Toxinology in Australia's colonial era: A chronology and perspective of human envenomation in 19th century Australia

The medical management of those envenomed by snakes, spiders and poisonous fish in Australia featured extensively in the writings 19th century doctors, expeditioners and anthropologists. Against the background of this introduced medical doctrine there already existed an extensive tradition of Aboriginal medical lore; techniques of heat treatment, suction, incision and the application of plant-derived pharmacological substances featured extensively in the management of envenomed victims. The application of a hair-string or grass-string ligature, suctioning of the bite-site and incision were practised in a variety of combinations. Such evolved independently of and pre-dated such practices, which were promoted extensively by immigrant European doctors in the late 19th century. Pacific scientific toxinology began in the 17th century with Don Diego de Prado y Tovar's 1606 account of ciguatera. By the end of the 19th century more than 30 papers and books had defined the natural history of Australian elapid poisoning. The medical management of snakebite in Australia was the focus of great controversy from 1860 to 1900. Dogmatic claims of the supposed antidote efficacy of intravenous ammonia by Professor G.B. Halford, and that of strychnine by Dr. Augustus Mueller, claimed mainstream medical attention. This era of potential iatrogenic disaster and dogma was brought to a conclusion by the objective experiments of Joseph Lauterer and Thomas Lane Bancroft in 1890 in Brisbane; and by those of C.J. Martin (from 1893) and Frank Tidswell (from 1898), both of Sydney. The modern era of Australian toxinology developed as a direct consequence of Calmette's discovery, in Paris in 1894, of immune serum, which was protective against snakebite. We review the key contributors and discoveries of toxinology in colonial Australia.

The vacuous concept of dignity

Rights talk dominates contemporary moral discourse. It is also having a growing impact on the development of legal principle and doctrine. One of the best known general arguments in support of rights-based moral theories is the one given by John Rawls, who claims that only rights-based theories take seriously the distinction between human beings; only they can be counted on to protect certain rights and interests that are so paramount that they are beyond the demands of net happiness (Rawls 1971). Charges and assertions of this nature have been extremely influential. After the Second World War, there was an immense increase in rights talk, both in the sheer volume of that talk and in the number of supposed rights being claimed. Rights doctrine has progressed a long way since its original modest aim of providing “a legitimization of … claims against tyrannical or exploiting regimes” (Benn 1978: 61). As Tom Campbell points out: The human rights movement is based on the need for a counter-ideology to combat the abuses and misuses of political authority by those who invoke, as a justification for their activities, the need to subordinate the particular interests of individuals to the general good (Campbell 1996: 13).

Exploring the influences of internal branding on employees' brand promise delivery

Internal branding is increasingly seen as a doctrine to ensure employees’ delivery of the brand promise by shaping employees’ brand attitudes and behaviours. However, few studies, if any, have been conducted to understand the internal branding process from the viewpoint of employees who are the end receivers. Therefore, this study aims at exploring employees’ perceptions toward the internal branding process. It identifies the relevant mechanisms and describes how internal branding affected service employees. The challenges of its success are uncovered and discussed. Finally, managerial implications and future research directions are provided.

The overlapping of legal concepts:a legal realist approach to the classification of private law

The thesis presented an overlapping analysis of private law institutions, in response to the arguments that law must be separated into discrete categories. The basis of this overlapping approach was the realist perspective, which emphasises the role of facts and outcomes as the starting point for legal analysis as opposed to legal principle or doctrine.

Brain, mind and consciousness in the history of neuroscience

From Platonic and Galenic roots, the first well developed ventricular theory of brain function is due to Bishop Nemesius, fourth century C.E. Although more interested in the Christian concept of soul, St. Augustine, too addressed the question of the location of the soul, a problem that has endured in various guises to the present day. Other notable contributions to ventricular psychology are the ninth century C.E. Arabic writer, Qusta ibn Lūqā, and an early European medical text written by the twelfth century C.E. author, Nicolai the Physician. By the time of Albertus Magnus, so-called medieval cell doctrine was a well-developed model of brain function. By the sixteenth century, Vesalius no longer understands the ventricles to be imaginary cavities designed to provide a physical basis for faculty psychology but as fluid-filled spaces in the brain whose function is yet to be determined

On realizing the principles of Gaudium et spes in a post-communist country: Searching for christian entrepreneurs and roots of individuals in Hungary at the time of globalization

