bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Conceptualization of Intellectual Disability in Medieval English Law
Authors: Turner Wendy J.
Published: September 2018

Medieval terminology for mental health was a complex matrix of identifiers from legal, medical, and social sources and included terms for many mental, emotional, neurotic and psychotic conditions recognized today. Intellectual disability was one of those categories, especially in the legal realm, with the most-often used term being idiota. Governmental officials that became aware of properties in distress (unplanted, squatters ruining a site, etc) relieved individuals identified as idiota of their responsibilities and placed them into wardship with guardians, who not only cared for the wards but also their properties. The process of examination and civil ‘diagnosis’ of ability encompassed an individual’s intelligence, memory, cognitive ability, discretion, and, at times, appearance. The medieval terms, while not ‘intellectual disability’, certainly described differences in intellectual ability and used vocabulary appropriate for separate conditions, identifying a faulty memory, weak intelligence, difficult time managing property or goods, issue with coping day-to-day, or inability to have discretion. Medieval legal and administrative arms of the crown and local towns each used their own standards to judge competency and intelligence, yet all of them recognized the same wide variety of intellectual conditions and categories of symptoms for intellectual disabilities and other mental health conditions.
‘Will-Nots’ and ‘Cannots’: Tracing a Trope in Medieval Thought
Authors: Metzler Irina
Published: September 2018

For medieval thinkers, a prominent philosophical, religious and legal problem concerned how to distinguish between the ‘will-not’ and the ‘can-not’. Amassing medieval evidence for the characterization these 'types', this chapter considers the tension between people regarded as not wanting to do something and people incapable of doing something despite perhaps wanting to. The 'genuine fool' was accorded preferential treatment in all these realms, but the 'pretend fool' was regarded with suspicion, and was perceived as morally dubious, even dangerous. Precisely because cognitive disability is not something writ large on the body, like a crippled limb, medieval commentators were worried by it, just as they were worried by deafness (equally invisible and also causing communication and moral issues). It is the behaviour rather than the physique that is highlighted as being different from 'the norm'. It is a sign of more modern times that physical appearance comes to be more strongly linked to cognitive disability. Medieval children appear to have been categorised by their learning ability as expressed through behaviour, not physiognomy.
Exclusion from the Eucharist: The Re-shaping of Idiocy in the Seventeenth-Century Church
Authors: Goodey C. F.
Published: September 2018

Throughout the English revolution of the mid-seventeenth century, churchmen disagreed about whom to exclude from taking holy communion, who should do the excluding, and how this exclusion should be imposed. The constant reclassifications of potential contaminants of church ritual fluctuated in tandem with larger socio-political processes. The ferocity of the debate in the 1650s reflects that decade’s social revolutionary chaos. Near the end of it, the label ‘idiot’ – whatever that may mean – arrives on the list, emerging from a dialectic of disputes which acknowledge the socio-political context. In that particular deployment of the label we start to see an outline of the modern psychological definition.
Sensationalism and the Construction of Intellectual Disability
Authors: Stainton Tim
Published: September 2018

The seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries saw the emergence of sensationalism as a counter to the prevailing idea that human knowledge was innate, pre-determined within us, only to emerge gradually over time. This chapter considers the influence of the theory of sensationalism on both the conceptualization of intellectual disability and the emergence of educational efforts on their behalf. It considers how the debate over sensationalism shaped Itard’s work and the theories which underpinned it, rooted most fully in the work of Locke, Rousseau, and, finally, Condillac, whose revision of Locke would create the foundation for the coming medico-psychological hegemony over intellectual disability.
‘Belief’, ‘Opinion’, and ‘Knowledge’: The Idiot in Law in the Long Eighteenth Century
Authors: Jarrett Simon
Published: September 2018

This chapter explores the development of the legal concepts of idiocy and imbecility over the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, examining legal theory as well as evidence from civil court cases to reveal an ongoing conflict between libertarian resistance to state intervention in the lives of citizens, however mentally incapacitated they might be, and a belief that the state should be responsible for protecting individuals against exploitation and the corruption of bloodlines. From the late eighteenth century, French medico-legal theorists, supported by the ‘scientific’ enlightenment ideals of the French revolution, proposed a medicalised appropriation of legal decision-making over capacity. While these ideas gained some currency among a small group of British medical men working in the field of idiocy, they faced strong public and legal resistance throughout the nineteenth century on the grounds of liberty of the subject. Both legal and medical formulations of idiocy in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries borrowed heavily from popular, ‘common-sense’ public notions about what constituted an idiot.
Idiocy and the Conceptual Economy of Madness
Authors: Simpson Murray K.
Published: September 2018

