The John Jay Papers: Re-envisioning a 20th-Century Editorial Project for a 21st-Century Audience

John Jay\u27s papers have had a far more tortured history than they deserve-and more than seemed their destiny at his death in 1829. Then it seemed likely that his career and contributions would be studied as carefully and enthusiastically as any other Founding Father\u27s-certainly as closely as his friends John Adams and Alexander Hamilton. His family\u27s archive had survived the Revolution in war-torn Westchester County and New York City. His personal papers had successfully crossed the Atlantic when he returned from diplomatic missions abroad in 1784 and 1795. Jay\u27s will placed those papers in the custody of his devoted family, and his younger son, William, published a creditable two volume life and letters of his father in the 1830s. As the years passed, Jay\u27s documentary record still seemed to be blessed. His descendants, unlike those of Madison and Jefferson, did not fall on hard times, and there were no emergency sales of historical manuscripts for cash

Lyman H. Butterfield Award for 2009 Presented to Gregg L. Lint

Now I will begin leaking details that will enable you to confirm your suspicions, for by now many of you will have guessed that this year’s recipient of the Lyman H. Butterfield Award is Gregg L. Lint. The project where he has spent his entire career as an editor is, of course, the Adams Papers, whose staff he joined in the fall of 1975. He recently completed work on the fifteenth volume of The Papers of John Adams, the series with which he has been most closely identified. He has been the “lead editor” responsible for volumes in that series since 1983, and the 2010 volume will be the ninth in which his position on the title page recognizes his role. In addition, he has contributed to several other volumes in other Adams Papers series. Said one colleague: “His knowledge of John Adams’s public life is unrivaled, and he has used that expertise to produce well-edited books that have furthered substantially our understanding of U.S. diplomacy in the revolutionary era.” Another regrets the fact that “nowadays not many students of the late colonial, revolutionary, and early national periods think of themselves as diplomatic historians.” But our Butterfield laureate does, and his work shows him to be “a scholar of diplomatic history of insight and skill.

Confessions of a Deceitful Correspondent

In evaluating personal correspondence, most editors must spend considerable time speculating on authorial intention and the responses of the women and men who were the intended audience for each letter. Tonight I shall discuss what may be learned from an archive of letters where little such informed guesswork is necessary. At least on my part

In Memoriam

Beverly Runge--Larry I. Bland--John Y. Simo

In Vivo Anti-Biofilm and Anti-Bacterial Non-Leachable Coating Thermally Polymerized on Cylindrical Catheter

Catheters are indispensable tools of modern medicine, but catheter-associated infection is a significant clinical problem, even when stringent sterile protocols are observed. When the bacteria colonize catheter surfaces, they tend to form biofilms making them hard to treat with conventional antibiotics. Hence, there is a great need for inherently antifouling and antibacterial catheters that prevent bacterial colonization. This paper reports the preparation of nonleachable antibiofilm and antibacterial cationic film coatings directly polymerized from actual tubular silicone catheter surfaces via the technique of supplemental activator and reducing agent surface-initiated atom-transfer radical polymerization (SARA SI-ATRP). Three cross-linked cationic coatings containing (3-acrylamidopropyl) trimethylammonium chloride (AMPTMA) or quaternized polyethylenimine methacrylate (Q-PEI-MA) together with a cross-linker (polyethylene glycol dimethacrylate, PEGDMA) were tested. The in vivo antibacterial and antibiofilm effect of these nonleachable covalently linked coatings (using a mouse catheter model) can be tuned to achieve 1.95 log (98.88%) reduction and 1.26 log (94.51%) reduction of clinically relevant pathogenic bacteria (specifically with methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) and vancomycin-resistant Enterococcus faecalis (VRE)). Our good in vivo bactericidal killing results using the murine catheter-associated urinary tract infection (CAUTI) model show that SARA SI-ATRP grafting-from technique is a viable technique for making nonleachable antibiofilm coating even on “small” (0.30/0.64 mm inner/outer diameter) catheter

Prevalence of ICU delirium in postoperative pediatric cardiac surgery patients

OBJECTIVES: The objective of this study was to determine the prevalence of ICU delirium in children less than 18 years old that underwent cardiac surgery within the last 30 days. The secondary aim of the study was to identify risk factors associated with ICU delirium in postoperative pediatric cardiac surgical patients. DESIGN: A 1-day, multicenter point-prevalence study of delirium in pediatric postoperative cardiac surgery patients. SETTING: Twenty-seven pediatric cardiac and general critical care units caring for postoperative pediatric cardiac surgery patients in North America. PATIENTS: All children less than 18 years old hospitalized in the cardiac critical care units at 06:00 on a randomly selected, study day. INTERVENTIONS: Eligible children were screened for delirium using the Cornell Assessment of Pediatric Delirium by the study team in collaboration with the bedside nurse. MEASUREMENT AND MAIN RESULTS: Overall, 181 patients were enrolled and 40% (n = 73) screened positive for delirium. There were no statistically significant differences in patient demographic information, severity of defect or surgical procedure, past medical history, or postoperative day between patients screening positive or negative for delirium. Our bivariate analysis found those patients screening positive had a longer duration of mechanical ventilation (12.8 vs 5.1 d; p = 0.02); required more vasoactive support (55% vs 26%; p = 0.0009); and had a higher number of invasive catheters (4 vs 3 catheters; p = 0.001). Delirium-positive patients received more total opioid exposure (1.80 vs 0.36 mg/kg/d of morphine equivalents; p \u3c 0.001), did not have an ambulation or physical therapy schedule (p = 0.02), had not been out of bed in the previous 24 hours (p \u3c 0.0002), and parents were not at the bedside at time of data collection (p = 0.008). In the mixed-effects logistic regression analysis of modifiable risk factors, the following variables were associated with a positive delirium screen: 1) pain score, per point increase (odds ratio, 1.3; 1.06-1.60); 2) total opioid exposure, per mg/kg/d increase (odds ratio, 1.35; 1.06-1.73); 3) SBS less than 0 (odds ratio, 4.01; 1.21-13.27); 4) pain medication or sedative administered in the previous 4 hours (odds ratio, 3.49; 1.32-9.28); 5) no progressive physical therapy or ambulation schedule in their medical record (odds ratio, 4.40; 1.41-13.68); and 6) parents not at bedside at time of data collection (odds ratio, 2.31; 1.01-5.31). CONCLUSIONS: We found delirium to be a common problem after cardiac surgery with several important modifiable risk factors