Due to the communist regime in Hungary the values and principles of the Second Vatican Counsil could hardly achieve their goal in the region and the situation is almost the same even today. This paper examines two levels of society where the thoughts of Gaudium et spes might have appeared: we have explored that there are Christian companies existing about 15 years since the political transition in 1990 and we made a research among individuals in rural environment, how could they preserve their human wholeness described in GS, in other words, how could they keep their social, cultural, natural, religiuos and local roots amongst the consumer society that has been developped in Hungary at the time of capitalism. Regarding the Christian companies our research could produce a positive result: we have explored that although the Christian companies survayed hardly know the Church’s social doctrine, they live and operate according to it. At the same time in the realm of individuals we cannot tell good news of this kind. Most of the persons interviewed have already lost or are near to loose their roots, that is their human wholeness. Our final conclusion is that our hope for preserving even strenghtening the values of GS in the Hungarian society is in the communities, be it work communities, as John Paul II. mentioned in his encyclical Sollicitudo rei Socialis. The paper presents the details and conclusions of our researches.

Soft power as the new norm: How the Chinese-Russian strategic partnership (soft) balances American hegemony in an era of unipolarity

This study explores how great powers not allied with the United States formulate their grand strategies in a unipolar international system. Specifically, it analyzes the strategies China and Russia have developed to deal with U.S. hegemony by examining how Moscow and Beijing have responded to American intervention in Central Asia. The study argues that China and Russia have adopted a soft balancing strategy of to indirectly balance the United States at the regional level. This strategy uses normative capabilities such as soft power, alternative institutions and regionalization to offset the overwhelming material hardware of the hegemon. The theoretical and methodological approach of this dissertation is neoclassical realism. Chinese and Russian balancing efforts against the United States are based on their domestic dynamics as well as systemic constraints. Neoclassical realism provides a bridge between the internal characteristics of states and the environment which those states are situated. Because China and Russia do not have the hardware (military or economic power) to directly challenge the United States, they must resort to their software (soft power and norms) to indirectly counter American preferences and set the agenda to obtain their own interests. Neoclassical realism maintains that soft power is an extension of hard power and a reflection of the internal makeup of states. The dissertation uses the heuristic case study method to demonstrate the efficacy of soft balancing. Such case studies help to facilitate theory construction and are not necessarily the demonstrable final say on how states behave under given contexts. Nevertheless, it finds that China and Russia have increased their soft power to counterbalance the United States in certain regions of the world, Central Asia in particular. The conclusion explains how soft balancing can be integrated into the overall balance-of-power framework to explain Chinese and Russian responses to U.S. hegemony. It also suggests that an analysis of norms and soft power should be integrated into the study of grand strategy, including both foreign policy and military doctrine.

"Suffragettes of the Harem": The Evolution of Sympathy and the Afterlives of Sentimentality in American Feminist Orientalism, 1865-1920

This project examines narrative encounters in space identified as “harem,” produced by authors with biographical ties to the vanguard of the American Suffrage Movement. I regard these feminists’ circulations East, to the domestic space of the Other, as a hitherto unstudied, yet critical component of transnationalism in the history of U.S. Suffrage. This literary record also crucially reveals the extent to which sentimentality was plotted as a potential force for the reform of other cultures. An urge to sympathize denied in the space of the harem illustrates the colonial anxieties that subtended sentimentality’s prospective deployment beyond national borders. In five chapters on the work of Anna Leonowens, Susan Elston Wallace, Demetra Vaka Brown, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, and Edith Wharton, I examine how Suffrage-minded authors writing the harem strategically abandon an activist praxis of fellow feeling. Such a reluctance to transform sentimental literature into a colonial literature consequently informs that genre’s postbellum decline. The sentiments that run dry for American feminists in the harem additionally foreground the costly failures of Wilsonian Idealism, a doctrine that appropriated a discourse of sentimentality in order to script the United States’ expanded involvement in global affairs.

The Land of the Savior: Óscar Romero and the Reform of Agriculture

This study approaches Óscar Romero by attending to his intimate involvement in and concern for the problematic surrounding the reform of Salvadoran agriculture and the conflict over property and possession underlying it. In this study, I situate Romero in relation to the concentration of landholding and the production of landlessness in El Salvador over the course of the twentieth century, and I examine his participation in the longstanding societal and ecclesial debate about agrarian reform provoked by these realities. I try to show how close attention to agrarian reform and what was at stake in it can illumine not only the conflict that occasioned Romero’s martyrdom but the meaning of the martyrdom itself.

