McCoy and Clarke : their dispute over the age of Australia's black coal

From 1847 until his death in 1899, Professor Frederick McCoy, palaeontologist in Melbourne, maintained a war of words in the scientific literature with Rev. William Clarke, geologist in Sydney, concerning the age of Australia’s black coal deposits. McCoy was convinced that the coals were all of Mesozoic age and Clarke, during the period from 1847 to his death in 1878, maintained equally vehemently that they were Palaeozoic. In fact, Clarke was correct in placing the New South Wales coals in the Palaeozoic, and McCoy’s placing of the Victorian coals in the Mesozoic was also correct. The two men were both particularly stubborn and neither would admit that they might have been arguing about coals of differing ages. Both stood unbendingly by their Northern Hemisphere, European backgrounds, and neither would change their views in the face of new evidence from the Colonies.

"I could see, and yet, mon, I could na` see" : William Macewen, the agnosias, and brain surgery

Two little noticed cases in which William Macewen used symptoms of visual agnosia to plan brain surgery on the angular gyrus are reviewed and evaluated. Following a head injury, Macewen’s first patient had an immediate and severe visual object agnosia that lasted for about 2 weeks. After that he gradually became homicidal and depressed and it was for those symptoms that Macewen first saw him, some 11 months after the accident. From his examination, Macewen concluded that the agnosia clearly indicated a lesion in “the posterior portion of the operculum or in the angular gyrus.” When he removed parts of the internal table that had penetrated those structures the homicidal impulses disappeared. Macewen’s second patient was seen for a chronic middle ear infection and, although neither aphasic nor deaf, was ‘word deaf.’ Slightly later he became ‘psychically blind’ as well. Macewen suspected a cerebral abscess pressing on both the angular gyrus and the first temporal convolution. A large subdural abscess was found there and the symptoms disappeared after it was treated. The patients are discussed and Macewen’s positive results analysed in the historical context of the dispute over the proposed role of the angular gyrus as the visual centre.

Localisation and William Macewen`s early brain surgery part I: the controversy

Neurosurgery for the removal of brain tumours based on localising signs is usually dated from the 1884 operation by Bennett and Godlee. However, within weeks of that operation claims were made on behalf of William Macewen, the Glasgow surgeon, to have been the real pioneer of such surgery. According to Macewen's protagonists, he had conducted seven similar operations earlier than Bennett and Godlee and, in a notable 1888 address, Macewen described these seven pre-1884 cases and a number of others operated on after 1884. This paper, which is in two parts, contains an evaluation of the claims made for the priority of Macewen's pre-1884 operations. Part I deals mainly with Macewen's work in fields other than brain surgery that are relevant to it and sets out the facts of the controversy. It begins with a brief biography of Macewen, describes his pioneering work in antiseptic and aseptic surgery, his work on osteotomy and bone regeneration, and his use in brain surgery of the knowledge so gained. Part I concludes with an examination of the battle waged in the newspapers between Macewen's and Bennett's and Godlee's supporters, and of previously unpublished correspondence between Macewen himself, David Ferrier and Hughes Bennett. The primary records of the patients on whom Macewen operated, together with other materials relevant to the controversy, are examined in Part II.

Refuge in the land of liberty : France and its refugees, from the revolution to the end of asylum, 1787-1939

France has a long tradition of asylum for refugees. Since the Revolution, this has made it the land of liberty (pays de la liberte) and the land of asylum (la terre d'asile)." "In practice, responses have been shaped less by principle than by political and social conditions. Various refugee movements - from the late eighteenth-century Lowlands, to Spanish and Italian liberals in the 1820s, Polish nationalists in the 1830s. German social revolutionaries of 1848-9, anti-Bolsheviks from the Russian Revolution, Christians from the former Ottoman Empire, and Jews from Nazi Germany - have met with mixed responses, which shifted uneasily between sympathy, principle, pragmatism, and open hostility." "This book examines the tensions between refugee rights and political responses to refugees, and between humanitarian concern for their plight and hostility to their imposition on the state. Increasingly punitive measures against refugees saw, in 1939, the end of asylum in the internment of republican exiles from the Spanish Civil War.