bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Letters to an Old Friend
Authors: Hayes Kevin J
Published: November 2023

As a literary device, the dream vision reached its peak during the time of Pierce Plowman. By no means did it disappear from the literary discourse once the medieval period gave way to the Renaissance. John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, the best-known dream vision of the seventeenth century, influenced such works as Benjamin Franklin’s “Silence Dogood, No. 4,” the best-known dream vision in early American literature. But Franklin was not the only early American author and, for that matter, not the only signer of the Declaration of Independence who wrote dream visions. Benjamin Rush greatly enjoyed writing them and some-times built dream visions into his personal letters.
The Retirement Library
Authors: Hayes Kevin J
Published: November 2023

Once the last wagonload of books left Monticello for Washington, the suite of rooms that had contained Jefferson’s great library looked desolate. Altogether, about 25,000 pounds of books, which had covered about seven hundred square feet of wall space, were carted from Monticello to Washington. Because Jefferson had sold the bookcases with the books in them, the rooms were now a foot wider on each side. The bare walls, like the walls of Balclutha, had a melancholy look. Standing within this empty suite once the final wagon had left, Jefferson realized an important truth about himself. Well, perhaps he did not realize it at this precise moment. Perhaps he knew it all along. But at this particular moment he could have been reminded of it more poignantly than ever before. As he said in his next letter to John Adams, “I cannot live without books.” Jefferson knew what he needed to do next. He had to start a new library. Actually, he had begun making plans for a new collection even before shipping his books to Washington. Earlier that year he had spoken about rebuilding his library at Monticello with George Ticknor, who graciously offered his help. Since Ticknor was going to Europe for an extended stay, he would be in an ideal position to acquire books Jefferson could not readily obtain in America—scholarly editions of ancient Greek and Roman texts.
The Life and Soul of the University
Authors: Hayes Kevin J
Published: November 2023

When the University of Virginia officially opened its doors the first week of March 1825, the same week John Quincy Adams was inaugurated president, the school’s library remained far from completion—but not from want of trying. Besides giving Francis Walker Gilmer the responsibility of recruiting professors in Great Britain, Jefferson had also assigned him the task of purchasing books for the university while there. He wrote Gilmer a letter of introduction to the distinguished critic and scholar Samuel Parr, asking for his help. And he recommended that Gilmer contact Lackington’s, the London bookseller who had supplied numerous books for his personal library in the past. Parr turned out to be a great help. With his advice, Gilmer put together an excellent catalogue of classical books for the university.
Introduction
Authors: Layman C Stephen
Published: November 2023

Are there any good reasons to believe that God exists? That’s the question this book attempts to answer. But in my experience, it’s unwise to plunge directly into arguments for and against the existence of God. To avoid inevitable misunderstandings, we must first tackle certain preliminary issues. For example, what counts as a “good argument” in this context? Many people become disappointed with philosophy because they demand proofs. By a “proof” I mean an argument with these two features: (1) Its premises are acceptable to all rational people, and (2) its conclusion follows logically from its premises. Proofs in this sense are rare or nonexistent in philosophy. The defense of virtually any major philosophical position will involve controversial premises at some point, i.e., premises not acceptable to all rational people.
Theism and Naturalism
Authors: Layman C Stephen
Published: November 2023

Dear Zachary,

I know it has been a long time since you’ve heard from me much too long! But I think of you often and often wish I could talk with you. I miss our discussions and regret that we live so far apart. I’ve decided to write you some letters. If you don’t have time to reply, I’ll understand. But, to make a long story short, I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about religion lately-more specifically, about the existence of God. And I’m not too happy with the thoughts I’ve been having. They seem disorganized and muddled. To be honest, I don’t know where to start.
Anthroposophic Medicine, Integrative Oncology, and Mistletoe Therapy of Cancer
Authors: Heusser Peter , Kienle Gunver Sophia
Published: November 2023

Anthroposophic medicine (AM) is a holistic form of integrative medicine. AM uses a comprehensive multimodal therapy concept that simultaneously addresses specific processes and interactions of the physical body, life functions, soul, and spirit. In oncology, AM integrates conventional tumor therapy, mistletoe and other plant or mineral medications, art therapy (painting, modeling, music, poetry recitation), eurythmy (a movement therapy), and psycho-oncological and spiritual care. Quality of life (QoL) studies show significant improvements of global, physical, emotional, cognitive, spiritual, and social QoL after holistic AM treatment in advanced cancer.
Youth And Apprenticeship: The Sound And The Fury
Authors: Porter Carolyn
Published: November 2023

Faulkner’S Life Was all About Stories-Making Them Up, making them over, even making them true. As a child in Oxford, Mississippi, he was a famous storyteller, often spinning tales with more verisimilitude than veracity. He was also an ardent listener, as he had learned to be from listening to family stories told by his grandfather, his aunts and uncles, his neighbors, stories that were themselves often more made-up than not. Meanwhile, people began to tell stories about Faulkner as well, especially as he grew up and became a writer.
The Major Phase, Part 1: As I Lay Dying, Sanctuary, And Light In August
Authors: Porter Carolyn
Published: November 2023

