Françoise Briegel et Michel Porret [dir.], Le criminel endurci. Récidive et récidivistes du Moyen Âge au xxe siècle. Actes du colloque de l’International Association for the History of Crime and Criminal Justice tenu à Genève du 6 au 8 juin 2002, Droz, Genève, 2006, 395 p. ISBN : 2-600-01033-5. 50 francs suisses.Claire Dolan [dir.], Entre justice et justiciables : les auxiliaires de la justice du Moyen Âge au xxe siècle. Actes du Colloque tenu à Québec du 15 au 17 septembre 2004, Presses universitaires de Laval, Canada, 2005, 828 p. ISBN : 2-7637-8268-X. 50 dollars canadiens.

La parution de deux imposants ouvrages collectifs consacrés à l’histoire de la justice dans une périodisation longue qui s’étend du Moyen Âge au xxesiècle montre le dynamisme actuel de ce champ. Le criminel endurci. Récidive et récidivistes du Moyen Âge au xxesiècle poursuit la série de colloques genevois (Le corps violenté ; Homo criminalis. Pratiques et doctrines médico-légales ; Beccaria et la culture juridique des Lumières ) qui proposent une histoire sociale du crime et du système pénal..

Aliénation mentale, irresponsabilité pénale et dangerosité sociale face à la justice du XIXe siècle. Étude d’un cas de fureur

La fureur est un ancien concept appartenant au droit autant qu’à la médecine. Remise au goût du jour, au début du XIXe siècle, par les aliénistes qui en proposent des formes novatrices, cette folie délirante et menaçante a justifié, dans les années 1830, une série de verdicts d’acquittements appliquant la loi sur l’irresponsabilité pénale des déments. L’analyse du procès de Théodore Durand, accusé d’homicide, permettra de montrer l’impasse dans laquelle se trouve alors l’institution judiciaire, qui renonce à punir un acte grave, tandis que son auteur ne peut être interné parce qu’il a recouvré la raison.La Fureur (insane frenzy) is an old concept in both law and medecine. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, in accordance with much contemporary thinking, it was revived by alienists then in the process of developing new ideas. During the 1830s, as the law of criminal responsibility was applied to offenders apparently suffering from this delirious and threatening form of madness, there were a series of acquittals. An analysis of the trial for murder of Theodore Durand demonstrates the dead end in which the judicial institution found itself when it relinquished the right to punish a serious offence, yet could not incarcerate the offender who had subsequently recovered his sanity

Folie ou passion : l’acquittement d’un monomane (Jules Rousse, 1855)

Ce travail est l’étude d’une enquête judiciaire : celle suscitée en 1855 par le crime de Jules Rousse, parricide aux motivations énigmatiques commis par un fils de famille bordelais. Le cheminement des investigations et le lent travail de taxinomie judiciaire qui permettent de faire la généalogie du verdict donnent une place centrale à l’analyse de la personnalité de l’inculpé. Cette étude de cas atteste ainsi une mutation fondamentale du travail judiciaire centré désormais sur le criminel plus que sur le crime. L’analyse de la personnalité s’appuie sur les catégories alors constitutives du sujet : les passions, le caractère, la moralité, l’hérédité, le suicide, la masturbation et la cruauté en forment une grille de questionnement précise qui structure la réflexion. Les médecins, dont certains sont de grande notoriété comme Tardieu, Devergie ou Calmeil y jouent un rôle fondamental et, malgré les hésitations des magistrats, s’imposent aux jurés qui acquittent Jules Rousse.Madness or passion: the acquittal of a monomaniac (Jules Rousse, on 1855) This case study attempts to analyse the inquiry provoked by the crime of Jules Rousse: a parricide, for which the motives were enigmatic, committed by the son of a well-established family from Bordeaux. The verdict was given after a long judicial inquiry. The analyses of the legal inquiry and the slow process of judicial taxonomy reveals the central role allotted to the questions related to the personality of the accused. This case study adds evidence to the observation of a fundamental transfer from the crime to the criminal operated within judicial practice. The legal inquiry was based on subjective criteria that were supposed to define a subject. These criteria could be summarized within the categories related to the question of passion, character, morality, heredity, suicide, masturbation and cruelty. The expertise given by medical doctors among whom some were very famous like Tardieu, Devergie or Calmeil played a fundamental role. Despite the serious concerns and hesitations formulated by the magistrates, the medical doctors imposed their views upon the members of the jury and Jules Rousse was acquitted

Introduction : usages du droit dans l’historiographie du xixe siècle

Alors que le droit semblait un cadre lointain de processus sociaux qui le dépassaient largement, nombre de travaux d’histoire et de sociologie historique mobilisent aujourd’hui les ressources de la législation et de la fabrique de la loi, mais aussi du droit élaboré en continu par la jurisprudence et par la doctrine juridique. Compris comme l’enjeu de débats incessants, et ouvert à l’évolution, le droit révèle un ordre symbolique structurant, ainsi qu’une anthropologie dominante ; mais il est..