Understanding Romero’s involvement in the debate about agrarian reform requires sustained attention to how it takes its bearings from the line of thinking about property and possession for which Pope Leo XIII’s 1891 encyclical Rerum novarum stands as a new beginning. The enclyclical tradition developing out of Leo’s pontificate is commonly referred to as Catholic social doctrine or Catholic social teaching. Romero’s and the Church’s participation in the debate about agrarian reform in El Salvador is unintelligible apart from it.

What Romero and the encyclical tradition share, I argue, is an understanding of creation as a common gift, from which follows a distinctive construal of property and the demands of justice with respect to possessing it. On this view, property does not name, as it is often taken to mean, the enclosure of what is common for the exclusive use of its possessors—something to be held by them over and against others. Rather, property and everything related to its holding derive from the claim that creation is a gift given to human creatures in common. The acknowledgement of creation as a common gift gives rise to what I describe in this study as a politics of common use, of which agrarian reform is one expression.

In Romero’s El Salvador, those who took the truth of creation as common gift seriously—those who spoke out against or opposed the ubiquity of the concentration of land and who clamored for agrarian reform so that the landless and land-poor could have access to land to cultivate for subsistence—suffered greatly as a consequence. I argue that, among other things, their suffering shows how, under the conditions of sin and violence, those who work to ensure that others have access to what is theirs in justice often risk laying down their lives in charity. In other words, they witness to the way that God’s work to restore creation has a cruciform shape. Therefore, while the advocacy for agrarian reform begins with the understanding of creation as common gift, the testimony to this truth in word and in deed points to the telos of the gift and the common life in the crucified and risen Lord in which it participates

Common Bound: The Small Groups of Methodism

The system of small groups John Wesley established to promote a proper life of discipleship in early Methodist converts was, in many respects, the strength of the Methodist movement. Those who responded to Wesley’s initial invitation to “flee the wrath to come” were organized into large gatherings called “societies,” which were then subdivided into smaller bands, class meetings, select societies, and penitent bands. The smaller groups gave Wesley the opportunity, through a system of appointed leaders, to keep track of the spiritual progress of every member in his movement, which grew to tens of thousands by the time of his death in 1791. As Methodism shifted from renewal movement to institutional church in the nineteenth century, however, growth slowed, and participation in such groups declined rapidly. By the early twentieth century, classes and bands were virtually extinct in every sector of Methodism save the African-American tradition. In recent years, scholars in various sectors of the Wesleyan tradition, particularly David Lowes Watson and Kevin Watson, have called for a recovery of these small groups for purposes of renewal in the church. There is no consensus, however, concerning what exactly contributed to the vitality of these groups during Wesley’s ministry.

Over the last century, sociological studies of group dynamics have revealed three common traits that are crucial to highly functioning groups: interdependence created by the existence of a common goal, interaction among group members that is “promotive” or cooperative in nature, and high levels of feedback associated with personal responsibility and individual accountability. All three of these were prevalent in the early Methodist groups. Interdependence existed around a shared goal, which for Wesley and the Methodists was holiness. That interdependence was cooperative in nature; individuals experienced the empowering grace of God as they each pursued the goal in the company of fellow pilgrims. Finally, the groups existed for purposes of feedback and accountability as individuals took responsibility both for themselves and others as they progressed together toward the goal of holy living. Wesley seemed to instinctively understand the essential nature of each of these characteristics in maintaining the vitality of the movement when he spoke of the importance of preserving the “doctrine, spirit and discipline” of early Methodism. Analysis of some of the present-day attempts to restore Wesley’s groups reveals frequent neglect to one or more of these three components. Perhaps most critical to recovering the vitality of the early Methodist groups will be reclaiming the goal of sanctification and coming to a consensus on what its pursuit means in the present day.

The European Union Foreign Policy in the Caucasus and Central Asia: The Limitations of the Opening towards the East

This article intends to study the evolution of the European Union foreign policy in the Southern Caucasus and Central Area throughout the Post-Cold War era. The aim is to analyze Brussels’ fundamental interests and limitations in the area, the strategies it has implemented in the last few years, and the extent to which the EU has been able to undermine the regional hegemons’ traditional supremacy. As will be highlighted, the Community’s chronic weaknesses, the local determination to preserve sovereignty and an increasing international geopolitical competition undermine any European aspiration to become a pre-eminent actor at the heart of the Eurasian continent in the near future.