On June 20, 1929, Faulkner married Estelle Oldham. He would soon turn thirty-two and Estelle was thirty-three years old. Recently divorced, Estelle brought two children, aged five and ten, to the marriage, along with her own anxieties and misgivings. Judging from what his biographers have reported, Faulkner was deeply ambivalent about this decision, and Estelle was sufficiently distraught while on her honeymoon that summer that she attempted suicide. The marriage was always to he a difficult one, intermittently a disaster, not least because both were alcoholics.
Predictors of Long-Term Course and Outcome for the DOSMeD Cohort
Authors: Siegel Carole , Wanderling Joseph A , Lin Shang , Baker Sherryl
Published: November 2023

An investigation of the predictors of long-term course and outcome for persons diagnosed with schizophrenia or a related psychosis was conducted using a subsample of subjects participating in ISoS who entered the study as Incidence cases. Earlier analyses of 2-year outcomes in both the Determinants of Outcome of Schizophrenia (DOSMeD) study and the International Pilot Study of Schizophrenia (IPSS) concurred that both cultural and illness factors play a strong role in predicting outcome. Specifically, persons in developing countries had more favorable outcomes than persons in the developed countries, and insidious onset predicted poorer outcome. While some subsequent studies agreed with the WHO studies’ finding on location (Karno and Jenkins, 1993), others questioned the prudence of the crude classification of centers according to the developing– developed dichotomy and the subsequent use of this categorization as a predictor of outcomes. Such an assignment, they argued, can mask differences both across cultures (Craig, Siegel, Hopper, Lin, and Sartorius, 1997) and within them, assuming as it does that cultures are relatively homogeneous (Hopper, 1991; Edgerton and Cohen, 1994).
Identifying Prognostic Factors That Predict Recovery in the Presence of Loss to Follow-Up
Authors: Drake Christiana , Levine Richard , Laska Eugene A
Published: November 2023

Typically, the identification of prognostic factors in longitudinal outcome studies is based on data from those individuals in the cohort who are not lost to follow-up (i.e., who have not been “censored”). Loss to follow-up is a common occurrence, and the longer the follow-up period the greater the chance it will occur. If the majority of subjects are uncensored, it is unlikely that estimates will be biased. But if the percentage of censored individuals is large, the likelihood of erroneous inference grows. Bias is not a problem if the mechanisms that govern loss to follow-up are statistically independent of the outcome measure. However, if this assumption does not hold, the possibility of bias must be considered.
IPSS: Agra, India
Authors: Dube K C , Kumar Narendar
Published: November 2023

Situated on the banks of the river Yamuna, 200 km southeast of Delhi, Agra is the third largest city (1.2 million population) in the northern province of Uttar Pradesh (UP), the largest Indian state with over 160 million population. The area lies in the fertile region of the Indo-Gangetic plains bounded on the north by the Himalayan mountains. In the 25 years since IPSS (1967), the city and other parts of the catchment area have had phenomenal growth and have developed industrially; the decennial growth rate between 1981 and 1991 was 25%. Consequently, Agra is very densely populated, and its narrow roads are choked with traffic of all sorts—automotive vehicles, rickshaws, scooters, cycles, bullock carts, horse-drawn carriages, and stray cattle, all with their various pollutants. The nearby town of Mathura has one of the biggest petroleum refineries in India, and the agricultural sector of the area is undergoing a green revolution with farmers converting to modern methods. Agra has two universities and scores of colleges and has become a tourist center.
Nottingham, U.K.
Authors: Harrison Glynn , Mason Peter
Published: November 2023

For centuries, England and Scotland have been ruled by a centralized monarchy. England achieved the transition to parliamentary democracy in the 17th century with only one major civil war. Surrounded by its ocean “moat,” Shakespeare’s “sceptered isle” resisted invasion by Spain and France and, in this century, by Germany. Some believe this has nurtured a sense of insularity and even unhealthy jingoism; others argue that it has generated a distinctive independence of thought and social cohesion. Seafaring trade and conquest built a global British empire, which led to the widespread diffusion of English language and culture. Following the transition to a self-governing Commonwealth of nations, the United Kingdom (England, Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland) resumed its status as a relatively small island off the coast of Europe and joined the European Union in 1971.
Rochester, New York
Authors: Wynne Lyman C , Holmberg Sharon
Published: November 2023

