It was the call those of us working night shifts at the Associated Press bureau in Detroit in the mid-1990s dreaded. A body in a seedy motel or dropped at a hospital's ER meant one thing: Dr. Death at work. More »
As of yesterday, all PDF versions of books published by the National Academies Press will be downloadable to anyone free of charge. This includes a current catalog of more than 4,000 books plus future reports produced by the Press.
1200 members of the nanotechnology community from over 50 countries gathered in Budapest, Hungary, for three days of presentations, networking and inspiration during EuroNanoForum 2011.
Shrink Nanotechnologies, Inc. and BlackBox Semiconductor, Inc. announced the execution of the share exchange whereby 100% of the equity interests of BlackBox Semiconductor, Inc. (the Nevada company) were sold to BlackBox Semiconductor, Inc. (the publicly traded Delaware company).
TowerJazz, the global specialty foundry leader, announced today that it completed its previously announced acquisition of Micron Technology's fabrication facility in Nishiwaki City, Hyogo, Japan.
Pyrograf Products was recently issued a Consent Order by the US Environmental Protection Agency allowing the sale of Pyrograf-III Carbon Nanotubes for commercial scale applications. This makes Pyrograf Products the first and only domestic supplier to be granted a consent order for direct sale of stacked-cup carbon nanotubes.
CelluForce will manufacture nanocrystalline cellulose, a recyclable and renewable nanomaterial, that will be commercialized throughout the world. The new company's identity was developed to reflect both the origin of the nanomaterial, extracted from tree cellulose, and one of the multiple properties of the product to be sold by the new company.
A novel, lower-dose formulation of indomethacin, a widely used pain reliever, is absorbed faster by the body than a standard formulation and maintains comparable maximum concentrations in the blood despite being administered at a lower dose, according to a study to be reported here tomorrow at the annual meeting of the American Headache Society.
Oxford Instruments Magnetic Resonance (OIMR) and Green Imaging Technologies, Inc. (GIT) have announced an agreement to establish a strategic partnership to bring complete cutting edge Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (NMR) solutions to the core analysis community. The partnership will open opportunities for NMR core analysis to be used by technicians with no specialist NMR knowledge or training and make special core analysis routine.
Three molecules thick, or two, or one: how does an extremely thin layer of trapped liquid behave when we make it even thinner? Measurements made using the Atomic Force Microscope show that the forces of friction increase with each step.
This meeting will address the advances occurring in nanoscale tribology, providing attendees the opportunity to network, and discuss trends and future developments.
Researchers describe a family of seven potential defect structures that may appear in sheets of graphene and image examples of the lowest-energy defect in the family.
Schedule forthcoming. Visit http://www.pathinformatics.pitt.edu/content/overview.
Pathology Informatics 2011 (PI-2011) is the product of more than 40 cumulative years of experience in providing continuing medical education in the area of pathology informatics. Its predecessor conferences were: (1) AIMCL, held in Ann Arbor from 1983 to 2003; (2) APIII held in Pittsburgh from 1996 to 2009; and (3) Lab InfoTech Summit from 2004 to 2009. A decision was made in 2010 to merge these events into a single mega-event, bringing together their directors and staffs under the sponsorship of the Department of Biomedical Informatics, University of Pittsburgh, and the Association for Pathology Informatics, API. This first merged conference, Pathology Informatics 2010 was held in Boston, Massachusetts in September 2010.
Pathology Informatics, a subdiscipline of pathology and clinical laboratory medicine, is growing rapidly. In recognition of this fact, we offer registrants to PI-2011 three workshops on the first day of and three tracks on the subsequent two and one-half days. The three tracks are the following: (1) Clinical Information Management; (2) System Support and Connectivity; and (3) Digital Pathology. These three tracks are punctuated by plenary lectures to the whole group by noted pathologists and scientists. The first of these tracks closely approximates the previous Lab InfoTech Summit held in Las Vegas and the latter two track closely to previous APIII offerings.
We view the role of the exhibitors at PI-2011 as essential to the learning mission because they serve as partners in the deployment of new information management systems. Because the training of pathology residents and fellows in pathology informatics is essential to our mission, we have also taken special efforts to award travel grants to them in programs across the country and encourage pathology program directors to view the PI-2011 experience as an “away rotation” for such trainees. Special discounts on the registration fees are offered to them as well as to API and HIMA members.
Pathology Informatics 2011 is an annual educational conference designed for world-wide collaboration, technology and learning together to come together in one meeting place.
PI2011 offers direct interaction with physicians, researchers, residents and graduate students, Industry-related developers, engineers, imaging informatics professionals, vendor representatives and many others interested in how informatics and imaging are transforming pathology, oncology and radiology. Prior knowledge of informatics is not required and courses are offered for individuals new to this field.