The binary relationship between ‘intellectual disability’ and ‘mental illness’ is widely regarded as self-evident and long-established. This chapter demonstrates that the historical, and continuing, relationship between intellectual disability and psychiatry is, in fact, ambiguous and inconsistent. Beginning with the nosology of William Cullen in the latter part of the seventeenth century, the chapter explores the dispersal of madness across all the branches of disease and illness. The advent of alienism and Pinel’s nosology of madness, at the beginning of the eighteenth century, produced much flatter conceptual structures, in which idiocy was one of the various forms of madness. As psychiatry developed, the position of idiocy shifted. Maudsley located it in a separate branch, though still not separated in a binary manner from insanity. Lastly, the nosology of the neurologist Spitzka became more nuanced and layered, though still without a binary separation of idiocy. The chapter takes the view that the lack of any consistent underlying paradigm in psychiatry will continue to make the presence and position of intellectual disability impossible to fix. Psychoanalytic and neo-Jasperian psychiatry thoroughly exclude it as an object of investigation.
Visiting Earlswood: The Asylum Travelogue and the Shaping of ‘Idiocy’
Authors: McDonagh Patrick
Published: September 2018

In the 1850s, visitors to the Earlswood Asylum, also known as the National Asylum for Idiots, in Reigate, Surrey, wrote about their experiences for publication. Frequently, these reports were presented as forms of travel writing, with the narrator recounting the customs of the asylum natives. The middle-class, sane and (one assumes) intelligent target audiences lived far beyond the asylums, in terms of identity if not geography. The asylum inhabitants, meanwhile, are resolutely ‘other’, subjected to the visitors’ inquisitive, evaluative gaze. This chapter draws on primary documents including works by Charles Dickens and asylum propagandists such as Joseph Parkinson, Cheyne Brady and the Reverend Edwin Sidney, as well as numerous anonymous pieces, to explore how these asylum travelogues, through their own representations of ‘idiocy’, helped shape ideas of idiocy and inform social policy that affected the lives of people identified as ‘idiots’ and ‘imbeciles’ in the 1850s, 1860s and after.
Visions and ruins
Authors: Davies Joshua
Published: September 2018

This book is a study of cultural memory in and of the British Middle Ages. It works with material drawn from across the medieval period – in Old English, Middle English and Latin, as well as material and visual culture – and explores modern translations, reworkings and appropriations of these texts to examine how images of the past have been created, adapted and shared. It interrogates how cultural memory formed, and was formed by, social identities in the Middle Ages and how ideas about the past intersected with ideas about the present and future. It also examines how the presence of the Middle Ages has been felt, understood and perpetuated in modernity and the cultural possibilities and transformations this has generated. The Middle Ages encountered in this book is a site of cultural potential, a means of imagining the future as well as imaging the past. The scope of this book is defined by the duration of cultural forms rather than traditional habits of historical periodization and it seeks to reveal connections across time, place and media to explore the temporal complexities of cultural production and subject formation. It reveals a transtemporal and transnational archive of the modern Middle Ages.
Introduction
Authors: Davies Joshua
Published: September 2018

Memory is the matrix of all human temporal perception.

Mary Carruthers, The Book of Memory
1

This book is a study of cultural memory in and of the British Middle Ages. It is about ways of knowing the past created by individuals and groups in medieval Britain and how those texts and images have been adapted and appropriated in the modern West. Like the medieval and modern material with which it works, this book’s methodology is associative. It traces connections – often explicit, sometimes intuitive – across time, place and media to explore the temporal complexities of cultural production and subject formation. So while the methodology of this book is defined by historicist readings of the texts with which I work, this book is also a study of untimeliness, an investigation of cultural productions bereft of their original context....
Ruins and wonders: The poetics of cultural memory in and of early medieval England
Authors: Davies Joshua
Published: September 2018

The Old English poem known as The Ruin meditates on the material remains of a long-passed civilisation and has often been read as typical of the nostalgic poetry of the Anglo-Saxons, but its reception history reveals how cultural memories of the Anglo-Saxons have been rewritten in the modern world and the importance of the idea of ruination to modern conceptions of the Middle Ages. This chapter constitutes the first extended study of the disciplinary and translation histories of The Ruin, traces the history of the poem from 1826 to the twenty-first century and explores the meanings of ruins in the Middle Ages and modernity.
Queen Eleanor and her crosses: Trauma and memory, medieval and modern
Authors: Davies Joshua
Published: September 2018

This chapter is the first extended study of the Eleanor Crosses. Commissioned by Edward I and built in the years immediately following Eleanor’s death in 1290, the monuments fashioned an idealised image of Eleanor that stands distinct from the historical record but which defined cultural memories of her. Over time, however, what were once memorials to an individual woman came to signify a more general sense of loss, melancholy and nostalgia that signified differently in particular times and places. E. M. Barry’s refashioned Charing Cross of the 1860s is but one of a number of nineteenth- and twentieth-century monuments that self-consciously repeated and reflected the medieval precedents of the Eleanor Crosses to create an idealised image of the medieval past. This chapter traces the reception, recreation and influence of the crosses in postmedieval England.
Medievalist double consciousness and the production of difference: Medieval bards, cultural memory and nationalist fantasy
Authors: Davies Joshua
Published: September 2018