Metropolitan Rochester, New York, is located at about the midpoint of the southern shore of Lake Ontario, 550 km northwest of New York City. Rochester is the core city for an area about 110 km from east to west and about 80 km north to south. Monroe County, which runs some 60 km from east to west, is the jurisdiction within this metropolitan area in which most of the mental health services are provided. While surrounding counties have some of their own services, persons with severe problems, such as psychosis, come into the city medical facilities. Rochester’s strategic location has meant that there is very little duplication of resources within the area. From the epidemiological standpoint, this has two consequences: (1) At the time of primary data collection, there was no significant “leakage” from the area of persons with acute psychoses; all were screened through the Emergency Department of Strong Memorial Hospital, the site of the Rochester WHO Center. (2) Mobility is primarily from one neighborhood to another (e.g., from the inner city to the suburbs). People tend to stay within Monroe County and continue to receive public health care services within the same jurisdiction.
Mannheim, Germany
Authors: Heiden Wolfram an der , Krumm Bertram , Müller Sabine , Schäfer Marianne , Schwerd Bettina , Weber Iris
Published: November 2023

The Mannheim Field Research Center is located in the province of Baden-Württemberg in the midWestern part of Germany. The catchment area of the study comprises Mannheim, an industrial city at the confluence of the Rhine and Neckar Rivers, the city of Heidelberg, a tourism center some 20 km from Mannheim, and the Rhine-Neckar district with a total population of about 935,000 inhabitants. Located in Mannheim are the most important industrial harbor of the province and an important railroad junction on the north/south route. The region is characterized by a massive conglomeration of industries—metal working, engine building, ship building, chemical and oil refining—as well as scattered agricultural areas cultivating mainly tobacco, hops, fruit, and vegetables.
Beijing, China
Authors: Chen Changhui , Shen Yucun
Published: November 2023

Epidemiological surveys of mental disorders carried out by Chinese psychiatrists in the 1950s, 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s indicate that schizophrenia has the highest prevalence rate of all major mental disorders (Chen and Xu, 1995) including all psychoses, drug and alcohol dependencies, personality disorders, and mental retardation. Furthermore, over time, there seems to be an increasing trend in the schizophrenia prevalence rate from 0.77 to 1.13 per 1000 in the 1950s to 0.92 to 4.60 per 1000 in the 1970s, and from 5.69 per 1000 in 1982 to 6.55 per 1000 in 1993 (Chen, Zhang, and Shen, 1986a; Chen and Xu, 1995). This disorder thus merits top priority for researchers. In the late 1950s, a door-to-door investigation of major mental disorders done by psychiatrists in various cities found a total prevalence rate for mental disorders of 1.27 to 2.82 per 1000 (Chen and Xu, 1995). These data were then used by the Health Administration as the basis of a national development plan for psychiatric institutions, professional training, and education programs.
A Brief History Of Placebos
Authors: Bausell R Barker
Published: November 2023

As far as we know, the first official use of the term ‘‘placebo’’ in a medical context occurred in a medical dictionary published in 1785, which defined a placebo therapy as something ‘‘calculated to amuse for a time.’’ Similarly, an 1811 definition characterized a placebo as something ‘‘given more to please than to benefit the patient.’’ Indeed, the Latin word placebo is commonly translated as ‘‘to please.’’ On the other hand, Patrick Wall, a well-known pain expert, argues that the medical use of this term may derive from the Latin version of Psalm 116:9, ‘‘Placebo Domino in regione vivorum,’’ which in translation means ‘‘I will walk before the Lord in the land of the living.’’ Wall hypothesizes that ‘‘placebo’’ later became a derogatory term to describe the work of priests and friars who were constantly badgering the populace for money to sing vespers for the dead—a speculation buttressed in the seventeenth century by Francis Bacon, a giant in the history of science, who used the term ironically: ‘‘instead of giving Free Counsel sing him song of placebo.’’ While there is anecdotal evidence that some ancient physicians recognized the uniquely beneficial effects of a positive, authoritative presentation of a treatment regimen, we know for sure that nineteenthand twentieth-century physicians increasingly became aware of a surprising phenomenon.
Impediments That Prevent Poorly Trained Scientists From Making Valid Inferences
Authors: Bausell R Barker
Published: November 2023

Even if ordinary people (such as Sarah) and the physicians who treat them (such as Dr. Smith) have major impediments to overcome in order to figure out what does and doesn’t work, it’s ultimately not up to them to evaluate issues scientifically. Ordinary people and clinicians didn’t come up with the theory of evolution or discover that a specific type of bread mold can cure syphilis. That sort of work—to determine the cause of things as well as what is good for us—is what we have scientists for, isn’t it? It is, but if they are not very, very careful, even our best-trained scientists are capable of being tricked by exactly the same phenomena that confounded Sarah’s and Dr. Smith’s little experiments. And unfortunately, in a discipline such as CAM, which is well outside mainstream scientific inquiry, most of its researchers historically have not been that well trained. Allow me to illustrate some of the implications of this circumstance via the further adventures of Dr. Smith.
Judging The Credibility And Plausibility Of Scientific Evidence
Authors: Bausell R Barker
Published: November 2023

I think everyone is aware that there is a major distinction between what is considered acceptable scientific evidence and what is considered to be appropriate legal, political, or religious evidence. I think, too, that most people understand that there are also major distinctions between what is considered to be acceptable evidence among the various scientific disciplines. Some sciences are primarily observational in nature, some are primarily experimental, and many are both.
Some Personal Research Involving Acupuncture
Authors: Bausell R Barker
Published: November 2023