PROFESSIONAL LIABILITY OF AMATEURS: THE CONTEXT OF SPORTS COACHING

The developing intersection between the law of negligence and sports coaching in the UK provides a profoundly distinctive context, as compared to that of the more traditional learned professions, in which to critically examine the issue of professional liability. More specifically, detailed consideration of the Bolam test in the context of sports coaching, where the majority of coaches are volunteers, reinforces the Bolam doctrine as a control mechanism designed to protect both claimants and defendants alike. Importantly, a fuller analysis of related jurisprudence, even in instances where defendant coaches lack a formal qualification, and/or may not have engaged in considered and reasoned decision-making, reveals the potential for the Bolam test to operate as a quasi-defence, thereby safeguarding coaches from negligence liability. Nonetheless, in discharging this heightened standard of care incumbent upon them, coaches must ensure that the coaching practices adopted are regular, approved, and capable of withstanding robust and logical scrutiny. Ultimately, this article’s analysis of the principles of professional liability, in the specific circumstances of sports coaching, should prove to be of appreciably wider interest and utility for practitioners specialising in personal injury law.

It is Time for Something New: A 21st Century Joint-Employer Doctrine for 21st Century Franchising

[Excerpt] The joint-employer doctrine is perhaps the hottest issue in labor and employment law for 2015 and the foreseeable future. In the September 2015 Browning-Ferris ("BFI”) decision, the National Labor Relations Board (the "NLRB" or the "Board"), the administrative agency that enforces the National Labor Relations Act (the "NLRA" or the "Act"), issued what is expected to be the first of two decisions, expanding the joint-employer doctrine. In the BFI decision, the so-called putative employer (e.g., the lessor of employees or a franchisor) is now considered the employer of individuals who had in the past been considered employees of the supplier employer. Like in Browning-Ferris, a number of McDonald's employees and the Service Employees International Union ("SEIU") are arguing that the world's largest franchisor is the joint employer of all its franchisees' employees. At first blush, one might believe that this is another esoteric labor and employment law issue that only lawyers and scholars care about. However, depending on how the Board and courts rule on this issue, the joint-employer doctrine could fundamentally change business in the United States by destroying the franchise model.

The Ideological Transformation of the Icon Chairman Mao during the Four Modernisations period : As illustrated by "Melody of Youth, Beautiful Soul"

After Chairman Mao's death, in the late 1980's, Mao was removed from official government communications and his iconography transformed from having a specific meaning generation role linked to Maoist ideology, to becoming available for use as a commodity. In this research I use cultural theorist Jacques Derrida's theory of Hauntology and the deconstruction method to analyse a representative Chinese Propaganda poster, "Melody of Youth, Beautiful Soul", in order to ascertain the effect Mao's death had on the Iconography of Chairman Mao, and how Mao is ideologically transformed during this period. Analysing the painting I found specific symbols associated with the iconography of Mao that had been adopted and transformed for the purposes of the CCP. These symbols both suggested the presence of Chairman Mao, as well as negated that presence through being co-opted for other purposes. Using these symbols and writings about the period I deduced that during this period the CCP had to rely on existing symbols of power and authority in order to communicate and legitimise regime change whilst maintaining the semblance of continuity. At the same time they had to decouple these symbols from their original meanings in order to distance themselves from the past and redefine the ideology of China. In the process, Mao's iconography was decoupled from its Maoist ideological heritage and transformed into abstract symbols of power, doctrine and so on. This means that the transformation had made them available to use as an "open basket" into which new, related meanings could be placed – including serving as a commodity.

The Origins and Legacy of a Currency Board in Argentina

This is a qualitative case study of the adoption of a currency board in Argentina in 1991. It presents a discursive analysis and intellectual history of four overlaying and mutually influencing stories of Convertibility’s adoption. It is (1) the story of how Menem aligned himself to the Washington Consensus as a means to win a Presidential election. This ideological alignment influences and is influenced by a (2) reconstitution of the Peronist Party’s historically entrenched identity. This in turn re-fashion the whole system of interest articulation and relative power of interest groups in Argentina. The adoption of a currency board also marks the pace of (3) the entrenchment neoliberal interests across a domestic network of neoliberal think-tanks, technocrats, politicians, and “technopoles” articulating neoliberal interests outside of the Washington Consensus, within an International Neoliberal Network. Argentina’s adoption of a currency board falls in line with the Corner Solutions, a neoliberal doctrine promoted to influence developing countries to adopt two forms of exchange rate regimes that allow for less government involvement, including a currency board. Argentina starts as a test country and then becomes (4) an ideological stepping stone to help promote the creation of currency boards across more “developing” countries. These stories are not sequential but concurrent, and they help advance an alternative critique of neoliberalism that focuses on specifics to induce case-specific lessons versus a theory claiming to provide any universal truth.