity of the term "race" over a period of decades. They failed to reach an agreement, and the "debate" has continued to the present. The ms contains an account of the debate to the present. This essay is part of a Special Issue, Revisiting Garland Allen's Views on the History of the Life Sciences in the Twentieth Century.

[About a quarrel concerning the artificial production of iron. The differences between Nicolas Lémery and his son, Louis]

In the early eighteenth century, a quarrel developed between the chemists at the Académie royale des sciences. They discussed the question if it were possible or not to make artificially some iron from the combustion of vegetal organisms. Étienne-François Geoffroy defended the thesis resting on certain alchemical texts, but Louis Lémery, Nicolas’ son, refused it in the name of a mechanistic conception of chemical operations. Louis Lémery also had to oppose the hypothesis emitted by his father who preferred to admit that the test of the magnet, which was used to reveal the presence of fragments of iron into the ashes, was not convincing. He thought that other substances than iron could be attracted by the magnet. Louis thus had to reject the positions of his father, the latter did not seem for him to have a rather vigorous position against the allusions to alchemical writings and in favour of the strictly mechanistic theories.

[Pierre Pomet’s opinion on Lemery revealed by the project of a second edition of his General History of Drugs, in 1699 ]

General History of Drugs was first published in 1694 by Pierre Pomet, as a big in-folio volume, illustrated by more than 400 engraved figures. It was a very expensive book. In 1698-1699, just after the publication of the Universal Treaty on Simple Drugs by Lemery, Pomet prepared a new edition in-8°, less expensive. Unfortunately, it was not ready for publication when Pomet died in 1699. Only 208 pages were preprint, but together with manuscript mentions written on the exemplar gathered by BIU Santé, pôle Pharmacie, they were sufficient to prove that Pomet deeply felt that Lemery had committed plagiarism, copying even some errors he had included in his first edition.

[Women's complaint leadership in the Causa Kleinwächter. A contribution to patient history of the Innsbruck maternity hospital]

On the basis of the Innsbruck Maternity Clinic this paper deals with the individual and collective worlds of experience of obstetric patients. However, not only the patient's view on the proceedings in this specific medical space is being reconstructed, also the prevailing conventions surrounding the treatment of pregnant, parturient and puerperal patients serving as clinical material in obstetric research and education are critically scrutinised. At the centre of this paper stands Dr. Ludwig Kleinwächter's period of duty, who acted as professor for obstetrics and gynaecology in Innsbruck between 1877 and 1881. During this period numerous conflicts regarding the treatment of patients are documented. Concerned about the good reputation of the Maternity Clinic, the Tyrolean State Committee, as the Clinic's provider, tried to solve the crisis. The existing letters of complaint and protocols do not only give a voice to the women concerned, but also to the medical professions as well as the local political representatives involved.

[An interest group in the Haina Hospital against the anatomic dissection. Actors and their protest readiness against organizational expectations]

Between 1839 and 1853 several petitions have been addressed by inmates of the Haina hospital (Hesse, Germany) in order to save them from being transferred to the Anatomical Institute of the University of Marburg for post mortem dissection. In 1855, exemptions were granted in certain cases. Initially, the petitioners' strategies of argumentation and procedure have been analysed; then--referring to the application being sent in December 1847 and signed by 30 persons--the focus goes to the formation of this group and their opportunities for action. As a result it can be stated that inmates being physically ill or impaired or with impeded visual sensory perception tried to withstand unsuitable restrictions of their liberty of action as well as their personal rights induced by the routines of every-day hospital life. Guiltless for depending on public assistance they were not willing to accept unjustified curtailing of their personal and moral integrity. The attempts of being saved from anatomical dissection are part of the inmates' self-assertion.

Socrates’ Questions: A Focus for Nursing

This column focuses on the philosophical dialogue originated by Socrates. Six questions that Socrates would ask the ancient Greeks are explored in discussing a book written by Phillips entitled Six Questions of Socrates. These questions were: What is virtue? What is moderation? What is justice? What is good? What is courage? What is piety? A human becoming perspective is used as a lens to view the discussion on these questions and the question is posed, “What would it be like to frame discussions on health and quality of life around Socrates’ questions?” Parse’s teaching-learning processes are presented as a means of creating an environment where dialogue on these questions can occur.

Natural history and the formation of the human being: Kant on active forces

In his 1785-review of the Ideen zur Philosophie der Geschichte der Menschheit, Kant objects to Herder's conception of nature as being imbued with active forces. This attack is usually evaluated against the background of Kant's critical project and his epistemological concern to caution against the "metaphysical excess" of attributing immanent properties to matter. In this paper I explore a slightly different reading by investigating Kant's pre-critical account of creation and generation. The aim of this is to show that Kant's struggle with the forces of matter has a long history and revolves around one central problem: that of how to distinguish between the non-purposive forces of nature and the intentional powers of the mind. Given this history, the epistemic stricture that Kant's critical project imposes on him no longer appears to be the primary reason for his attack on Herder. It merely aggravates a problem that Kant has been battling with since his earliest writings.