Of the various impediments to interpreting the results of randomized, controlled trials of complementary and alternative medical therapies, the most problematic involves the difficulties involved in constructing credible placebo controls. In this chapter I will illustrate the importance of this issue via some research in which I was personally involved during my tenure with the University of Maryland’s NIH-funded Complementary Medicine Program. I believe that describing this firsthand experience is crucial as a point of reference for the remainder of the book, in which I will primarily discuss placebo and CAM research conducted by other investigators. There is always a leap of faith taken when reviewing the work of others. For one thing, it is necessary to assume that what they report about their investigations is exactly what was done in the actual trials. In addition, one has to assume that they have duly reported any serious problems arising during the course of a trial, even though for too many researchers the difficulty of doing so is akin to a camel traversing the eye of a needle—a problem that is compounded by the fact that a surprisingly large number of principal investigators are not integrally involved with what goes on during their trials but rely on other people to run the studies for them.
How We Know That The Placebo Effect Exists
Authors: Bausell R Barker
Published: November 2023

It is time to begin the process of weighing and evaluating evidence because of one simple fact: people often do feel better after they have received a complementary and alternative therapy. This, in turn, requires us to choose between the two most popular rival hypotheses, beliefs, explanations, or opinions (take your pick) advanced for explaining this strange fact: (1) CAM recipients feel better because of some biochemical, energetic, magical, or unknown component of the therapies themselves, or (2) CAM recipients feel better because of the placebo effect.
A Biochemical Explanation For The Placebo Effect
Authors: Bausell R Barker
Published: November 2023

So far I have succeeded in proving the obvious: there is such a thing as a placebo effect. Unfortunately, the answers to some other questions are not quite as obvious. For example: Is there any evidence regarding what the underlying psychological mechanism is that triggers the placebo effect? We already know that expectations play a role, but what psychological phenomenon can explain how a mere expectation can be strong enough to trigger something as dramatic as the placebo effects we’ve seen, say, in the thoracic surgery study? Pavlov’s work has given us a powerful hint in this regard, but just because dogs are our best friends doesn’t mean that we can accept their drooling as direct evidence for a placebo effect for pain relief in humans.
How CAM Therapies Are Hypothesized To Work
Authors: Bausell R Barker
Published: November 2023

We’ve now answered three of our four original questions by establishing that (1) there is credible research supporting the existence of a placebo effect for pain, (2) there are plausible biochemical reasons we should believe this research, and (3) there is no credible research to support the existence of any CAM therapeutic effect over and above what can be attributed to the placebo effect. So this brings us to our final task, which is to determine if there is some plausible biochemical reason for us to assume that there should be such an effect. Remember, scientists can be wrong, and even the most well-designed placebo-controlled RCTs can sometimes produce false negative results for therapies that in fact do work.
Tying Up A Few Loose Ends
Authors: Bausell R Barker
Published: November 2023

While our primary mission has been accomplished, I believe we need to place our results into a larger context. Specifically, given the evidence that CAM therapies are no more effective than placebos: Are there any other modern precedents for so many scientists in an entire area of endeavor to be wrong? If so, do these incidents possess anything in common? Could the public’s access to scientific information be improved to prevent so many people from being misled by marginal scientific findings? Ignoring everything said to this point, what courses of action are available to people who do simply want to find something that provides them symptomatic relief and who couldn’t care less why it does so? Earlier I artificially categorized inferential impediments into those affecting ordinary people, therapists, and scientists. While I did this in an attempt to make these rather abstract concepts a bit more concrete, ultimately we are all ordinary people and these factors conspire to help us all make fools of ourselves, scientists and nonscientists alike. So what I would like to do now is to examine a few relatively recent examples of science ‘‘gone wrong’’ to see if there are any commonalities with CAM research.
The New Medicine: An Introduction
Authors: Veatch Robert M
Published: November 2023

A new medicine is on the horizon. It is as radically different from modern medicine as modern medicine is from medicine men and faith healers. Pre-modern thinking did not understand scientific notions of cause and effect. It believed in the power of evil spirits, magical forces, and bewitching. It had no understanding of scientific evidence. Modern medicine is nothing if not scientific. At its best it refuses to tolerate, without scientific testing, folk beliefs about causes and cures. It rejects “old wives’ tales,” deeply held but unproven beliefs about the powers of all manner of strange potions, procedures, and prophecies. Although these more primitive understandings of medicine survive, they come from a paradigm entirely different from the one for the medicine we call modern or scientific.
The Puzzling Case of the Broken Arm
Authors: Veatch Robert M
Published: November 2023

This book rests on the claim that every medical decision requires value judgments that cannot be based on science. It would not be surprising if this claim were greeted with some healthy skepticism. Almost anyone would grant that some medical decisions are heavily shaped by religious and other values. Abortion, euthanasia, and even organ transplants raise profound moral and philosophical questions about the meaning and value of life. No doctor, however good a practitioner, can decide whether an abortion is “medically indicated” because the decision is always an evaluative one. Even in the increasingly rare case of a woman’s life being jeopardized by a pregnancy, science alone cannot tell whether the abortion should occur.
Societal Interests and Duties to Others
Authors: Veatch Robert M
Published: November 2023