Three pre-conference workshops and three tracks to choose from over the course of the four conference days.
An eminent faculty consisting of most of the national experts in the field of pathology informatics in the country and from abroad.
Dawn-to-dusk programming over the course of four days including a gala welcoming reception on the first night of the conference and formal lecture-demonstrations by a selection of exhibitors.
Elegant conference space and room accommodations at the Pittsburgh Wyndham Grand, one of the finest hotels in the center of downtown Pittsburgh.
Overall Conference Objectives
Present practical and emerging solutions for automated information and image management in pathology and the clinical laboratories.
Describe how workflow in the clinical laboratories and pathology can be supported and enhanced by new software and hardware solutions.
Understand the various software and hardware products available in the clinical laboratory and pathology market by interacting with a large number of exhibitors.
Present new research in pathology informatics on the basis of submitted competitive scientific abstracts.
Provide a forum for basic pathology informatics instruction for house officers and fellows in pathology training programs.
During the decade of the 1870s, three young women found themselves in the hysteria ward of the Salpetriere Hospital in Paris under the direction of the prominent neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot. All three — Blanche, Augustine, and Genevieve — would become medical celebrities. The stories of their lives as patients on the ward are a strange amalgam of science and religion, medicine and the occult, hypnotism, love, and theater. The illness they suffered from was hysteria. This disease was not an arcane preoccupation of the doctors that treated them, but an affliction that would increasingly capture the public imagination. Stories about hysterical patients filled the columns of newspapers. They were transformed into fictional characters by novelists. Hysterics were photographed, sculpted, painted, and drawn. Every week, eager crowds arrived at the hospital to attend Charcot's demonstrations of hysterics acting out their hysterical symptoms. And it wasn't only medical students and physicians who came to view the shows, but artists, writers, actors, socialites, and the merely curious. Hysteria had become a fascinating and fashionable spectacle. But who were these hysterical women? Where did they come from? What role did they play in their own peculiar form of stardom? And what exactly were they suffering from?
... To what degree their disease was socially determined and to what degree it was physically determined is impossible to say. If they showed up at a hospital today, suffering from the same symptoms, they would probably be diagnosed with schizophrenia or conversion disorder or bipolar disorder. They would undoubtedly be diagnosed with eating disorders because they had bouts of willful starving and vomiting. However, if these women were alive today, they might not have become ill to begin with and no doubt would suffer from other symptoms.
I am convinced that Blanche, Augustine, and Genevieve were neither frauds nor passive receptacles of a sham diagnosis. They really did "have" hysteria. Located on the problematic border between psychosomatic and somatic disorders, hysteria was a confusion of real and imagined illness. In an era without demons and before Freud's unconscious, hysteria fell into a theoretical vacuum...
Hysteria may be an illness of the past, but the medical and ideological notions of femininity that lie behind it offer insights into the illnesses of the present and the way they are perceived. And while modern medicine no longer talks about hysteria, it nonetheless continues to perpetuate the idea that the female body is far more vulnerable than its male counterpart... Why has my study of a disease that is no longer officially a medical diagnosis compelled me to collect information on these new disorders? Why do the lives of three women who lived more than a hundred years ago feel so relevant today and resonate so strongly with the lives of women who are my contemporaries?
--Excerpt from the introduction to Medical Muses: Hysteria in Nineteenth-Century Paris, Asti Hustvedt, 2011
I have long been on the lookout for a scholarly yet accessible book--in English!--that could answer my many questions about the 19th century phenomenon of hysteria as spectacularly manifested at Charcot's Salpêtrière Clinic (depicted in the painting above). Asti Hustvedt's newly-released Medical Muses: Hysteria in Nineteenth-Century Paris--the cover of which you see above--has proven to be just the book I have been waiting for.
Hustvedt--whose memorable essays on hysteria and popular culture you might remember from the Zone Decadent Reader--uses the stories of 3 of the great divas of the Salpêtrière stage as a framework to examine the history of Charcot and his clinic and to adeptly and compellingly tease out the taxonomically-troubling overlaps that make hysteria so fascinating. Her examination of these overlaps--which include science and art, mind and body, the clinic and the carnival, miracles and medicine, theatre and hospital, the mind and the body, the occult and the scientific--beautifully frame the central paradox of hysteria, its simultaneous realness and imaginariness, baffling to this "era without demons and before Freud's unconscious."