L'Ennemi de la Mort, the fight against the fevers'realm

The plot of the Ennemi de la Mort, published in 1908, one year after the death of the author Eugne Le Roy, is briefly presented: in 1820, the young practitioner Daniel Charbonniere, who is of Huguenot origin, comes home to the French "Double"-region in Dordogne. For a while, he is enticed by his cousin Minna de Lege, having saved her life. But, as Charbonniere thinks that their inequality of wealth is a barrier, he disregards her desire, which leads the very devout cousin to marry the nephew of her spiritual adviser. Daniel Charbonniere shows himself a disinterested physician, dedicated to the ill peasants suffering from malaria caused by the waters of the Double marshes. He aims to obtain the dry draining of these pools., With the help of a mayor and a priest, the physician also distributes inoculation against poxes and, otherwise, saves the life of a young lady, who later on becomes his companion. Confronted with charlatanry and the hostility of the landlords owning the pools, Daniel Charbonniere is beaten up by the peasants. Dispossessed by his very embittered cousin Minna, the physician goes to live with his wife and children in a decrepit sheep shelter. The persecutions go on and the peasants, instigated by the clergymen, murder Daniel's wet nurse and profane his ancestor's tombs. He ends his life in loneliness. The character of the physician is then analyzed more thoroughly ; under the aspect of his convictions and his humanistic engagement, in the name of which he doesn't accept any accommodation with a wealth-driven society, Charbonniere appears as a freethinker and a very indulgent practitioner, a scientist and a wholehearted mind shaped by the Enlightenment's spirit. In appendix to this analysis follows the rapid description of a litigation, which occurred in 1862 in the village of Les Riceys (Aube district), about a pool, of which Dr. Gabiot, the physician in charge of the epidemics, struggled to obtain the dry draining, in order to eradicate typhoid fever and dysentery. This practitioner stumbled upon the local public authorities, and, despite the support of the prefect, lost his fight.

Basic sanitation policy in Brazil: discussion of a path

This article demonstrates that the position of dominance enjoyed by state sanitation companies dictates the public policy decision-making process for sanitation in Brazil. These companies' hegemony is explained here through the analysis of a path that generated political and economic incentives that have permitted its consolidation over time. Through the content analysis of the legislation proposed for the sector and the material produced by the stakeholders involved in the approval of new regulations for the sector in 2007, the study identifies the main sources of incentive introduced by the adoption of the National Sanitation Plan, which explain certain structural features of the current sanitation policy and its strong capacity to withstand the innovations proposed under democratic rule.

Feyerabend, truth, and relativisms: Footnotes to the Italian debate

There is a substantial literature on Feyerabend's relativism-including a few papers in this collection-but fewer specific studies of the ways that his writings and ideas have been taken up among the non-academic public. This is odd, given his obvious interest in the lives and concerns of persons who were not 'intellectuals'-a term that, for him, had a pejorative ring to it. It is also odd, given the abundance of evidence of how Feyerabend's relativism played a role in a specific national and cultural context-namely, contemporary Italian debates about relativism. This paper offers a study of how Feyerabend's ideas have been deployed by Italian intellectuals and cultural commentators-including the current Pope-and critically assesses them.

[A giant field of death: medical and scientific controversies about the cholera morbus epidemic of 1855]

The article examines the cholera morbus epidemic that afflicted the province of Pernambuco, Brazil, in 1855, focusing on the medical and scientific controversies about how the disease spread, which split medical opinion into two camps: contagion and infection. Documents and reports produced by the Society of Medicine of Pernambuco and the General Public Health Board were analyzed, based on which it was possible to describe the official medical and sanitation program, involving engineers, scientists, and physicians, designed to plan a salubrious city - a model of civilization that combined redeveloping the urban space and disseminating new habits amongst the local people. It is essentially an exercise in observing a science and a society as they take shape.

Professional Resistance in Social Work: Counterpractice Assemblages

The goal of this article is to deepen understanding of the concept of professional resistance. Studies show that social workers in various parts of the world are increasingly confronted with regulations, programs, and policies that challenge their ability to carry out their professional mission in an ethical manner. Social workers may also find themselves under the pressure of periodic retrenchment resulting from budgetary constraints and subjected to worsening working conditions and threats of wage or social benefit reduction. Therefore, it is not surprising that social workers are sometimes required to engage in actions to oppose these negative realities or, in other words, to practice professional resistance. However, despite its growing relevance, the term "professional resistance" remains both theoretically obscure and marginal to social work practice. This article traces the presence of the concept in social work history, examines divergent uses of the concept in social work literature, introduces theoretical perspectives that may help practitioners enlarge their professional repertoire, provides concrete cases of resistance in different contexts, and finally proposes some paths to professional resistance.