This brings us to the third and final reason why physicians in the twentyfirst century will have to stop trying to benefit patients. Almost every plausible ethical system other than the Hippocratic one acknowledges that legitimate societal interests impinge on the patient-physician relation. We are not as far along in recognizing this third problem, but most scholars in medical ethics by now understand that there are times when the patient’s interest must be sacrificed for the good of society or to fulfill duties to others.
The New, Limited, Twenty-First-Century Role for Physicians as Patient Assistants
Authors: Veatch Robert M
Published: November 2023

The previous three chapters have provided a three-pronged analysis for why physicians must stop trying to benefit their patients. First, they cannot know what will benefit patients because reasonable patients have interests beyond the health. All rational people will make marginal sacrifices of their medical well-being in order to pursue other dimensions of a good life. Even within the medical sphere, there is no such thing as a single medical good. Saving lives, curing disease, relieving suffering, and promoting continued health are all worth pursuing, but striving for one will sometimes come at the expense of one of the other components of medical well-being. There is no definitively correct way to trade off one aspect of medical well-being for another. The right balance will depend on individual, subjective preferences, and physicians cannot know what the right balance is for their patients without asking them.
“Treatments of Choice”; and “Medical Necessity”;: Who Is Fooling Whom?
Authors: Veatch Robert M
Published: November 2023

Closely related to the idea of a treatment being “medically indicated”; are the concepts of “treatment of choice”; and “medical necessity.”; If “medical indications”; is a term that bootlegs value judgments, talking about “treatment of choice”; and “medical necessity”; is a major moonshining industry. The two expressions are closely related. “Treatment of choice”; is the simpler, so let’s attack there first.
Universal but Varied Health Insurance: Only Separate Is Equal
Authors: Veatch Robert M
Published: November 2023

Although the Clinton version of a universal health insurance plan collapsed in the political chaos of 1994, many Americans remain committed to some version of universal health coverage. Although new interest in health insurance seems to be emerging, and no viable proposal for universal health insurance has surfaced in America since those days, I will in this chapter use the Clinton plan as an example. Whether that coverage be a health service, such as Britain’s, or an insurance coverage, such as Canada’s or Germany’s, the imperative to bring the United States up to the minimally decent standard of the rest of the developed world is strong.
Randomized Human Experimentation: The Modern Dilemma
Authors: Veatch Robert M
Published: November 2023

Research medicine is another area that must undergo fundamental change in the era of the new medicine. In the modern era, medicine came to be dominated by what came to be called the “gold standard”; of medical science, the randomized clinical trial. Because medical decisions were believed to be based on medical science, it seemed to stand to reason that good science could tell physicians which treatments were “medically indicated”; or “treatments of choice.”; We have seen in chapters 8 and 9, however, that these notions are no longer meaningful in a world in which all medical choices involve value judgments. Now we need to see what the ethics of medical research is like in the new world of postmodern medicine.
Outcomes Research and How Values Sneak into Finding of Fact
Authors: Veatch Robert M
Published: November 2023

Even if clinicians and patients may rationally reject recommendations in practice guidelines and treatment protocols because they reject values incorporated into them, still many seem to believe that clinicians and patients ought to accept at least the fact finding in technology assessments. As we saw in the last chapter, many technology assessments are not so ambitious as to strive to make treatment recommendations. They claim only to be finding and reporting the relevant medical facts. If they could do that job, then the facts found in outcomes research could provide the data for the medical portion of the minor premise in the treatment syllogism. Outcomes research could provide the medical facts on which patients, clinicians, and public policy makers could impose their externally derived evaluations.
The Consensus of Medical Experts and Why It Is Wrong So Often
Authors: Veatch Robert M
Published: November 2023

Over the past two decades consensus formation among experts in the medical enterprise has had a controversial history. In the earliest, most naive stage, the belief was virtually universal that experts in clinical medicine could, by consensus, determine what were the correct clinical interventions for various conditions. Although this may still be the belief today among many ordinary clinicians as well as among patients and other laypeople, it is generally recognized by most who think critically about philosophy of medicine to contain logical errors. Earlier chapters in this book have shown why even the most expert clinicians in the world cannot, on their own, establish what is the proper clinical treatment for a particular patient.
Neuroscience and Psychiatry
Authors: Paris Joel
Published: November 2023

