The hysterical anorexia epidemic in the French nineteenth-century

The official birth of hysterical anorexia is attributed to the French alienist Ernest Charles Lasègue (1816-1883). Starting from his 1873 article, anorexia as a ‘new’ psychopathological picture is subjected to extensive clinical and theoreticalstudy. This paper is not an analysis about the process through which anorexia was formalized as specific psychiatric condition. Rather, it focuses on another important issue: the possibility that the ‘same’ disorder may have different meaning depending on the historical period considered. Furthermore, it is asserted that the study of every pathological form is conditioned by social, individual and cultural conditions. For example, in the same year the English Sir William Gull publishes a paper about “anorexia nervosa” which is described in a different way depending on the different perspective. Lasègue’s description is a way of seeing a kind of sufferance, that is he ‘sees’ this pathology through the hysterical paradigm. Starting from these considerations, this article discusses the construct of ‘hysterical anorexia’ trying to understand why, in late nineteenth century France, hysteria and anorexia were viewed as two aspects of the same specific disorder. Finally, it is discussed why anorexia gradually emerged as an independent mental disorder just after the death of Charcot (1893)

Early Land Redistribution and the Food Security of South African Households: Micro-econometric evidence from national data

The South African land redistribution program, which was launched in 1994, has been widely criticised for its slow pace as well as its seemingly limited contribution to poverty reduction, but to the best of my knowledge, no econometric evidence of the impact of land redistribution has been provided so far, as it is the case in most countries having experienced this type of policies. This paper presents estimates of the impact of having received a land grant on households´ self-reported difficulties in meeting food needs in the past 12 months, using data from the September 2002 South Africa National Labour Force Survey. Bivariate probit estimates controlling for potential self-selection of land reform beneficiaries indicate that participation in the land grant scheme has increased food insecurity for poorer participants, whilst decreasing it for comparatively better-off participants

Care, Education, protection – the Associação Protectora dos Diabéticis de Portugal goes from strength to strength

The Portuguese Diabetes Association is the world’s oldest diabetes association and a senior Member Association of the International Diabetes Federation. From the moment it was founded, early in the 20th century, to the present day, the Associação has been driven by a single overarching objective: to improve the quality of life of people with diabetes. Involved nationally in diabetes advocacy and the provision of education, as well as the delivery of care, APDP has become a key player in the healthcare arena in Portugal and its activities reach many thousands of people with diabetes

The Dirac equation, the concept of quanta, and the description of interactions in quantum electrodynamics

In this article the Dirac equation is used as a guideline to the historical emergence of the concept of quanta, associated with the quantum field. In Pascual Jordan’s approach, electrons as quanta result from the quantization of a classical field described by the Dirac equation. With this quantization procedure – also used for the electromagnetic field – the concept of quanta becomes a central piece in quantum electrodynamics. This does not seem to avoid the apparent impossibility of using the concept of quanta when interacting fields are considered together as a closed system. In this article it is defended that the type of analysis that leads to so drastic conclusions is avoidable if we look beyond the mathematical structure of the theory and take into account the physical ideas inscribed in this mathematical structure. In this case we see that in quantum electrodynamics we are not considering a closed system of interacting fields, what we have is a description of the interactions between distinct fields. In this situation the concept of quanta is central, the Fock space being the natural mathematical structure that permits maintaining the concept of quanta when considering the interaction between the fields

Trade, Envy and Growth: International Status Seeking in a Two-Country World

This paper analyzes international status seeking in a two-country model of endogenous growth: utility of agents in developing countries is affected by consumption gaps with the average consumer in advanced economies. By distorting terms of trade, status seeking: (i) may compensate for structural gaps in physical productivity, inducing convergence; (ii) may revert the link between trade and growth; and (iii) induces divergence when interacting with technological catching-up. In particular, envy in conjunction with catching-up predicts switchovers of growth leadership: when the advanced economy is both status- and technology-leader in the short run, convergence in interest rates - e.g. due to R&D spillovers - implies that the initially lagging economy becomes growth-leader in the long run, due to permanent price distortions induced by envy.Endogenous Growth; International Trade; Consumption Externalities; Productivity Di¤erences; Status Seeking; Technology Diffusion