This book is sensitive, informative, nuanced, insightful, engaging (I read it in a day and a half!) and extremely thought provoking; it is well illustrated with many images from Iconographie Photographique De La Salpêtrière (as seen in photos above) and provides a wonderful discussion of the relationship between these photographs and the understanding of the condition. It also provides a persuasive examination of contemporary maladies carrying on the hysterical tradition in a variety of ways.
This book is, to my mind, the long awaited perfect book on hysteria. For those of you with an interest in the topic, I simply cannot recommend this book more passionately!
You can find out more--and purchase a copy for yourself!--by clicking here. You can also come
pay it a visit at The Morbid Anatomy Library; more on that here. You can read an extended excerpt of the book on the NPR website by clicking here and can find out more about the Zone Books Decadent Reader by clicking here.
Images:
This weekend please join the Morbid Anatomy Library (as seen above) and sister space Observatory as we open our spaces to the public as part of the Atlantic Avenue Artwalk.
Following are the full details; Very much hope to see you there!
Atlantic Avenue Artwalk
Saturday and Sunday, June 4th and 5th
1-6 PM
543 Union Street at Nevins, Brooklyn
Free and Open to the PublicDirections: Enter the Morbid Anatomy Library and Observatory via Proteus Gowanus Gallery
R or M train to Union Street in Brooklyn: Walk two long blocks on Union (towards the Gowanus Canal) to Nevins Street. 543 Union Street is the large red brick building on right. Go right on Nevins and left down alley through large black gates. Gallery is the second door on the left.
F or G train to Carroll Street: Walk one block to Union. Turn right, walk two long blocks on Union towards the Gowanus Canal, cross the bridge, take left on Nevins, go down the alley to the second door on the left.
For more about the Morbid Anatomy Library, click here. You can find out more information about the Atlantic Avenue Artwalk, and get a full list of participants, by clicking here. You can find out more about Observatory and the exhibition now on view by clicking here.
Photo by Shannon Taggart.
Last week, my friend Michael Sappol of the History of Medicine Division of the National Library of Medicine sent me a fascinating clipping relating to a book published in 1817 and entitled, amazingly, Thesaurus of horror; or, The Charnel-House Explored!! (exclamation marks and all! See above title page for verification). I asked him if he would be so kind as to write a guest post for this blog on the subject; he and his colleague, Jim Labosier, kindly and thoroughly obliged!
Following is the story in their own words and images:
How the National Library of Medicine got its "Thesaurus of Horror!"
In the spring of 1872 John Shaw Billings (1838-1913), on a quest to make the Surgeon General’s Library into “a great national medical library,” corresponded with Dr. Henry S. Jewett, the son of an old medical acquaintance, Dr. Adams Jewett of Dayton, Ohio. Billings asked for assistance in collecting books and medical journals. Jewett passed on the letter to his father, who offered Billings a variety of titles, including John Snart’s Thesaurus of Horror; or, the Charnel-House Explored!! (London, 1817), about which he wrote, “No Lib[rar]y is complete without the HORRORS!!”
Billings wrote in blue pencil on the letter “Wanted!!”
and accepted the Thesaurus, which still resides in the collection of the National Library of Medicine.
One of many contemporary works on premature burial (and perhaps a source for Edgar Allan Poe’s 1844 story, “The Premature Burial”), the Thesaurus comes equipped with this extensive subtitle:
…being an historical and philanthropical inquisition made for the Quondam-Blood of its Inhabitants! by a contemplative Descent into the Untimely Grave! Shewing, by a number of awful facts that have transpired as well as from philosophical inquiry, the re-animating power of Fresh Earth in Cases of Syncope, &c. and the extreme criminality of Hasty Funerals: with the surest methods of escaping the Ineffable Horrors of Premature Interment!! The Frightful Mysteries of the Dark Ages Laid Open, which not deluged the Roman Empire, but Triumphed over All Christendom for a Thousand Years! entombing the sciences, and subsequently reviving all the ignorance and superstition of Gothic Barbarity!
Snart (d. 1834?), a British optician who was strongly anti-Catholic and anti-Jewish, also wrote An Historical Inquiry Concerning Apparent Death and Premature Interment (1824); The Power of Numbers Exemplified by the Laws of Permutation (1819); Table of Four Hundred and Fifty Specific Gravities (1813); Mathematical Synopsis (1816) and several articles on astronomy.
You can peruse this book in its entirety on Google Books by clicking here. Also, I highly encourage you to click on the images to view much larger, entirely readable versions!
Thanks so much to Jim Labosier & Michael Sappol, History of Medicine Division, National Library of Medicine for this post!
Amazon is now taking pre-orders for the Walter Isaacson-penned Steve Jobs biography, iSteve: The Book of Jobs, slated for release March 2012. Along with the listing is what might be the final cover and price for the tome. More »