Almost every day, one can read media reports on the latest developments in neuroscience. Scientific journals are packed with exciting new findings. As a result, we have never known so much about the human brain as we do now, and psychiatrists and their patients could eventually be among the beneficiaries of this research. Newresearch has, for example, raised hope that the causes of mental illness will be explained by brain abnormalities. It has also spurred investigations into genetics and specifically prompted a search for genes that may be associated with mental disorders. Meanwhile, a large body of research has examined the role of neurotransmitters in these disorders. Part of what has made this extraordinary brain science possible involves new imaging techniques that, by producing dramatic pictures of the brain, seem to unlock its secrets. A large body of research has examined how neurotransmitters are involved in mental disorders. Even more exciting is the prospect that research in neuroscience may lead to new and more effective methods of treatment.
Psychotherapy and Psychiatry
Authors: Paris Joel
Published: November 2023

In the 1960s, when I trained to be a psychiatrist, I expected to spend most of my career sitting in an armchair conducting psychotherapy. Many young doctors in my generation had the same idea. Psychotherapy was what attracted us to psychiatry. We were idealistic young doctors who wanted to work with people. The attraction to psychiatry was so powerful that 40 years ago up to 10% of medical students went into psychiatry.
Diagnosis in Psychiatry
Authors: Paris Joel
Published: November 2023

Physicians have always treated disease by organizing signs and symptoms into diagnoses. These categories of illness are used to guide treatment. Ideally, medicine aims to prescribe specific therapies for specific diagnoses.
Mood and Mental Illness
Authors: Paris Joel
Published: November 2023

Depression is a state of mind that most people can understand on some level. Most of us experience periods of sadness or grief after losses or disappointments in life, and some of us know what it is like to be unhappy for months, or even years at a time. But at what point does depressed mood become a mental disorder? Unfortunately, the broad concept used in contemporary psychiatry fails to answer this question and to distinguish between normal unhappiness, an experience not uncommon in everyday life, and the paralyzing disorder that is clinical depression.
Evidence-Based Psychiatry
Authors: Paris Joel
Published: November 2023

Someone could go to 10 psychiatrists for a problem and get 10 different opinions about what the best treatment would be. This variability is not unique to psychiatry but is a problem for all of medicine. Without agreedon standards, practice can be more of an art than a science. As a whole, treatment options have long been afflicted by the dominance of clinical opinion, and in many ways, the history of medicine is rather sobering.1 In the past, physicians worked without any standards for determining whether their treatments worked. Practice depended almost entirely on the accumulation of experience.
A Mess of Pottage
Authors: Kitcher Philip
Published: November 2023

When the Kansas School Board approved a characterization of science that would allow for the teaching of intelligent design in high-school biology, champions of Darwinism were quick to issue a stern warning. States that subordinate serious scientific education to religious concerns cannot expect to be attractive to businesses that are advancing, or applying, new forms of technology. In consequence, their citizens will lose opportunities for exciting and lucrative employment. More generally, American failure to honor established science will lead to a national decline in preparedness for the economic challenges of coming decades, as schoolchildren protected from disturbing ideas will no longer be able to compete in global markets. Darwinian commentators conjured the vision of the booboisie (in Mencken’s famous phrase), burying their heads, ostrichlike, in rural idiocy, and thereby precipitating the decline of the West
“WHAT IT IS?”
Authors: Adams Michael
Published: November 2023

If I were to say to you right now, “Dude, I know where we can score some phat mongo,” what would you do? Would you call the police? Would you come along to see what I meant by mongo? Would you look up mongo in the dictionary before we left, so that you knew what you were getting into? I mean, what kind of word is mongo? It doesn’t sound like an English word. It certainly isn’t a word you learned by studying for vocabulary quizzes in school. Is it a bad word for something good, or a good word for something bad?
STANDING OUT
Authors: Adams Michael
Published: November 2023

You probably remember growing into certain types of slang when you spent more time in the schoolyard than you do now. Of course, there was the broad range of profanity (fuck and shit), experimentally crude sexual expressions (suck off and carpetmuncher), romantic metaphors (like stone cold fox and hung), not to mention all of the yo, like, and all that focused and punctuated the flow of teenage conversation: “Yo, she was all, like, baked and shit at the concert.” Some of the slang, though, was a lot cleaner and, unexpectedly, rhymed: “Dude, you show up late in her class and you are cruisin’ for a bruisin’,” and “I told her I’d wash the car if I could borrow it, and it was, like, slam, bam, thank you ma’am, I had the keys and was out the door,” and “[Caprice:] ‘Those boots are sick.’ [Haley:] ‘Hey, whatever floats your boat, chica.’ ” Kids who spoke like that were too cool for school, and after they rhymed in conversation they’d say, “Hey, I’m a poet and didn’t know it.” But they did know it, knew it so well that they couldn’t help pointing it out, couldn’t help stretching it just one rhyme more.