This chapter interrogates the relationship between medievalist cultural memory and nationalism in Britain and Europe. Exploring work by the English poet Thomas Gray, the Welsh poet and critic Evan Evans, the Hungarian poet Janos Arany, the Icelandic scholar Grímur Jonsson Thorkelín and the Danish poet, historian and educator Nikolai Frederik Severin Grundtvig, this chapter explores how ideas of the medieval past are used to generate ideas of community and exclude some people, ideas and traditions from the future.
Reformation without end
Authors: Ingram Robert G.
Published: September 2018

Reformation without end reinterprets the English Reformation. No one in eighteenth-century England thought that they lived during ‘the Enlightenment’. Instead, they thought that they still faced the religious, intellectual and political problems unleashed by the Reformation, which began in the sixteenth century. They faced those problems, though, in the aftermath of two bloody seventeenth-century political and religious revolutions. This book is about the ways the eighteenth-century English debated the causes and consequences of those seventeenth-century revolutions. Those living in post-revolutionary England conceived themselves as living in the midst of the very thing which they thought had caused the revolutions: the Reformation. The reasons for and the legacy of the Reformation remained hotly debated in post-revolutionary England because the religious and political issues it had generated remained unresolved and that irresolution threatened more civil unrest. For this reason, most that got published during the eighteenth century concerned religion. This book looks closely at the careers of four of the eighteenth century’s most important polemical divines, Daniel Waterland, Conyers Middleton, Zachary Grey and William Warburton. It relies on a wide range of manuscript sources, including annotated books and unpublished drafts, to show how eighteenth-century authors crafted and pitched their works.
Why then are we still reforming?
Authors: Ingram Robert G.
Published: September 2018

This introductory chapter uses the Thomas Woolston and Thomas Rundle controversies of the 1720s and 1730s to introduce the book’s historiographical framework. This chapter argues that the eighteenth-century English saw themselves as living within the Reformation, which is why religion predominated the era’s print culture. The English Reformation spurred a long conversation, one which was fundamentally about what constituted truth. Eighteenth-century polemical divinity grappled both with what constituted truth and with the consequences of divisions over what constituted truth. For this reason, some during the eighteenth century feared that they lived in an unending Reformation.
The sacrament Socinianized: Benjamin Hoadly and the Eucharist
Authors: Ingram Robert G.
Published: September 2018

This chapter concerns the ways in which the Christian God effected men’s salvation. It reconstructs the Eucharistic debates between Waterland and Benjamin Hoadly. It locates those debates within wider debates during the 1730s about whether or not to repeal the Test and Corporation Acts. It shows how those sacramental debates got refracted through the memory of the seventeenth century which had produced the Test and Corporation Acts. Finally, it demonstrates why Waterland thought that when responding to Hoadly he was merely reiterating Thomas Cranmer’s Reformation-era sacramental theology, which itself had reiterated the pure sacramental theology of the primitive church.
I know not what to make of the author
Authors: Ingram Robert G.
Published: September 2018

Part II of this book (chapters 6-9) concern Conyers Middleton. This introductory chapter to Part II sets the scene for this story by considering feud between Middleton and Richard Bentley and its implications for Middleton’s later career. It illustrates two salient points. Firstly, it shows how seemingly scholarly debates — Middleton’s dispute with Bentley over Bentley’s proposed edition of the New Testament in Greek and Latin — were sometimes really just proxy wars in more parochial political squabbles. Secondly, it shows how polemical divines used the law to coerce and punish their polemical rivals.
Treating me worse, than I deserved: heterodoxy and the politics of patronage
Authors: Ingram Robert G.
Published: September 2018

This chapter highlights the ways that eighteenth-century orthodox clergy tried to coerce or punish their fellow clergy whom they judged heterodox. It opens with a consideration of Middleton’s unsuccessful attempts to secure plum ecclesiastical preferments with the assistance of Sir Robert Walpole’s ally, John Lord Hervey. It then anatomizes the arguments in the heterodox works that Hervey convinced Middleton not to publish in order to better his chances for preferment. Middleton would return to these unpublished manuscripts during the 1740s when he wrote about miracles. The chapter concludes by detailing Middleton’s failed effort during the late 1730s and early 1740s to redeem himself in the eyes of the orthodox by writing about Cicero. The process of bringing his life of Cicero to press also casts light onto the business of publishing with which Middleton and all other polemical divines had to deal.
None of us are born free: self-restraint and salvation
Authors: Ingram Robert G.
Published: September 2018

This chapter sketches the lineaments of the orthodox soteriological position of the eighteenth-century Church of England. It draws its evidence from Zachary Grey’s unpublished manuscript sermons, delivered to his parishioners across the middle third of the century. Through them runs a coherent soteriological argument, one with a stable conception of God; of how God operated in the world; and of how and why humans (God’s rational creatures) are damned or saved after death. Through Grey’s sermons also runs a coherent argument about how sin and salvation related to natural and human history. God’s active providential management of his creation was purposeful and responsive: he punished and warned because people sinned. Restraining sin offered a way to secure civil peace. This chapter explains why the eighteenth-century orthodox thought as much.
The incendiaries of sedition and confusion
Authors: Ingram Robert G.
Published: September 2018

