Quaker Families and Business Networks in Nineteenth-Century Darlington

This article investigates the central role played by Quakers in the industrial and urban growth of Darlington, focusing in particular upon family and business connections with Friends in the City of London. From the launch of the town\u27s famous first railway, to the ensuing arrival of heavy industry in the 1850s and 1860s, Quakers were at the forefront of industrial and urban developments. While Quaker entrepreneurs possessed advantages in business deriving from their access to finance and advice, and from their reputation for probity, the idea that they also had special talents for foresight, innovation and management, is not borne out by the evidence

The West Yorkshire textile engineering industry, 1780-1850.

SIGLEAvailable from British Library Document Supply Centre- DSC:DX182101 / BLDSC - British Library Document Supply CentreGBUnited Kingdo

Early PREdiction of Severe Sepsis (ExPRES-Sepsis) study: protocol for an observational derivation study to discover potential leucocyte cell surface biomarkers.

INTRODUCTION: Sepsis is an acute illness resulting from infection and the host immune response. Early identification of individuals at risk of developing life-threatening severe sepsis could enable early triage and treatment, and improve outcomes. Currently available biomarkers have poor predictive value for predicting subsequent clinical course in patients with suspected infection. Circulating leucocytes provide readily accessible tissues that reflect many aspects of the complex immune responses described in sepsis. We hypothesise that measuring cellular markers of immune responses by flow cytometry will enable early identification of infected patients at risk of adverse outcomes. We aim to characterise leucocyte surface markers (biomarkers) and their abnormalities in a population of patients presenting to the hospital emergency department with suspected sepsis, and explore their ability to predict subsequent clinical course. METHODS AND ANALYSIS: We will conduct a prospective, multicentre, clinical, exploratory, cohort observational study. To answer our study question, 3 patient populations will be studied. First, patients with suspected sepsis from the emergency department (n=300). To assess performance characteristics of potential tests, critically ill patients with established sepsis, and age and gender matched patients without suspicion of infection requiring hospital admission (both n=100) will be recruited as comparator populations. In all 3 groups, we plan to assess circulating biomarker profiles using flow cytometry. We will select candidate biomarkers by cross-cohort comparison, and then explore their predictive value for clinical outcomes within the cohort with suspected sepsis. ETHICS AND DISSEMINATION: The study will be carried out based on the principles in the Declaration of Helsinki and the International Conference on Harmonisation Good Clinical Practice. Ethics approval has been granted from the Scotland A Research Ethics Committee (REC) and Oxford C REC. On conclusion of this study, the results will be disseminated via peer-reviewed journals. TRIAL REGISTRATION NUMBER: NCT02188992; Pre-results

ActEarly: a City Collaboratory approach to early promotion of good health and wellbeing.

Economic, physical, built, cultural, learning, social and service environments have a profound effect on lifelong health. However, policy thinking about health research is dominated by the 'biomedical model' which promotes medicalisation and an emphasis on diagnosis and treatment at the expense of prevention. Prevention research has tended to focus on 'downstream' interventions that rely on individual behaviour change, frequently increasing inequalities. Preventive strategies often focus on isolated leverage points and are scattered across different settings. This paper describes a major new prevention research programme that aims to create City Collaboratory testbeds to support the identification, implementation and evaluation of upstream interventions within a whole system city setting. Prevention of physical and mental ill-health will come from the cumulative effect of multiple system-wide interventions. Rather than scatter these interventions across many settings and evaluate single outcomes, we will test their collective impact across multiple outcomes with the goal of achieving a tipping point for better health. Our focus is on early life (ActEarly) in recognition of childhood and adolescence being such critical periods for influencing lifelong health and wellbeing

Patents and Industrialisation. An Historical Overview of the British Case, 1624-1907

A Report to the Strategic Advisory Board on Intellectual Property Policy (SABIP), U

Family Firms and Business Networks: Textile Engineering in Yorkshire, 1780-1830

Recent accounts of nineteenth-century industrial organisation have presented the family firm as a secure environment in an essentially low-trust business environment. This article considers the transition of the textile engineering industry from an artisan trade of the late eighteenth century to one centred upon factories from the 1820s. Business networks were much more than casual links outside individual firms, but made up a central part of the industrial structure and operated in a collaborative, rather than a competitive, framework. In contrast, experiences of engineers within family firms illustrate that relationships within those firms were not guaranteed to be less problematic than with members of the surrounding community.