Slang has various social uses, especially on the schoolyard, even when it rhymes. But its value isn’t limited to social group identity, social perceptions and attitudes, or social interaction. Some of slang’s value is aesthetic, if we interpret the term aesthetic broadly. The first definition of the adjective aesthetic you’ll find in any dictionary will be something like, quoting the New Oxford American Dictionary (2005), “concerned with beauty or the appreciation of beauty.” Most slang is not “beautiful” in any conventional sense.
IT’S ALL IN YOUR HEAD
Authors: Adams Michael
Published: November 2023

Recently a group of researchers, principally Philip Davis (a professor of English at the University of Liverpool), Neil Roberts (a professor in Liverpool’s Magnetic Resonance and Image Analysis Research Centre), and Guillaume Thierry (at the University of Wales, Bangor), measured the brain activity of human subjects while those subjects read Shakespeare’s play Coriolanus. They discovered that when Shakespeare used words in odd ways, for instance, when he put a word typically recognized as a noun to use as a verb — “He godded me,” for instance — the subjects’ brains were suddenly very active. Apparently the activity was positive: it wasn’t as if the brains were confused, exactly, but rather as if they had been awakened from linguistic boredom. The conclusion was obvious: reading Shakespeare, or any author who pushes the linguistic envelope a bit, is good for your brain. Even if you were bored reading Coriolanus, it’s a good bet that your brain thoroughly enjoyed it.
Foucaultian Method A New Tale to Tell
Authors: Feder Ellen K
Published: November 2023

Feminist and critical race theorists alike have long acknowledged the ‘intersection’ of gender and race difference; it is by now a truism that the ways that we become boys and girls, men and women cannot be disentangled from the ways in which we become white or black men and women, Asian or Latino boys and girls. Such theoretical analyses have contributed in important ways to discussions of how gender is ‘raced’ and how race is ‘gendered.’ And yet, there has been little comparative analysis of the specific mechanisms that are at work in the ‘production’ of each, that is, how they are intelligible as categories, together with the ways these categories come to make sense of us—as raced and gendered human beings.
Professional Self-Regulation
Authors: Jones James W , McCullough Laurence B , Richman Bruce W
Published: November 2023

Self-regulation within surgery, either individually or as a collective effort of the profession, is among the most demanding elements of medical leadership and independent practice. It is typically a process of internal oversight and restraint that is emblematic of the dedication to professionalism observed by surgeons. Self-regulation in surgery reflects a key component of the ethical concept of fiduciary responsibility for patient care: accountability for the scientific and clinical quality of that care. The English philosopher of science and medicine, Francis Bacon (1561–1626), was among the first to call for scientific improvement of medicine, noting with scorn how physicians’ clinical judgment was more often a function of personal bias and self-interest than it was of scientific rigor. Bacon, as part of a broader proposal that helped birth the Enlightenment, called for the replacement of knowledge grounded in tradition and authority by knowledge based on “experience,” probably the first expression of the concept of evidence-based medicine.
Innovation and Research
Authors: Jones James W , McCullough Laurence B , Richman Bruce W
Published: November 2023

Surgery is perhaps the truest melding in any of the medical specialties of the objectivity of science and the subjectivity of art. Biological variability, and anatomical surprises, can make surgical art more important than surgical science in many cases. An individual “routine” for complex procedures is comprised of a complex series of individually developed algorithms. Surgical residents learn our craft by observing and repeating the techniques of the attending surgeons who teach them, but even before training is completed they will invariably begin to personalize the style of their procedures.
End-of-Life Issues
Authors: Jones James W , McCullough Laurence B , Richman Bruce W
Published: November 2023

“End-of-life” euphemizes the beginning of death. Knowledge stops at the end-of-life, death being our universal material finality. Francis Bacon (1561–1626) characterized the human emotions associated with death as, “Fear such as a small child has of the darkness.” Death motivates the existence of religion, the medical profession . . . and gravediggers. Many of the world’s great monuments, including the Great Pyramids, the Taj Mahal, the Mausoleum at Halicarnassus, Saint Peter’s Basilica, and the dynastic tombs of the Shang and the Han, are representations not only of the awe with which we confront death, but of our efforts to magically project life into death and so withstand it. Because we fear death’s ubiquity and the finality it imposes, many of ethics’ knottiest challenges are associated with end-of-life issues.
The Third Law and Nitrogen: Haber and Nernst
Authors: Coffey Patrick
Published: November 2023

In November of 1892, Fritz Haber, a twenty-four-year-old German Jewish chemist, stood at the baptismal font of the largest Lutheran church in Jena. He recited the Apostles’ Creed: I believe in God, the Father Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth, and in Jesus Christ, His only Son, our Lord: Who was conceived by the Holy Spirit, born of the Virgin Mary, suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, died, and was buried. He descended into hell. On the third day He rose again from the dead. He ascended into heaven and sits at the right hand of God the Father Almighty, from there He shall come to judge the living and the dead. I believe in the Holy Spirit, the Holy Christian Church, the communion of saints, the forgiveness of sins, the resurrection of the body, and the life everlasting Amen.
Science and the Nazis: Nernst and Haber
Authors: Coffey Patrick
Published: November 2023