Section IV of this book deals with William Warburton. This introductory chapter to Section IV charts Warburton’s idiosyncratic path to polemical divinity and the principles which guided his work. It traces his path from the law to the church. It also considers his first substantive publication, A Critical and Philosophical Enquiry into the Causes of Prodigies (1727). That work posited a method to distinguish truth from lies and first broached many of the subjects with which he would deal during his long polemical career.
The triumph of Christ over Julian: prodigies, miracles and providence
Authors: Ingram Robert G.
Published: September 2018

This chapter is about God’s providential management of his creation. The chapter examines the origins of Warburton’s Julian (1751). Warburton’s study of the fourth-century failed rebuild the Temple was part of a sustained attempt to demonstrate his orthodox bona fides in the wake of his Divine Legation of Moses. This chapter opens with an examination of the Weekly Miscellany’s attack on Warburton during the late 1730s for having insufficiently criticized Middleton in the Divine Legation of Moses. Afterwards, Warburton’s orthodox episcopal allies advised him publicly to distance himself from Conyers Middleton, which led to the unraveling of their friendship. The chapter turns next to anatomize Julian’s arguments. It concludes by illuminating how Warburton distinguished between miracles (like the destruction of the Jerusalem Temple rebuilding project in 363 AD) and prodigies (like the London and Lisbon earthquakes of the 1750s), while seeing both as tools of God’s providential management of his creation. Warburton contributed to a public discussion of providence for reasons that were also deeply personal. In that discussion, he employed Newtonian natural philosophy to interpret both natural and human history. In Warburton’s hands, it was employed for orthodox ends, but in sometimes deeply idiosyncratic ways.
Conclusion
Authors: Ingram Robert G.
Published: September 2018

The conclusion explains why the English Reformation ended in the late eighteenth century. It discounts a secular and secularizing Enlightenment as an explanation. Rather, it offers three other reasons for the Reformation’s ending. Firstly, by the last quarter of the eighteenth century enough time had passed to make the seventeenth-century wars of religion less threatening than they had seemed earlier in the century. Secondly, the Reformation issues with which the eighteenth-century English dealt got supplanted by other, more urgent ones, often having to do with England’s expanding empire. Finally, and importantly, the Reformation ended because the polemical divines who are the subject of this book failed fully in their tasks of defining truth and of defending the autonomy of the established Church of England. In the end, the modern state took on the role as truth’s arbiter and made the Church a subordinate, dependent institution.
Introduction: why sport?
Authors: Vere Bernard
Published: September 2018

The Introduction looks at the rise of sport as an organised activity across Europe in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It sets this in the context of the development of urban modernity, with elite sport becoming a focus for the emergent mass media and a concomitant rise in spectatorship. Sport can claim to be the most pervasive cultural form of the early twentieth century. As such it is surprising that the influence it had on modern art and artists has been largely overlooked.
Of gods and men: the Olympic games and its rivals
Authors: Vere Bernard
Published: September 2018

Pierre de Coubertin was responsible for the founding of the modern Olympics. Its antique ideals were consecrated in a painting by his father, an artist of the French salon, who pictured modern sportsmen from Paris paying tribute to Athena. The fourth chapter analyses the most notorious visual artwork concerning the games, Leni Riefenstahl’s Olympia. Promoted as a documentary of the 1936 Berlin Olympics, but enjoying state patronage from the fascist regime, the status of this film is highly contested in the fields of history and film studies. Here, it is argued that the film evinces attitudes not incompatible with, although not reducible to, Coubertin’s own conflicted views on modernity. This is contrasted with László Moholy-Nagy’s abortive project to film the same games, before a consideration of Gustav Klucis’ constructivist designs for the Soviet response to the Olympics, the Spartakiada, and other constructivist engagements with sport in light of the Soviet emphasis on fizkultura (physical culture).
Conclusion: body politics
Authors: Vere Bernard
Published: September 2018

The conclusion begins by looking at the treatment of sport in Le Corbusier and Amédée Ozenfant’s purist journal L’Esprit Nouveau. The eclectic and episodic fragments on sport are contrasted with the three-part essay by their associate Pierre Winter. Winter, later the founder of the French Revolutionary Fascist Party, concentrates of a regime of physical exercise and bodily training, in which it is argued an emphasis on competitive elite sport is incidental. But fascism could also demonstrate a keen interest in competitive sport, never more so than when Benito Mussolini instigated a National Exhibition of Sport in Milan in 1935, with exhibition halls designed by some of the most prominent figures of Italian rationalist architecture.
Introduction: Reading sacred space in late medieval England
Authors: Varnam Laura
Published: September 2018

The introduction establishes the methodology for reading sacred space in Middle English literature through an examination of the fifteenth-century text ‘The Canterbury Interlude’, in which Chaucer’s pilgrims arrive at Canterbury Cathedral, visit the shrine of Thomas Becket and argue over their interpretation of the stained glass. The chapter explores the relationship between texts, buildings, visual art, and lay practice in the production of sanctity and sets up the theoretical framework for discussing the church as sacred space. The chapter argues that sacred space is performative and must be made manifest, with reference to Mircea Eliade’s concept of the hierophany, and suggests that sacred space is a powerful tool in the negotiation of social relationships. Finally, the chapter discusses sanctity as a form of symbolic capital in an increasingly competitive devotional environment.
What the church betokeneth: Placing the people at the heart of sacred space
Authors: Varnam Laura
Published: September 2018

