Mortality and morbidity in the city of Bern, Switzerland, 1805-1815 with special emphasis on infant, child and maternal deaths

This article contributes to the research on demographics and public health of urban populations of preindustrial Europe. The key source is a burial register that contains information on the deceased, such as age and sex, residence and cause of death. This register is one of the earliest compilations of data sets of individuals with this high degree of completeness and consistency. Critical assessment of the register's origin, formation and upkeep promises high validity and reliability. Between 1805 and 1815, 4,390 deceased inhabitants were registered. Information concerning these individuals provides the basis for this study. Life tables of Bern's population were created using different models. The causes of death were classified and their frequency calculated. Furthermore, the susceptibility of age groups to certain causes of death was established. Special attention was given to causes of death and mortality of newborns, infants and birth-giving women. In comparison to other cities and regions in Central Europe, Bern's mortality structure shows low rates for infants (q0=0.144) and children (q1-4=0.068). This could have simply indicated better living conditions. Life expectancy at birth was 43 years. Mortality was high in winter and spring, and decreased in summer to a low level with a short rise in August. The study of the causes of death was inhibited by difficulties in translating early 19th century nomenclature into the modern medical system. Nonetheless, death from metabolic disorders, illnesses of the respiratory system, and debilitation were the most prominent causes in Bern. Apparently, the worst killer of infants up to 12 months was the "gichteren", an obsolete German term for lethal spasmodic convulsions. The exact modern identification of this disease remains unclear. Possibilities such as infant tetanus or infant epilepsy are discussed. The maternal death rate of 0.72% is comparable with values calculated from contemporaneous sources. Relevance of childbed fever in the early 1800s was low. Bern's data indicate that the extent of deaths related to childbirth in this period is overrated. This research has an explicit interdisciplinary value for various fields including both the humanities and natural sciences, since information reported here represents the complete age and sex structure of a deceased population. Physical anthropologists can use these data as a true reference group for their palaeodemographic studies of preindustrial Central Europe of the late 18th and early 19th century. It is a call to both historians and anthropologists to use our resources to a better effect through combination of methods and exchange of knowledge.

National Values and Theatrical Values. The Battle of the Siege de Calais (1765)

This article underscores the complex relationship between national concerns and dramatic criticism by interrogating the role of theatre in the creation of a 'national culture' during the last few decades of the Ancien regime. The author focuses more specifically on the forms of patriotism proposed by Pierre-Laurent De Belloy, author of Le Siege de Calais, France's "first tragedy in which the nation is given the pleasure to take an interest in itself," as well as by his adversaries and his allies. The version of patriotism proffered by De Belloy - a 'fatherland' that he defines as both bourgeois and monarchical - renders problematic several aesthetic and political norms in place in 1765. The author thus responds modestly to one of the most essential questions posed by research on eighteenth-century political and cultural history: how did patriotism operate before the French Revolution?