In the spring of 1933, Walther Nernst, then cochairman of the University of Berlin’s department of physics, arrived at work and went looking for his colleague, Peter Pringsheim, only to be told that Pringsheim had been banned from the laboratory as a Jew. Enraged, Nernst stormed into the office of Artur Wehnelt, his cochairman. Wehnelt had been given the cochairmanship as a sinecure for past service and had always deferred to Nernst. But today he seemed puffed up, and he lectured Nernst on the importance of cleansing the laboratory of Jews and on the requirements of the new civil service law of 7 April, which clearly barred the employment of non-Aryans such as Pringsheim. Nernst was in no mood to listen. He left, hailed a taxi, and went immediately to see his old colleague and sometimes rival, Fritz Haber.
Introduction: Hello, Miles
Authors: Cook Richard
Published: November 2023

The Prince of Darkness, the Evil Genius of Jazz, the Man with the Horn, the Master Magician, the Picasso of Jazz … or, simply, just plain Miles. No other jazz musician has been mythologized so completely as Miles Davis. Some fifteen years after his death, he remains the embodiment of ‘modern jazz’ as a mysterious, exotic, faintly chaotic music - most casual listeners, after all, find the idiom baffling. A lot of jazz music is these days serviceable as background sound or hip easy listening, but Miles obliges his witnesses to pay attention (even though he made the hippest easy-listening record of them all, Kind Of Blue), simply through an enduring force of personality. His career spanned close to a half-century of music-making and he was prominent during the most extraordinary upheavals in twentieth-century music. He started as a sideman to the coolest musician in jazz, and five decades later the coolest players in popular music still wanted to play with him, or at least be seen with him. His life was sensational, too: long before the excesses of over-indulged rock stars took the fancy of a voyeuristic audience, Davis had, unwittingly or otherwise, courted many kinds of scandal.
Birth Of The Cool 1926–52
Authors: Cook Richard
Published: November 2023

Miles Davis and bebop didn’t really go together. Among bop trumpeters, I 9 he was always an uneasy fit. The musical language and style of bebop was, from the beginning, bitterly demanding on a musician’s technique: that was part of its nature, devised by its principal architects – Dizzy Gillespie, Thelonious Monk, Kenny Clarke – to keep lesser players in the shadows, and leave the stage to the real champions. When Charlie Parker came along, the idiom gained its most particular voice, a virtuoso whose musical grasp and intensity of delivery personified bop itself. Young musicians such as Davis were dazed and spellbound.
Stet: Emendations of immortality
Authors: Humez Alexander Humez Nicholas
Published: November 2023

Despite their reputation as ruthless pursuers of deviations from orthodox spelling, grammar, and usage, editors and proof readers do make mistakes. When they catch themselves having made one, however, or wish to restore text someone else has edited with more zeal than judgment, they put a line of dots under the marked word or phrase and write stet (Latin for ‘let it stand’) in the margin. It is the inverse to the three dots of ellipsis, marking something excised by chance or design from the original text: Stet puts back into place the status quo ante, restoring that which has been erroneously altered or deleted by mistake.
Dot Com: Computation Punctuation
Authors: Humez Alexander Humez Nicholas
Published: November 2023

The dot has a wide variety of uses in the ever-expanding world of the computer—in file names, commands for navigating among file directories, Internet addresses, programming language syntax, the representation of fractions as fixed-point or floating-point numbers, the printers that render files as hard copy, down to the version of the software that actually lets you do your plugged-in work or play. All of these uses of the dot will be visited here. In most cases, the examples that follow are system-agnostic, though the assumed context is generally a personal computer of some sort. Some examples are specific to the Personal Computer (PC) and the DOS/Windows operating systems, though with a few tweaks, these examples would work just as well on a Mac or under UNIX.
Period the end point
Authors: Humez Alexander Humez Nicholas
Published: November 2023

The dot as period pervades our writing, inconspicuous in itself but decisive in the way it marks the end of declarative sentences and tells us, when we’re reading them to other people, when to let our voices drop and take in some air. Making written thoughts more intelligible to readers and their listeners is something all punctuation marks do, as we have seen in the previous chapter, but this is especially true for the period. Remove the first five periods from this chapter and this paragraph becomes a syntactic thicket in whose tangles we can no longer easily guess where one sentence ends and another begins. With the periods in place, the meaning snaps into much sharper focus. And the text on the page now cues us when to pause (and for how long) if the text on the page is to be spoken out loud.
The Classical Era
Authors: ShrockP Dennis
Published: November 2023

The Classical era began in the second half of the eighteenth century as a reaction against the thick contrapuntal and ornamental textures of the Baroque, and it ended by the second decade of the nineteenth century, when formal structures were replaced by freer forms. Tradi- tionally, the dates used to mark the beginning and end of the era are 1750 (the death of J. S. Bach) and 1820 (the relative emergence of new directions in the music of Berlioz and Beethoven). As with all eras, however, the dates are only convenient markers; styles began and ended over a pe- riod of time, and some genres adopted newer traits quickly while others held to older traditions. In general, the choral genres were conservative and slow to adopt new stylistic trends. Thus while opera, ballet, and instrumental forms began to change styles in the 1730s and 1740s, masses, motets, and oratorios did not evolve into genres with new characteristics until the 1770s and even later.