This chapter examines the debate over the relationship between the church building and its community in orthodox and Lollard texts. The chapter begins with the allegorical reading of church architecture in William of Durandus’s Rationale divinorum officiorum and the Middle English What the Church Betokeneth, in which every member of the community has a designated place in the church. The chapter then discusses Lollard attempts to divorce the building from the people by critiquing costly material churches and their decorations in The Lanterne of Liȝt, Lollard sermons, and Pierce the Ploughman’s Crede. The chapter concludes by examining Dives and Pauper in the context of fifteenth-century investment in the church, both financial and spiritual, and argues that in practice church buildings were at the devotional heart of their communities.
Epilogue
Authors: Varnam Laura
Published: September 2018

The epilogue discusses the depiction of the church as a sacred space in the Middle English carol By a chapel as I came. The chapel has a multisensory, dynamic sanctity, and is presented as the house of God and all his saints. The epilogue concludes by showing how this mode of sanctity can still be experienced in the modern world by describing a visit to the church of St Botolph’s, Slapton, to examine the wall paintings and by discussing modern material replicas of church architecture, including the Lego Durham cathedral and the ‘Woolly Spires’ knitted churches project.
Basil and No Name
Authors: Ifill Helena
Published: September 2018

Basil’s Robert Mannion, and No Name’s Magdalen Vanstone are both subject to monomaniacal impulses. In Basil, Collins draws on early-nineteenth-century theories of insanity and moral management, promoted by “alienists” such as John Connolly and J. C. Prichard, which warned of domination by unruly passions. Mannion allows himself to be swept away by his uncontrolled emotions, and therefore contributes to his own mental deterioration. In No Name, Collins makes use of mid-Victorian theories of the will, developed by mental physiologists such as William Benjamin Carpenter, to depict Magdalen as someone who has not been trained to manage her willpower correctly and is therefore overwhelmed by a monomaniacal urge when faced with sudden tragedy. Unlike Mannion, Magdalen also possesses intrinsic reserves of moral strength and endures a series of internal conflicts between her monomania and her ‘better’ nature. In his contemplation of the different aspects which comprise the individual personality, Collis asserts (and so counters mid-century associationist psychology as propounded by men like Alexander Bain) that we are not ‘born with dispositions like blank sheets of paper’, but also insists that our inborn traits may be cultivated for better or for worse.
John Marchmont’s Legacy
Authors: Ifill Helena
Published: September 2018

In John Marchmont’s Legacy, Braddon draws on two dominant Victorian female stereotypes: the ideal woman, or Angel in the House; and the emotionally volatile woman who, as prevailing medical discourse of the era asserted, was a prey to the influence of her reproductive system. The intellectually brilliant and emotionally repressed Olivia Marchmont is the antithesis of the ideal woman, while her monomaniacal malicious actions (inspired by unrequited love for her cousin Edward) seem to confirm a connection between female sexuality and pathological behaviour. Olivia is at once not womanly enough, and too womanly, leading to inconsistencies in her characterisation which reveal the incongruity of Victorian conceptions of gender, whilst allowing for speculation about what it means to be a woman. Olivia is also compared with two critically neglected, hyper-feminine, female characters, Mary Marchmont and Belinda Lawford. In her depiction of Belinda particularly, Braddon shows her readers the near-impossible combination of deterministic factors required to form the prized ideal woman, and implies that to hold women up to such standards is not only unrealistic but ignores the potential of women who may be able to contribute to society in ways that do not conform to narrow and essentialist conceptions of gender.
The Lady Lisle
Authors: Ifill Helena
Published: September 2018

The Lady Lisle features two near-identical boys from different ends of the social spectrum. The possibility of altering the development of their inborn natures through upbringing and education is explored and contested when the two are swapped by the villain, Major Varney. The upper-class child is sent to a middle-class school where he is raised in such a way as to negate detrimental qualities which initially seemed innate. Contrastingly, the lower-class child, James, impersonates the true heir and proves to be selfish, violent and eventually murderous, like his father. Yet it is never entirely clear to what extent James’s behaviour is due to heredity or to his emotionally abusive upbringing. A shift in narrative tone is identified which moves from making allowances for James due to ‘nurture’ towards castigating him as bad by ‘nature’. In this way Braddon raises questions about the malleability or fixity of the personality, about how we define, recognise and value naturalness, but ultimately combines the forces of education and hereditary degeneracy in order to segregate the lower classes, and to bring the morally upright middle classes together with the affluent upper classes.
Armadale
Authors: Ifill Helena
Published: September 2018

