Epilepsy in the Age of Neurology

This chapter focuses on the epistemological approach and analysis of the medical files of John Hughlings Jackson’s epileptic patients, who were hospitalized at the National Hospital for the Paralysed and Epileptic, during the period 1870–1895. More particularly, it examines and evaluates the time between epilepsy’s first manifestation and the patients’ admittance to the National Hospital, the length of their hospitalization, the prescribed treatment, the result of hospitalization, as well as the ways of epilepsy’s and epileptic seizures’ presentation and representation in the hospital’s medical files. From this perspective, it attempts to inscribe the aforementioned elements within the dominant nineteenth-century neurological discourse; to this direction, it proceeds with their comparative juxtaposition with contemporary medical journals and treatises, as well as with the medical files of the two private institutions that were also examined, the Manor House Asylum and the Holloway Sanatorium. Having the National Hospital’s medical files and epilepsy’s case as a starting point, and exploring Jackson’s neurophysiology, the “epistemological” part of this book attempts to depict this major turn towards the scientific study and systematic exploration of the human brain that marked the second half of the nineteenth century. © 2015, Springer International Publishing Switzerland

Velocity dispersions of clusters in the Dark Energy Survey Y3 redMaPPer catalogue

We measure the velocity dispersions of clusters of galaxies selected by the red-sequence Matched-filter Probabilistic Percolation (redMaPPer) algorithm in the first three years of data from the Dark Energy Survey (DES), allowing us to probe cluster selection and richness estimation, ?, in light of cluster dynamics. Our sample consists of 126 clusters with sufficient spectroscopy for individual velocity dispersion estimates. We examine the correlations between cluster velocity dispersion, richness, X-ray temperature, and luminosity, as well as central galaxy velocity offsets. The velocity dispersion-richness relation exhibits a bimodal distribution. The majority of clusters follow scaling relations between velocity dispersion, richness, and X-ray properties similar to those found for previous samples; however, there is a significant population of clusters with velocity dispersions that are high for their richness. These clusters account for roughly 22 per cent of the ? 0.5. A couple of these systems are hot and X-ray bright as expected for massive clusters with richnesses that appear to have been underestimated, but most appear to have high velocity dispersions for their X-ray properties likely due to line-of-sight structure. These results suggest that projection effects contribute significantly to redMaPPer selection, particularly at higher redshifts and lower richnesses. The redMaPPer determined richnesses for the velocity dispersion outliers are consistent with their X-ray properties, but several are X-ray undetected and deeper data are needed to understand their nature