The James Lind Library: explaining and illustrating the evolution of fair tests of medical treatments

The James Lind Library (www.jameslindlibrary.org) has been established to improve public and professional general knowledge about fair tests of treatments in healthcare and their history. Its foundation was laid ten years ago at the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh, and its administrative centre is in the College's Sibbald Library, one of the most important collections of historic medical manuscripts, papers and books in the world. The James Lind Library is a website that introduces visitors to the principles of fair tests of treatments, with a series of short, illustrated essays, which are currently available in English, Arabic, Chinese, French, Portuguese, Russian and Spanish. A 100-page book-- Testing Treatments--is now available free through the website, both in English and in Arabic and Spanish translations. To illustrate the evolution of ideas related to fair tests of treatments from 2000 BC to the present, the James Lind Library contains key passages and images from manuscripts, books and journal articles, many of them accompanied by commentaries, biographies, portraits and other relevant documents and images, including audio and video files. New material is being added to the website continuously, as relevant new records are identified and as methods for testing treatments evolve. A multinational, multilingual editorial team oversees the development of the website, which currently receives tens of thousands of visitors every month.

Literarisiertes Leben und gelebte Literatur - Interferenzen von Autobiographie, Briefkultur und galantem Roman um 1700

Der Beitrag untersucht Interferenzen von Literatur und Leben in höfischen Selbstzeugnissen um 1700. Am Beispiel einer autobiographischen Schlüsselerzählung von Aurora von Königsmarck wird zum einen gezeigt, wie die eigene Lebensgeschichte literarisch überformt in einer typischen galanten Erzählung dargeboten wird. An einem zweiten Beispiel, dem Briefwechsel zwischen Sophie Dorothea von Hannover und Graf Philipp von Königsmarck, lässt sich zum anderen erkennen, dass eben diese literarischen Muster aus dem Bereich der Galanterie wiederum Vorbilder für ganz reale Lebensentwürfe werden konnten. Der galante Diskurs um 1700 erweist sich als ein Diskurs, der der Verwischung der Grenzen zwischen Literatur und Leben Vorschub leistet. Dabei verstärken sich die selbstreflexiven Züge des frühneuzeitlichen Rollen-Ichs, was einerseits Handlungsspielräume neu eröffnet, andererseits von den Diskursteilnehmern eine komplexere Form von Fremd- und Selbstbeobachtung erfordert und sich deshalb als riskant erweist.

Prospects for measuring the gravitational free-fall of antihydrogen with emulsion detectors

The main goal of the AEgIS experiment at CERN is to test the weak equivalence principle for antimatter. AEgIS will measure the free-fall of an antihydrogen beam traversing a moir'e deflectometer. The goal is to determine the gravitational acceleration with an initial relative accuracy of 1% by using an emulsion detector combined with a silicon μ-strip detector to measure the time of flight. Nuclear emulsions can measure the annihilation vertex of antihydrogen atoms with a precision of ~ 1–2 μm r.m.s. We present here results for emulsion detectors operated in vacuum using low energy antiprotons from the CERN antiproton decelerator. We compare with Monte Carlo simulations, and discuss the impact on the AEgIS project.

A new application of emulsions to measure the gravitational force on antihydrogen

We propose to build and operate a detector based on the emulsion film technology for the measurement of the gravitational acceleration on antimatter, to be performed by the AEgIS experiment (AD6) at CERN. The goal of AEgIS is to test the weak equivalence principle with a precision of 1% on the gravitational acceleration g by measuring the vertical position of the annihilation vertex of antihydrogen atoms after their free fall while moving horizontally in a vacuum pipe. With the emulsion technology developed at the University of Bern we propose to improve the performance of AEgIS by exploiting the superior position resolution of emulsion films over other particle detectors. The idea is to use a new type of emulsion films, especially developed for applications in vacuum, to yield a spatial resolution of the order of one micron in the measurement of the sag of the antihydrogen atoms in the gravitational field. This is an order of magnitude better than what was planned in the original AEgIS proposal.