Mesures policières de sûreté et populations particulièrement surveillées. Le registre des détenus administratifs de Bicêtre (1813-1851)

Le registre de Bicêtre, coté 2Y1-1, rencontré aux Archives départementales du Val-de-Marne au hasard d’une recherche sur un cas d’internement à l’hospice, est un gros in folio composé de cadres pré-imprimés, sur le modèle des registres d’écrou. Il garde trace des entrées et sorties de prison : ici 1618 décisions d’enfermement à la maison de détention de Bicêtre, à l’initiative du ministre de l’Intérieur et du préfet de police de Paris entre 1813 et 1851. Ce document éclaire une procédure habi..

Strong EBV-specific CD8+ T-cell response in patients with early multiple sclerosis

Epstein-Barr virus (EBV) has been associated with multiple sclerosis (MS), however, most studies examining the relationship between the virus and the disease have been based on serologies, and if EBV is linked to MS, CD8+ T cells are likely to be involved as they are important both in MS pathogenesis and in controlling viruses. We hypothesized that valuable information on the link between MS and EBV would be ascertained from the study of frequency and activation levels of EBV-specific CD8+ T cells in different categories of MS patients and control subjects. We investigated EBV-specific cellular immune responses using proliferation and enzyme linked immunospot assays, and humoral immune responses by analysis of anti-EBV antibodies, in a cohort of 164 subjects, including 108 patients with different stages of MS, 35 with other neurological diseases and 21 healthy control subjects. Additionally, the cohort were all tested against cytomegalovirus (CMV), another neurotropic herpes virus not convincingly associated with MS, nor thought to be deleterious to the disease. We corrected all data for age using linear regression analysis over the total cohorts of EBV- and CMV-infected subjects. In the whole cohort, the rate of EBV and CMV infections were 99% and 51%, respectively. The frequency of IFN-γ secreting EBV-specific CD8+ T cells in patients with clinically isolated syndrome (CIS) was significantly higher than that found in patients with relapsing-remitting MS (RR-MS), secondary-progressive MS, primary-progressive MS, patients with other neurological diseases and healthy controls. The shorter the interval between MS onset and our assays, the more intense was the EBV-specific CD8+ T-cell response. Confirming the above results, we found that EBV-specific CD8+ T-cell responses decreased in 12/13 patients with CIS followed prospectively for 1.0 ± 0.2 years. In contrast, there was no difference between categories for EBV-specific CD4+ T cell, or for CMV-specific CD4+ and CD8+ T-cell responses. Anti-EBV-encoded nuclear antigen-1 (EBNA-1)-specific antibodies correlated with EBV-specific CD8+ T cells in patients with CIS and RR-MS. However, whereas EBV-specific CD8+ T cells were increased the most in early MS, EBNA-1-specific antibodies were increased in early as well as in progressive forms of MS. Our data show high levels of CD8+ T-cell activation against EBV—but not CMV—early in the course of MS, which support the hypothesis that EBV might be associated with the onset of this diseas

Improved methods to produce tissue-engineered skin substitutes suitable for the permanent closure of full-thickness skin injuries

There is a clinical need for skin substitutes to replace full-thickness skin loss. Our group has developed a bilayered skin substitute produced from the patient’s own fibroblasts and keratinocytes referred to as Self-Assembled Skin Substitute (SASS). After cell isolation and expansion, the current time required to produce SASS is 45 days. We aimed to optimize the manufacturing process to standardize the production of SASS and to reduce production time. The new approach consisted in seeding keratinocytes on a fibroblast-derived tissue sheet before its detachment from the culture plate. Four days following keratinocyte seeding, the resulting tissue was stacked on two fibroblast-derived tissue sheets and cultured at the air–liquid interface for 10 days. The resulting total production time was 31 days. An alternative method adapted to more contractile fibroblasts was also developed. It consisted in adding a peripheral frame before seeding fibroblasts in the culture plate. SASSs produced by both new methods shared similar histology, contractile behavior in vitro and in vivo evolution after grafting onto mice when compared with SASSs produced by the 45-day standard method. In conclusion, the new approach for the production of high-quality human skin substitutes should allow an earlier autologous grafting for the treatment of severely burned patients

The Athena X-ray Integral Field Unit: a consolidated design for the system requirement review of the preliminary definition phase

