Recruiting Small Manufacturing Worksites That Employ Multiethnic, Low-Wage Workforces Into a Cancer Prevention Research Trial

Introduction: Worksites, including those that employ multiethnic, low-wage workforces, represent a strategic venue for reaching populations at risk for developing cancer. Methods: We surveyed 197 small manufacturing worksites prior to an effort to recruit their workforces into a randomized clinical trial designed to test the effectiveness of a cancer prevention intervention among multiethnic, low-wage manufacturing workers. This paper assesses the external validity of the trial based on three factors: the percentage of potential trial sites excluded from consideration, the percentage of eligible worksites that adopted the trial, and worksite characteristics associated with adoption. Results: We found no statistically significant differences between worksites that adopted the trial and worksites that declined the trial with regard to employee demographics, anticipated changes in workforce size, and perceived importance and history of offering health promotion and occupational health and safety activities. Conclusion: Small manufacturing worksites present a viable venue for reaching multiethnic, low-wage populations with cancer prevention programs, although program adoption rates may be low in this sector. Worksites that adopted the trial are likely to represent worksites deemed eligible for the trial

Recruiting Small Manufacturing Worksites That Employ Multiethnic, Low-wage Workforces Into a Cancer Prevention Research Trial

INTRODUCTION: Worksites, including those that employ multiethnic, low-wage workforces, represent a strategic venue for reaching populations at risk for developing cancer. METHODS: We surveyed 197 small manufacturing worksites prior to an effort to recruit their workforces into a randomized clinical trial designed to test the effectiveness of a cancer prevention intervention among multiethnic, low-wage manufacturing workers. This paper assesses the external validity of the trial based on three factors: the percentage of potential trial sites excluded from consideration, the percentage of eligible worksites that adopted the trial, and worksite characteristics associated with adoption. RESULTS: We found no statistically significant differences between worksites that adopted the trial and worksites that declined the trial with regard to employee demographics, anticipated changes in workforce size, and perceived importance and history of offering health promotion and occupational health and safety activities. CONCLUSION: Small manufacturing worksites present a viable venue for reaching multiethnic, low-wage populations with cancer prevention programs, although program adoption rates may be low in this sector. Worksites that adopted the trial are likely to represent worksites deemed eligible for the trial

Opera and Hypnosis: Victor Maurel’s Experiments with Verdi’s Otello

One day in his private home on the avenue Bugeaud, in Paris’s sixteenth arrondissement, the famous baritone Victor Maurel hosted a meeting which combined music with hypnotism of a young woman

Vocal Culture in the Age of Laryngoscopy

For several months beginning in 1884, readers of Life, Science, Health, the Atlantic Monthly and similar magazines would have encountered half-page advertisements for a newly patented medical device called the ‘ammoniaphone’ (Figure 2.1). Invented and promoted by a Scottish doctor named Carter Moffat and endorsed by the soprano Adelina Patti, British Prime Minister William Gladstone and the Princess of Wales, the ammoniaphone promised a miraculous transformation in the voices of its users. It was recommended for ‘vocalists, clergymen, public speakers, parliamentary men, readers, reciters, lecturers, leaders of psalmody, schoolmasters, amateurs, church choirs, barristers, and all persons who have to use their voices professionally, or who desire to greatly improve their speaking or singing tones’. Some estimates indicated that Moffat sold upwards of 30,000 units, yet the ammoniaphone was a flash in the pan as far as such things go, fading from public view after 1886

Unsound Seeds

With this image of a curtain hiding and at the same time heightening some terrible secret, Max Kalbeck began his review of the first Viennese performance of Richard Strauss’s Salome. Theodor W. Adorno picked up the image of the curtain in the context of Strauss’s fabled skill at composing non-musical events, when he identified the opening flourish of Strauss’s Salome as the swooshing sound of the rising curtain. If this is so, the succès de scandale of the opera was achieved, in more than one sense, as soon as the curtain rose at Dresden’s Semperoper on 10 December 1905. Critics of the premiere noted that the opera set ‘boundless wildness and degeneration to music’; it brought ‘high decadence’ onto the operatic stage; a ‘composition of hysteria’, reflecting the ‘disease of our time’, Salome is ‘hardly music any more’.The outrage did not end there

Science, Technology and Love in Late Eighteenth-Century Opera

It is a tale told by countless operas: young love, thwarted by an old man’s financially motivated marriage plans, triumphs in the end thanks to a deception that tricks the old man into blessing the young lovers’ union. Always a doddering fool, the old man is often also an enthusiast for knowledge. Such is the case, for instance, in Carlo Goldoni’s comic opera libretto Il mondo della luna (1750), in which Buonafede’s interest in the moon opens him to an elaborate hoax that has him believe he and his daughters have left Earth for the lunar world; and also in the Singspiel Die Luftbälle, oder der Liebhaber à la Montgolfier (1788), wherein the apothecary Wurm trades Sophie, the ward he intended to marry himself, for a technological innovation that will make him a pioneering aeronaut

Operatic Fantasies in Early Nineteenth-Century Psychiatry

In his celebrated essay on insanity in the Dictionnaire des sciences médicales (1816), French psychiatrist Étienne Esquirol marvelled at the earlier custom of allowing asylum inmates to attend theatrical productions at Charenton

British medicine in the Peruvian Andes: the travels of Archibald Smith M.D. (1820-1870) Medicina britânica nos Andes peruanos: as viagens do médico Archibald Smith (1820-1870)

This article traces the travels of the Scottish physician Archibald Smith through the Peruvian Andes between the 1820s and 1860s. Despite his prominent role in the nineteenth-century Peruvian medical scene, almost nothing has been written on Archibald Smith. By exploring Smith's medical activities, publications, and debates, this article intends to uncover unexplored areas of Peruvian medical history, such as the animosity between local and foreign physicians during the post-Independence war era and the important role played by medical geography as a scientific discipline for redefining ethnical and regional issues.<br>O presente artigo traça a vida e obra do médico escocês Archibald Smith durante sua permanência no Peru, entre as décadas de 1820 e 1860. Apesar de sua proeminente contribuição para a medicina peruana, quase nada foi escrito sobre Archibald Smith. Através da investigação das atividades, publicações e debates de que Smith participou, o artigo pretende desvendar áreas inexploradas da história da medicina no Peru, tais como a animosidade entre os médicos locais e estrangeiros no pós-guerra de independência e o papel importante da geografia médica como disciplina científica que redefine questões étnicas e regionais