History of health, a valuable tool in public health

The aim of this article is to highlight the importance of the history of public health for public health research and practice itself. After summarily reviewing the current great vitality of the history of collective health oriented initiatives, we explain three particular features of the historical vantage point in public health, namely the importance of the context, the relevance of a diachronic attitude and the critical perspective. In order to illustrate those three topics, we bring up examples taken from three centuries of fight against malaria, the so called “re-emerging diseases” and the 1918 influenza epidemic. The historical approach enriches our critical perception of the social effects of initiatives undertaken in the name of public health, shows the shortcomings of public health interventions based on single factors and asks for a wider time scope in the assessment of current problems. The use of a historical perspective to examine the plurality of determinants in any particular health condition will help to solve the longlasting debate on the primacy of individual versus population factors, which has been particularly intense in recent times.

Recent Armenian Developments

The War has brought us into a close relation with Armenia. The annihilation of her people in 1915 and 1916 aroused universal sympathy. For the most of us Armenia, hitherto, had been relegated to a position of partial obscurity in the Near East. We were acquainted with the fact that they had suffered persecution beore at Turkish hands but an indifference born of unfamiliarity with her history, customs and people still continued with us. However much the gulf separating ourselves and these people has been narrowed by the war it is only by an actual journey into their life past and present that we can ever come into a full appreciation of a people who despite persecution and oppression are potentially fine citizens.

The Middle Ages in recent historical thought; selected topics.

Mode of access: Internet.

The Middle Ages in recent historical thought; selected topics.

Mode of access: Internet.

The Cambridge natural history,

Vols. 1, 2, 5-7, 9 reprinted 1922; v. 3, 1927; and vols. 4, 8, 10, 1923.

History and pathology of vaccination,

Vol. 2 contains reproductions of original title pages of ten of the essays.

A history of science,

Contains reference lists and notes.

A history of Sumer and Akkad; an account of the early races of Babylonia from prehistoric times to the foundation of the Babylonian monarchy,

Appendices: I. Recent explorations in Turkestan in their relation to the Sumerian problem. II. A chronological list of the kings and rulers of Sumer and Akkad.

Recent economic changes and their effect on the production and distribution of wealth and the well-being of society,

Mode of access: Internet.

The early English dissenters in the light of recent research (1550-1641).

I. History and criticism.--II. Illustrative documents.

Recent developments in European thought; essays arranged and ed.

"This volume, like its two predecessors ['The unity of western civilization' and 'Progress'] arises from a course of lectures delivered at a summer school at Woodbrooke, near Birmingham, in August, 1919."

The Cambridge natural history,

--VI. Insects, pt. II. Hymenoptera continued (Tubilifera and Aculeata), Coleoptera, Strepsiptera, Lepidotera, Diptera, Aphaniptera, Thysanoptera, Hemiptera, Anoplura. By David Sharp. 1901.--VII. Hemichordata, by S.F. Harmer. Ascidians and Amphioxus, by W.A. Herdman. Fishes (exclusive of th systematic account of Teleostei) by T.W. Bridge. Fishes (systematic account of Teleostei) by G.A. Bonlenger. 1904.--VIII. Amphibia and reptiles, by Hans Gadow. 1901.--IX. Birds, by A.H. Evans. 1900--X. Mammalia, by F.E. Beddard. 1902.

Phylogeny, molecular and fossil dating, and biogeographic history of Annonaceae and Myristicaceae (Magnoliales)

Annonaceae and Myristicaceae, the two largest families of Magnoliales, are pantropical groups of uncertain geographic history. The most recent morphological and molecular phylogenetic analyses identify the Asian-American genus Anaxagorea as sister to all other Annonaceae and the ambavioids, consisting of small genera endemic to South America, Africa, Madagascar, and Asia, as a second branch. However, most genera form a large clade in which the basal lines are African, and South American and Asian taxa are more deeply nested. Although it has been suggested that Anaxagorea was an ancient Laurasian line, present data indicate that this genus is basically South American. These considerations may mean that the family as a whole began its radiation in Africa and South America in the Late Cretaceous, when the South Atlantic was narrower, and several lines dispersed from Africa-Madagascar into Laurasia as the Tethys closed in the Tertiary. This scenario is consistent with the occurrence of annonaceous seeds in the latest Cretaceous of Nigeria and the Eocene of England and with molecular dating of the family. Based on distribution of putatively primitive taxa in Madagascar and derived taxa in Asia, it has been suggested that Myristicaceae had a similar history. Phylogenetic analyses of Myristicaceae, using morphology and several plastid regions, confirm that the ancestral area was Africa-Madagascar and that Asian taxa are derived. However, Myristicaceae as a whole show strikingly lower molecular divergence than Annonaceae, indicating either a much younger age or a marked slowdown in molecular evolution. The fact that the oldest diagnostic fossils of Myristicaceae are Miocene seeds might be taken as evidence that Myristicaceae are much younger than Annonaceae, but this is implausible in requiring transoceanic dispersal of their large, animal-dispersed seeds.

The state of history and the empire of metaphysics [Review]

One of the curious things about this challenging book is that its ostensible subject— the Saxon medical and political scientist Hermann Conring (1606–1681)— is not mentioned in the title. Constantin Fasolt argues that we cannot know what Conring really thought or meant in his writings, which means that his topic cannot be Conring as such and must instead be that which occludes our knowledge of him, the titular limits of history. Given that we do in fact learn a good deal about Conring from Fasolt’s book, we can only hope that the decapitation of its subject will be rectified in a subsequent edition, or perhaps by the restorative work of librarians putting together subject headings. And yet Fasolt’s decision is understandable, for Conring is indeed a stalking-horse for a much bigger quarry: historiography and the historical consciousness. By “history” Fasolt understands a way of imposing intelligibility on the world, which is founded on the twin assumptions that the past is gone and unchangeable, and that the meaning of texts can be determined by placing them in their historical contexts (ix). In challenging this mode of intelligibility, Fasolt is not attempting to improve professiona history—it’s already as good as it can be—but to displace it. He regards his work as a declaration of “independence from historical consciousness” (32). At the same time, Fasolt insists that he is not simply jumping from historiography to philosophy, or attempting to preempt history with ontology (37-39). That has been tried by Nietzsche and Heidegger, who have been tainted by Nazism (Fasolt thinks unfairly). It has also been attempted by modern philosophers from Gadamer to Foucault and Charles Taylor who, in failing to address the “violence” that its mode of intelligibility does to the world, have not succeeded in outflanking history. Perhaps, Fasolt wonders, it is only the personal experience of those who have been subject to this violence—the experience of those who have been subject to historical examination—that can break the spell of history. Fasolt’s disclaimer notwithstanding, in the course of these remarks I shall argue that he is indeed jumping from history to philosophy, or attempting to outflank history by subjecting it to a particular metaphysical understanding. I shall do so in part by sketching the recent intellectual history of this move—a historical examination that I hope inflicts as little violence as possible on Fasolt’s argument.