The Athena X-ray Integral Unit (X-IFU) is the high resolution X-ray spectrometer, studied since 2015 for flying in the mid-30s on the Athena space X-ray Observatory, a versatile observatory designed to address the Hot and Energetic Universe science theme, selected in November 2013 by the Survey Science Committee. Based on a large format array of Transition Edge Sensors (TES), it aims to provide spatially resolved X-ray spectroscopy, with a spectral resolution of 2.5 eV (up to 7 keV) over an hexagonal field of view of 5 arc minutes (equivalent diameter). The X-IFU entered its System Requirement Review (SRR) in June 2022, at about the same time when ESA called for an overall X-IFU redesign (including the X-IFU cryostat and the cooling chain), due to an unanticipated cost overrun of Athena. In this paper, after illustrating the breakthrough capabilities of the X-IFU, we describe the instrument as presented at its SRR, browsing through all the subsystems and associated requirements. We then show the instrument budgets, with a particular emphasis on the anticipated budgets of some of its key performance parameters. Finally we briefly discuss on the ongoing key technology demonstration activities, the calibration and the activities foreseen in the X-IFU Instrument Science Center, and touch on communication and outreach activities, the consortium organisation, and finally on the life cycle assessment of X-IFU aiming at minimising the environmental footprint, associated with the development of the instrument. Thanks to the studies conducted so far on X-IFU, it is expected that along the design-to-cost exercise requested by ESA, the X-IFU will maintain flagship capabilities in spatially resolved high resolution X-ray spectroscopy, enabling most of the original X-IFU related scientific objectives of the Athena mission to be retained. (abridged).Comment: 48 pages, 29 figures, Accepted for publication in Experimental Astronomy with minor editin

The Athena X-ray Integral Field Unit: a consolidated design for the system requirement review of the preliminary definition phase

The Athena X-ray Integral Unit (X-IFU) is the high resolution X-ray spectrometer studied since 2015 for flying in the mid-30s on the Athena space X-ray Observatory. Athena is a versatile observatory designed to address the Hot and Energetic Universe science theme, as selected in November 2013 by the Survey Science Committee. Based on a large format array of Transition Edge Sensors (TES), X-IFU aims to provide spatially resolved X-ray spectroscopy, with a spectral resolution of 2.5 eV (up to 7 keV) over a hexagonal field of view of 5 arc minutes (equivalent diameter). The X-IFU entered its System Requirement Review (SRR) in June 2022, at about the same time when ESA called for an overall X-IFU redesign (including the X-IFU cryostat and the cooling chain), due to an unanticipated cost overrun of Athena. In this paper, after illustrating the breakthrough capabilities of the X-IFU, we describe the instrument as presented at its SRR (i.e. in the course of its preliminary definition phase, so-called B1), browsing through all the subsystems and associated requirements. We then show the instrument budgets, with a particular emphasis on the anticipated budgets of some of its key performance parameters, such as the instrument efficiency, spectral resolution, energy scale knowledge, count rate capability, non X-ray background and target of opportunity efficiency. Finally, we briefly discuss the ongoing key technology demonstration activities, the calibration and the activities foreseen in the X-IFU Instrument Science Center, touch on communication and outreach activities, the consortium organisation and the life cycle assessment of X-IFU aiming at minimising the environmental footprint, associated with the development of the instrument. Thanks to the studies conducted so far on X-IFU, it is expected that along the design-to-cost exercise requested by ESA, the X-IFU will maintain flagship capabilities in spatially resolved high resolution X-ray spectroscopy, enabling most of the original X-IFU related scientific objectives of the Athena mission to be retained. The X-IFU will be provided by an international consortium led by France, The Netherlands and Italy, with ESA member state contributions from Belgium, Czech Republic, Finland, Germany, Poland, Spain, Switzerland, with additional contributions from the United States and Japan.The French contribution to X-IFU is funded by CNES, CNRS and CEA. This work has been also supported by ASI (Italian Space Agency) through the Contract 2019-27-HH.0, and by the ESA (European Space Agency) Core Technology Program (CTP) Contract No. 4000114932/15/NL/BW and the AREMBES - ESA CTP No.4000116655/16/NL/BW. This publication is part of grant RTI2018-096686-B-C21 funded by MCIN/AEI/10.13039/501100011033 and by “ERDF A way of making Europe”. This publication is part of grant RTI2018-096686-B-C21 and PID2020-115325GB-C31 funded by MCIN/AEI/10.13039/501100011033

Large expert-curated database for benchmarking document similarity detection in biomedical literature search

Document recommendation systems for locating relevant literature have mostly relied on methods developed a decade ago. This is largely due to the lack of a large offline gold-standard benchmark of relevant documents that cover a variety of research fields such that newly developed literature search techniques can be compared, improved and translated into practice. To overcome this bottleneck, we have established the RElevant LIterature SearcH consortium consisting of more than 1500 scientists from 84 countries, who have collectively annotated the relevance of over 180 000 PubMed-listed articles with regard to their respective seed (input) article/s. The majority of annotations were contributed by highly experienced, original authors of the seed articles. The collected data cover 76% of all unique PubMed Medical Subject Headings descriptors. No systematic biases were observed across different experience levels, research fields or time spent on annotations. More importantly, annotations of the same document pairs contributed by different scientists were highly concordant. We further show that the three representative baseline methods used to generate recommended articles for evaluation (Okapi Best Matching 25, Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency and PubMed Related Articles) had similar overall performances. Additionally, we found that these methods each tend to produce distinct collections of recommended articles, suggesting that a hybrid method may be required to completely capture all relevant articles. The established database server located at https://relishdb.ict.griffith.edu.au is freely available for the downloading of annotation data and the blind testing of new methods. We expect that this benchmark will be useful for stimulating the development of new powerful techniques for title and title/abstract-based search engines for relevant articles in biomedical research.Peer reviewe