Wilkie Collins’s Armadale is compared with his short story ‘Mad Monkton’, both of which speculate about negative hereditary transmission. Whereas ‘Mad Monkton’ portrays the consequences of hereditary insanity as devastating and inescapable,Armadale engages with a broader range of hereditary threats, but does not depict them as insurmountable. I attribute this change to both Collins’s choice of genre and his growing sense of responsibility as a widely read author. As a sensation author Collins had an eye for the alarming, and in Armadale his imaginative speculations foreshadow the paranoia of developing degenerationist thought which expressed concern with numerous issues, including the hereditary nature of criminality and insanity, atavism, regression, miscegenation, and acquired characteristics which could develop into morbid traits in the next generation. By associating different types of degeneration with different characters, and by offering different reasons for the development of that degeneration, Collins raises questions about class and race. However, Collins crucially opposes the view that morality is irrevocably hereditary at the same time as he invokes the fearful consequences of if it were. Moreover, Collins attempts to create sympathy with, rather than to reject or isolate, social outsiders.
Man and Wife
Authors: Ifill Helena
Published: September 2018

This chapter returns to the topic of monomania. Hester Dethridge develops homicidal urges after murdering her abusive husband. Collins emphatically draws attention to the circumstances which lead to Hester’s mental condition in order to fulfil the main purpose of the novel, highlighting the dangers of the British marriage laws which disadvantage women. The novel’s secondary purpose is the disparagement of what Collins perceived as a harmful national obsession with physical prowess. The upper-class villain, Geoffrey Delamayn, has been raised to prize his physicality over intellectual and moral development, and as a result he is little more than a bestial thug. The final part of the chapter shows how Collins makes use of the strange and improbable coincidences that are a staple of sensation fiction. Rather than playing down such moments, Collins emphasises ‘the capricious mercy of Chance’ and uses it as a way of revealing the influence of unforeseen circumstances on his characters and their development. Overall this chapter shows that Collins depicts human beings with little capacity for agency, personal responsibility or self-determinism; seeming acts of free will are really the result of external influences (social, legal, educational and circumstantial), and can only ever be short-sighted.
Lost for Love
Authors: Ifill Helena
Published: September 2018

Braddon depicts education as a means of cultivating character in her largely overlooked novel Lost for Love. The novel’s heroines, Flora Chamney and Louisa Gurner, find happiness because of their intellectual abilities, and end up marrying men who are responsible for their intellectual development, providing a sort of unofficial higher education. Braddon shows that women are capable of rigorous intellectual pursuits, and that this will make them attractive, interesting and useful companions to men. By emphasising woman’s role as helpmate to man, Braddon places a conservative sheen over a potentially radical depiction of female ability, and in doing so makes several inferences regarding both biological and social determinism in relation to women. On the one hand, Braddon presents women as having vast inherent intellectual potential which requires education to fulfil its promise. However, she also acknowledges that in Victorian patriarchal society it is men who are responsible for women’s development and implies that if men are going to rule society they must think more carefully about the women they want to cultivate as future wives and mothers. In this way Braddon’s addressing of the Woman Question, and her depiction of companionate marriage are grounded on her beliefs regarding character formation.
European Academy of Cancer Sciences – position paper
Authors: Adami Hans‐Olov , Berns Anton , Celis Julio E. , de Vries Elisabeth , Eggermont Alexander , Harris Adrian , zur Hausen Harald , Pelicci Pier Giuseppe , Ringborg Ulrik
Published: September 2018

The European Academy of Cancer Sciences (EACS) is an independent advisory body of well‐recognised medical specialists and researchers striving to create a compelling interactive continuum of cancer research, from innovative basic research to implementation of state‐of‐the‐art evidence‐based cancer care and prevention. Achieving the above will entail bridging high‐quality basic and preclinical cancer research to research on prevention, early detection and therapeutics as well as improving coordination of translational research efforts across Europe. The latter is expected to be expedited through quality assuring translational cancer research in Comprehensive Cancer Centres – entities that link research with the healthcare system – and networks of cancer research centres. Achieving a critical mass of expertise, resources and patients is crucial. Improving late translational research, which involves clinical studies to assess effectiveness, and added value for the health care is also a high priority. Both high‐quality Big Data collections and the intelligent use of these data will promote innovation in cancer research and support outcomes research to assess clinical utility, quality of cancer care and long‐term follow‐up of treated patients. The EACS supports the mission‐oriented approach recently proposed by the European Commission in Horizon Europe to deal with major challenges and would like to persuade the EU and its member states to formally launch a mission in cancer to boost and streamline the cancer research continuum in Europe. Building a coherent translational cancer research continuum with a focus on patients and individuals at risk will require, however, foresight as well as the extensive and continuous provision of evidence‐based advice to inform policy.
Genome‐wide identification of a novel miRNA‐based signature to predict recurrence in patients with gastric cancer
Authors: Yang Yongmei , Qu Ailin , Zhao Rui , Hua Mengmeng , Zhang Xin , Dong Zhaogang , Zheng Guixi , Pan Hongwei , Wang Hongchun , Yang Xiaoyun , Zhang Yi
Published: September 2018