A Robust Parser of Czech

Mr. Kubon's project was inspired by the growing need for an automatic, syntactic analyser (parser) of Czech, which could be used in the syntactic processing of large amounts of texts. Mr. Kubon notes that such a tool would be very useful, especially in the field of corpus linguistics, where creating a large-scale "tree bank" (a collection of syntactic representations of natural language sentences) is a very important step towards the investigation of the properties of a given language. The work involved in syntactically parsing a whole corpus in order to get a representative set of syntactic structures would be almost inconceivable without the help of some kind of robust (semi)automatic parser. The need for the automatic natural language parser to be robust increases with the size of the linguistic data in the corpus or in any other kind of text which is going to be parsed. Practical experience shows that apart from syntactically correct sentences, there are many sentences which contain a "real" grammatical error. These sentences may be corrected in small-scale texts, but not generally in the whole corpus. In order to be able to complete the overall project, it was necessary to address a number of smaller problems. These were; 1. the adaptation of a suitable formalism able to describe the formal grammar of the system; 2. the definition of the structure of the system's dictionary containing all relevant lexico-syntactic information, and the development of a formal grammar able to robustly parse Czech sentences from the test suite; 3. filling the syntactic dictionary with sample data allowing the system to be tested and debugged during its development (about 1000 words); 4. the development of a set of sample sentences containing a reasonable amount of grammatical and ungrammatical phenomena covering some of the most typical syntactic constructions being used in Czech. Number 3, building a formal grammar, was the main task of the project. The grammar is of course far from complete (Mr. Kubon notes that it is debatable whether any formal grammar describing a natural language may ever be complete), but it covers the most frequent syntactic phenomena, allowing for the representation of a syntactic structure of simple clauses and also the structure of certain types of complex sentences. The stress was not so much on building a wide coverage grammar, but on the description and demonstration of a method. This method uses a similar approach as that of grammar-based grammar checking. The problem of reconstructing the "correct" form of the syntactic representation of a sentence is closely related to the problem of localisation and identification of syntactic errors. Without a precise knowledge of the nature and location of syntactic errors it is not possible to build a reliable estimation of a "correct" syntactic tree. The incremental way of building the grammar used in this project is also an important methodological issue. Experience from previous projects showed that building a grammar by creating a huge block of metarules is more complicated than the incremental method, which begins with the metarules covering most common syntactic phenomena first, and adds less important ones later, especially from the point of view of testing and debugging the grammar. The sample of the syntactic dictionary containing lexico-syntactical information (task 4) now has slightly more than 1000 lexical items representing all classes of words. During the creation of the dictionary it turned out that the task of assigning complete and correct lexico-syntactic information to verbs is a very complicated and time-consuming process which would itself be worth a separate project. The final task undertaken in this project was the development of a method allowing effective testing and debugging of the grammar during the process of its development. The problem of the consistency of new and modified rules of the formal grammar with the rules already existing is one of the crucial problems of every project aiming at the development of a large-scale formal grammar of a natural language. This method allows for the detection of any discrepancy or inconsistency of the grammar with respect to a test-bed of sentences containing all syntactic phenomena covered by the grammar. This is not only the first robust parser of Czech, but also one of the first robust parsers of a Slavic language. Since Slavic languages display a wide range of common features, it is reasonable to claim that this system may serve as a pattern for similar systems in other languages. To transfer the system into any other language it is only necessary to revise the grammar and to change the data contained in the dictionary (but not necessarily the structure of primary lexico-syntactic information). The formalism and methods used in this project can be used in other Slavic languages without substantial changes.

The 'Philosophical paintings' of the Republic

En el presente artículo examino la apropiación platónica del lenguaje poético en República y sostengo que, a pesar de sus críticas a la poesía en los libros 3 y 10, el lenguaje poético está correctamente entrelazado dentro del tejido filosófico para pintar lo corrupto, lo feo y lo inmoral. En términos específicos, la adaptación platónica de diversos motivos poéticos e imágenes en República se vuelve más significativa si prestamos atención a Sócrates como un quasi-pintor en el diálogo e interpretamos sus imágenes filosóficas como una respuesta de la filosofía a las engañosas representaciones dramáticas de la poesía. De este modo, el arte de la pintura que, incluso es criticado en el libro 10 de República, en manos de Platón resulta una herramienta filosófica que le permite investigar la relación de nuestro mundo senso-perceptivo ordinario con el campo metafísico de las Ideas y el lugar de lo humano en él

The 'Philosophical paintings' of the Republic

En el presente artículo examino la apropiación platónica del lenguaje poético en República y sostengo que, a pesar de sus críticas a la poesía en los libros 3 y 10, el lenguaje poético está correctamente entrelazado dentro del tejido filosófico para pintar lo corrupto, lo feo y lo inmoral. En términos específicos, la adaptación platónica de diversos motivos poéticos e imágenes en República se vuelve más significativa si prestamos atención a Sócrates como un quasi-pintor en el diálogo e interpretamos sus imágenes filosóficas como una respuesta de la filosofía a las engañosas representaciones dramáticas de la poesía. De este modo, el arte de la pintura que, incluso es criticado en el libro 10 de República, en manos de Platón resulta una herramienta filosófica que le permite investigar la relación de nuestro mundo senso-perceptivo ordinario con el campo metafísico de las Ideas y el lugar de lo humano en él

The 'Philosophical paintings' of the Republic

En el presente artículo examino la apropiación platónica del lenguaje poético en República y sostengo que, a pesar de sus críticas a la poesía en los libros 3 y 10, el lenguaje poético está correctamente entrelazado dentro del tejido filosófico para pintar lo corrupto, lo feo y lo inmoral. En términos específicos, la adaptación platónica de diversos motivos poéticos e imágenes en República se vuelve más significativa si prestamos atención a Sócrates como un quasi-pintor en el diálogo e interpretamos sus imágenes filosóficas como una respuesta de la filosofía a las engañosas representaciones dramáticas de la poesía. De este modo, el arte de la pintura que, incluso es criticado en el libro 10 de República, en manos de Platón resulta una herramienta filosófica que le permite investigar la relación de nuestro mundo senso-perceptivo ordinario con el campo metafísico de las Ideas y el lugar de lo humano en él