[Communication and mental health: a discursive analysis of posters of the National Anti-Asylum Campaign Movement in Brazil]

The article analyzes two posters that with the same slogan - "Asylums nevermore" - promote National Anti-Asylum Day. The analysis was based on principles of the symptomatology of social discourse, articulating analytical concepts and practices arising from the French School and the pragmatic dimension of discourse analysis. The results revealed affirmation strategies of the movement for the qualification and exacerbation of the issues of the enunciation and other enunciators, namely political actors of the anti-asylum movement and their allies. It also reveals the attempt to disqualify competitive discourse, especially that which discloses the serious problems of its institutional models, but also by juxtaposing the positive presence of the issuers and enunciators of the posters.

[In process.]

Whoever turns to the history of photosynthesis research in the twentieth century is soon confronted with the fact that one of its most exciting periods, the years from 1938 to 1955 (and even beyond), was in large part overshadowed by a bitter controversy in which many of the leading scientists in the field were involved: the dispute on the minimal quantum requirement - or, its inverse: the maximum quantum yield - of photosynthesis. On the one side was Otto H. WARBURG (1883 -1970), who, in 1923, had found that 4-5 light quanta were required for one molecule of oxygen; and who would never accept any other value. On the other side were a number of highly renowned American photosynthesis researchers, among others Robert EMERSON (1903-1959), James FRANCK (1882-1964) and Hans GAFFRON (1902-1979), who contested this value and argued, instead, that 8-12 light quanta were required for one molecule oxygen. This value is still accepted today. In this paper, the course of the controversy is reconstructed on the basis of numerous documents and correspondences that so far have not received much attention. The historically contingent factors will be analyzed that made this controversy so atrocious; however, I will argue that the dispute was not primarily about reputation and glory but in large parts driven by the keen interest of the scientific community to solve a difficult research question - notwiith standing the fact that WARBURG failed to comply with scientific conventions of methodical transparency and mutual.

[Anarchists, Assassins and Revolutionaries. The Psychopathologization of "Political Criminals" between 1880 and 1920]

"Political criminals" of the early 20th century were adjudged to be psychopaths, a term which was generally accompanied by a negative moral judgement. However, other more positive appraisals were also made at this time. These contradictory moral judgements by psychiatrists expose the need for an examination of the historical development of concepts, traditions and moral debates associated with political criminals (anarchists, assassins, revolutionaries). This will be undertaken in the context of psychiatry/ criminology, security (and surveillance) policy as well as culture and the arts in German-speaking countries from 1880 to the early 1920s.

[In process.]

Two of the most important life scientists in the GDR were the botanist, plant biochemist and pharmacist Kurt MOTHES (1900-1983) and the geneticist and plant breeder Hans STUBBE (1902-1989). Both started their successful careers during the period of NS dictatorship. MOTHES was a full professor of botany at the University of K6nigsberg from 1935 to 1945. After working at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Plant Breeding Research in Mincheberg and at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Biology in Berlin-Dahlem, STUBBE oversaw the establishment of a Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Crop Plant Research near Vienna in 1943, which was moved to Stecklenberg in the Harz Mountains in 1945 and later to Gatersleben. While MOTHEs was being held as a Soviet prisoner of war from 1945 to 1949, STUBBE was able to set up his institute in Gatersleben in the eastern part of Germany and held influential positions at Martin Luther University in Halle (Saale) as a professor for genetics and as the founding dean of the Faculty of Agriculture. After his release from war captivity, MOTHES, with STUBBE'S support, was able to continue his research at STUBBE'S institute in Gatersleben as the head of the Department for Chemical Physiology. There MOTHES was offered espe- cially favourable conditions by East German standards which led him to turn down other job offers, like the position of professor of botany at the University of Leipzig which was vacant at the time. In addition, MOTHES was also of- fered teaching opportunities in the Faculty of Natural Sciences at the University of Halle, again thanks to STUBBE'S support. In 1951 STUBBE became a founding member and president of the German Academy of Agricultural Sciences at Berlin, and in 1954 MOTHEs became president of the German Academy of Sciences Leopoldina. Both were also influential members of the German Academy of Sciences at Berlin (later the GDR's Academy of Sciences). This article investigates how their collaboration developed into an ever-increasing competitiveness which came to a head as an embroiled dispute resulting from differences in scientific and scientific policy views. In the process a battle was fought over research resources so that, what was at first an apparently personal quarrel, affected the course of research promotion at an institutional level in the area of life sciences in the GDR. Despite several attempts at mediation, old age finally forced the adversaries to put aside their differences.