The current tumor node metastasis (TNM) staging system is inadequate for identifying high‐risk gastric cancer (GC) patients. Using a systematic and comprehensive‐biomarker discovery and validation approach, we attempted to build a microRNA (miRNA)‐recurrence classifier (MRC) to improve the prognostic prediction of GC. We identified 312 differentially expressed miRNAs in 446 GC tissues compared to 45 normal controls by analyzing high‐throughput data from The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA). Using a Cox regression model, we developed an 11‐miRNA signature that could successfully discriminate high‐risk patients in the training set (n = 372; P < 0.0001). Quantitative real‐time polymerase chain reaction‐based validation in an independent clinical cohort (n = 88) of formalin‐fixed paraffin‐embedded clinical GC samples showed that MRC‐derived high‐risk patients succumb to significantly poor recurrence‐free survival in GC patients (P < 0.0001). Cox and stratification analysis indicated that the prognostic value of this signature was independent of clinicopathological risk factors. Time‐dependent receiver operating characteristic (ROC) analysis revealed that the area under the curve of this signature was significantly larger than that of TNM stage in the TCGA (0.733 vs. 0.589 at 3 years, P = 0.004; 0.802 vs. 0.635 at 5 years, P = 0.005) and validation cohort (0.835 vs. 0.689 at 3 years, P = 0.003). A nomogram was constructed for clinical use, which integrated both MRC and clinical‐related variables (depth of invasion, lymph node status and distance metastasis) and did well in the calibration plots. In conclusion, this novel miRNA‐based signature is superior to currently used clinicopathological features for identifying high‐risk GC patients. It can be readily translated into clinical practice with formalin‐fixed paraffin‐embedded specimens for specific decision‐making applications.
Heterologous expression in Toxoplasma gondii reveals a topogenic signal anchor in a Plasmodium apicoplast protein
Authors: Narayan Aishwarya , Mastud Pragati , Thakur Vandana , Rathod Pradipsinh K. , Mohmmed Asif , Patankar Swati
Published: September 2018

Glutathione peroxidase‐like thioredoxin peroxidase (PfTPxGl) is an antioxidant enzyme trafficked to the apicoplast, a secondary endosymbiotic organelle, in Plasmodium falciparum. Apicoplast trafficking signals usually consist of N‐terminal signal and transit peptides, but the trafficking signal of PfTPxGl appears to exhibit important differences. As transfection is a protracted process in P. falciparum, we expressed the N terminus of PfTPxGl as a GFP fusion protein in a related apicomplexan, Toxoplasma gondii, in order to dissect its trafficking signals. We show that PfTPxGl possesses an N‐terminal signal anchor that takes the protein to the endoplasmic reticulum in Toxoplasma—this is the first step in the apicoplast targeting pathway. We dissected the residues important for endomembrane system uptake, membrane anchorage, orientation, spacing, and cleavage. Protease protection assays and fluorescence complementation revealed that the C terminus of the protein lies in the ER lumen, a topology that is proposed to be retained in the apicoplast. Additionally, we examined one mutant, responsible for altered PfTPxGl targeting in Toxoplasma, in Plasmodium. This study has demonstrated that PfTPxGl belongs to an emergent class of proteins that possess signal anchors, unlike the canonical bipartite targeting signals employed for the trafficking of luminal apicoplast proteins. This work adds to the mounting evidence that the signals involved in the targeting of apicoplast membrane proteins may not be as straightforward as those of luminal proteins, and also highlights the usefulness of T. gondii as a heterologous system in certain aspects of this study, such as reducing screening time and facilitating the verification of membrane topology.
Both fluid intelligence and visual object recognition ability relate to nodule detection in chest radiographs
Authors: Sunday Mackenzie A. , Donnelly Edwin , Gauthier Isabel
Published: September 2018

Recent work suggests that some aspects of lung nodule detection ability may relate to object recognition ability. However, this work only sampled radiological novices. Here, we further investigate whether object recognition ability predicts lung nodule detection ability (as measured by the Vanderbilt Chest Radiograph Test or VCRT), after controlling for experience and fluid intelligence, in a sample of radiologists and nonradiologists. We find that radiological experience accounts for approximately 50% of VCRT variance. After controlling for experience, fluid intelligence and object recognition ability account for an additional 15% of VCRT variance. These results suggest that while training is key in learning to detect nodules, given the same experience level, those with higher fluid intelligence and object recognition ability perform better. The recently proposed construct of visual object recognition ability may add unique information relative to general cognitive skills in assessing aptitude for a career in radiology.
Left Ventricular Systolic Myocardial Function in Ankylosing Spondylitis
Authors: Midtbø Helga , Semb Anne G. , Matre Knut , Rollefstad Silvia , Berg Inger J. , Gerdts Eva
Published: September 2018

Objective

Subclinical left ventricular (LV) myocardial dysfunction is associated with an increased risk of cardiovascular disease (CVD), but it is not known whether subclinical LV myocardial dysfunction is present in patients with ankylosing spondylitis (AS) independent of CVD risk factors.

