Advancing the understanding of treponemal disease in the past and present

Syphilis was perceived to be a new disease in Europe in the late 15th century, igniting a debate about its origin that continues today in anthropological, historical, and medical circles. We move beyond this age-old debate using an interdisciplinary approach that tackles broader questions to advance the understanding of treponemal infection (syphilis, yaws, bejel, and pinta). How did the causative organism(s) and humans co-evolve? How did the related diseases caused by Treponema pallidum emerge in different parts of the world and affect people across both time and space? How are T. pallidum subspecies related to the treponeme causing pinta? The current state of scholarship in specific areas is reviewed with recommendations made to stimulate future work. Understanding treponemal biology, genetic relationships, epidemiology, and clinical manifestations is crucial for vaccine development today and for investigating the distribution of infection in both modern and past populations. Paleopathologists must improve diagnostic criteria and use a standard approach for recording skeletal lesions on archaeological human remains. Adequate contextualization of cultural and environmental conditions is necessary, including site dating and justification for any corrections made for marine or freshwater reservoir effects. Biogeochemical analyses may assess aquatic contributions to diet, physiological changes arising from treponemal disease and its treatments (e.g., mercury), or residential mobility of those affected. Shifting the focus from point of origin to investigating who is affected (e.g., by age/sex or socioeconomic status) and disease distribution (e.g., coastal/ inland, rural/urban) will advance our understanding of the treponemal disease and its impact on people through time

La psicomotricidad en los niños menores de 5 años

El presente trabajo académico se desarrolla dentro del campo de la educación y es un esfuerzo de contribuir al docente con conocimiento o reconocimiento para el logro de sus objetivos educativos en los educandos es decir con los aprendizajes. El tema a abordar un tema fundamental en educación sobretodo en educación inicial, hacemos referencia a la psicomotricidad. Es sabido en la formación docente y en la amplia literatura científica pedagógica que el psicomotricidad es por necesaria para cualquier tipo de actividad humana y para el desarrollo humano en general. En este trabajo estamos actualizando información importante en este tema en el fundamental campo de la educación.Trabajo académic

Bernard de Gordon (fl. 1270-1330): medieval physician and teacher

The Montpellier physician Bernard de Gordon flourished in the late Middle Ages in the era when university education first evolved in the training of European physicians. Fragmentary details of his life and medical influence are known from seven books, particularly his extensive (163 chapters) text Lilium Medicine and from Chaucer's reference to him in the Canterbury Tales. Chaucer lists Bernard de Gordon as one whose writings were part of the core curriculum of the best-trained European doctors of medieval Europe. Bernard de Gordon was one of that small group of medieval physicians who reverently followed Galenic lore which had endured for a thousand years yet who began to challenge its details and to experiment clinically with new methods of treatment. In his writings, Bernard de Gordon made the first reference to spectacles and to the hernial truss. His writings also contained detailed desiderata for the ethical best practice of medicine of his day, extending the principles of both Hippocrates and Haly ibn Abbas. Unlike many of the surviving writings of other medieval medical teachers, his texts have within them a tone of humility and acknowledged fallibility. Bernard de Gordon holds a small but significant place in the evolving pre-Renaissance chronology of medical professionalism

Anglo-Saxon concepts of dis/ability: Placing disease at Great Chesterford in its wider context

Within Anglo-Saxon society, individuals obtained their status on the basis of their ability to undertake required and prescribed social roles. People experiencing impairment, be that as a result of disease or some other process including trauma or pregnancy, might thus have reduced ability to undertake socially required activities. These people would have been highly visible within contemporary society by their very inability to undertake all required roles. These ideas are explored using a cluster of inhumations from the early Anglo-Saxon cemetery at Great Chesterford. Cemetery topography, visibility of difference, liminality, and etiology are explored in order to suggest the importance of the development of a sample-based approach to osteobiography. These might then be used to establish local understandings of disability,whereby individuals are viewed as people with focus placed on ability

Digitization of data for a historical medical dictionary

What are known as specialized or specialist dictionaries are much more than lists of words and their definitions with occasional comments on things such as synonymy and homonymy. That is to say, a particular specialist term may be associated with many other concepts, including quotations, different senses, etymological categories, semantic categories, superordinate and subordinate terms in the terminological hierarchy, spelling variants, and references to background sources discussing the exact meaning and application of the term. The various concepts, in turn, form networks of mutual links, which makes the structure of the background concepts demanding to model when designing a database structure for this type of dictionary. The Dictionary of medical vocabulary in English, 1375–1550 is a specialized historical dictionary that covers the vast medical lexicon of the centuries examined. It comprises over 12,000 terms, each of them associated with a host of background concepts. Compiling the dictionary took over 15 years. The process started with an analysis of hand-written manuscripts and early printed books from different sources and ended with the electronic dictionary described in the present paper. Over these years, the conceptual structure, database schema, and requirements for essential use cases were iteratively developed. In our paper, we introduce the conceptual structure and database schema modelled for implementing an electronic dictionary that involves different use cases such as term insertion and linking a term to related concepts. The achieved conceptual model, database structure, and use cases provide a general framework for reference-oriented specialized dictionaries, including ones with a historical orientation.publishedVersionPeer reviewe