Methods

Conventional and speckle tracking echocardiography were performed in 106 patients with AS (mean ± SD age 48 ± 12 years; 59% men) and 106 matched controls (mean ± SD age 51 ± 12 years; 59% men). LV systolic myocardial function was assessed by peak systolic global longitudinal strain (GLS).

Results

CVD risk factors were similarly distributed in patients with AS and controls, but more controls received statin therapy (P = 0.05). GLS was significantly lower in patients with AS compared to controls (mean ± SD −17.7 ± 2.5% versus −18.4 ± 2.3%; P = 0.03). In univariable linear regression analyses in the total study population, lower GLS was associated with having AS, male sex, higher body mass index, higher LV mass index, and lower LV ejection fraction (all P < 0.05). Having AS retained an independent association with lower GLS when adjusted for these factors in multivariable analyses (β = 0.16, P = 0.02). In patients with AS, lower GLS was independently associated with larger aortic root diameter in multivariable analyses (β = 0.24, P = 0.02), while no association with AS disease activity, disease duration, or use of antirheumatic medication was observed.

Conclusion

Patients with AS had lower GLS compared with controls, independent of confounders. In AS patients, lower GLS was associated with larger aortic root diameter. Prospective studies should test whether lower GLS contributes to the observed higher CVD risk in patients with AS.
Association of Varus Knee Thrust During Walking With Worsening Western Ontario and McMaster Universities Osteoarthritis Index Knee Pain: A Prospective Cohort Study
Authors: Wink Alexandra E. , Gross K. Douglas , Brown Carrie A. , Lewis Cora E. , Torner James , Nevitt Michael C. , Tolstykh Irina , Sharma Leena , Felson David T.
Published: September 2018

Objective

To investigate the 2‐year association of varus knee thrust observed during walking to the odds of worsening Western Ontario and McMaster Universities Osteoarthritis Index (WOMAC) knee pain in older adults with or at risk of osteoarthritis (OA).

Methods

Video recordings of self‐paced walking trials of Multicenter Osteoarthritis Study participants were assessed for the presence of varus thrust at baseline. Knee pain was assessed using the WOMAC questionnaire at baseline and at 2 years. Logistic regression was used to estimate the odds of worsening knee pain (defined as either any increase in WOMAC score or as clinically important worsening), adjusting for age, sex, race, body mass index, clinic site, gait speed, and static knee alignment. Analyses were repeated, stratified by baseline radiographic OA status and among the subset of knees without baseline WOMAC pain.

Results

A total of 1,623 participants contributed 3,204 knees. Varus thrust was observed in 31.5% of knees. Knees with varus thrust had 1.44 times (95% confidence interval [95% CI] 1.19–1.73) the odds of any worsening and 1.37 times (95% CI 1.11–1.69) the odds of clinically important worsening WOMAC pain compared to knees without thrust. Knees with thrust without baseline WOMAC pain had 2.01 times (95% CI 1.47–2.74) the odds of incident total pain.

Conclusion

Results indicate that varus thrust is a risk factor for worsening and incident knee pain. Targeting varus thrust through noninvasive therapies could prevent development or worsening of knee pain in older adults with or at risk for knee OA.
Do Patients With Skin Psoriasis Show Subclinical Axial Inflammation on Magnetic Resonance Imaging of the Sacroiliac Joints and Entire Spine?
Authors: Bratu Vlad A. , Häusermann Peter , Walker Ulrich A. , Daikeler Thomas , Zubler Veronika , Jaeger Veronika K. , Weber Ulrich , Studler Ueli
Published: September 2018

Objective

To explore potential subclinical involvement of the axial skeleton by magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) of the sacroiliac (SI) joints and the entire spine in patients with skin psoriasis without clinical evidence of peripheral or axial inflammation.

Methods

Twenty patients with skin psoriasis but no clinical evidence of peripheral or axial inflammation and 22 healthy controls underwent standardized dermatologic and rheumatologic clinical examination and unenhanced 1.5T MRI of the SI joint and the entire spine. Two blinded readers globally assessed the presence or absence of SI joint inflammation simultaneously on T1‐weighted and short tau inversion recovery MRI sequences with a confidence estimate. Bone marrow edema, fat metaplasia, erosion, and ankylosis of the SI joint, and vertebral corner inflammatory lesions and fat lesions were recorded using standardized modules. The prevalence of each lesion type was calculated in both groups, averaged across 2 readers. The number of subjects with lesions in the SI joint and spine (≥1, 2, 3, 4, or 5 lesions) as concordantly assessed by both readers was recorded.

Results

The median duration of skin psoriasis was 23.0 years, the median age of patients was 48.5 years, and 25.0% of patients and 9.1% of healthy controls were concordantly classified by both readers as having SI joint inflammation (P = 0.23). The prevalence of bone marrow edema and structural lesions was comparable across patients and controls, both on SI joint and spine MRI.

Conclusion

In this controlled study, patients with skin psoriasis but no clinical arthritis or spondylitis showed limited evidence of concomitant subclinical axial involvement by SI joint and spine MRI. These findings do not support routine screening for subclinical axial inflammation in patients with longstanding skin psoriasis.