Thomas Hobbes and the Duke of Newcastle: A Study in the Mutuality of Patronage before the Establishment of the Royal Society

This study shows how patronage framed and fashioned the careers of Thomas Hobbes and his patron William Cavendish, the earl of Newcastle. Newcastle's protection allowed Hobbes to articulate heterodox ideas without immediate fear of reprisal. It also enabled him to solidify his status as a gentleman and the intellectual equal of both his mentor and other natural philosophers. When Hobbes offered his ideas on optics, motion, politics, and philosophy as gifts to his patron, he was reaffirming his own honor and status while acknowledging Newcastle's power. Hobbes always acted as if he was operating in the space created by a noble patron, even after this place had been transformed by the Royal Society. For Newcastle, intellectual patronage reaffirmed the status and honor he had lost during the English Civil War. Newcastle tried to establish himself as a philosopher in his own right by applying Hobbesian ideas to studies of politics, horsemanship, and swordsmanship. Thus, the rewards of patronage were mutua

Fetal pH and postnatal adaptation in preterm vaginal deliveries

Peer Reviewe

Vitalism and the Resistance to Experimentation on Life in the Eighteenth Century

There is a familiar opposition between a ‘Scientific Revolution’ ethos and practice of experimentation, including experimentation on life, and a ‘vitalist’ reaction to this outlook. The former is often allied with different forms of mechanism – if all of Nature obeys mechanical laws, including living bodies, ‘iatromechanism’ should encounter no obstructions in investigating the particularities of animal-machines – or with more chimiatric theories of life and matter, as in the ‘Oxford Physiologists’. The latter reaction also comes in different, perhaps irreducibly heterogeneous forms, ranging from metaphysical and ethical objections to the destruction of life, as in Margaret Cavendish, to more epistemological objections against the usage of instruments, the ‘anatomical’ outlook and experimentation, e.g. in Locke and Sydenham. But I will mainly focus on a third anti-interventionist argument, which I call ‘vitalist’ since it is often articulated in the writings of the so-called Montpellier Vitalists, including their medical articles for the Encyclopédie. The vitalist argument against experimentation on life is subtly different from the metaphysical, ethical and epistemological arguments, although at times it may borrow from any of them. It expresses a Hippocratic sensibility – understood as an artifact of early modernity, not as some atemporal trait of medical thought – in which Life resists the experimenter, or conversely, for the experimenter to grasp something about Life, it will have to be without torturing or radically intervening in it. I suggest that this view does not have to imply that Nature is something mysterious or sacred; nor does the vitalist have to attack experimentation on life in the name of some ‘vital force’ – which makes it less surprising to find a vivisectionist like Claude Bernard sounding so close to the vitalists

A Re-conceptualization of Access for 21st Century Healthcare

Many e-health technologies are available to promote virtual patient–provider communication outside the context of face-to-face clinical encounters. Current digital communication modalities include cell phones, smartphones, interactive voice response, text messages, e-mails, clinic-based interactive video, home-based web-cams, mobile smartphone two-way cameras, personal monitoring devices, kiosks, dashboards, personal health records, web-based portals, social networking sites, secure chat rooms, and on-line forums. Improvements in digital access could drastically diminish the geographical, temporal, and cultural access problems faced by many patients. Conversely, a growing digital divide could create greater access disparities for some populations. As the paradigm of healthcare delivery evolves towards greater reliance on non-encounter-based digital communications between patients and their care teams, it is critical that our theoretical conceptualization of access undergoes a concurrent paradigm shift to make it more relevant for the digital age. The traditional conceptualizations and indicators of access are not well adapted to measure access to health services that are delivered digitally outside the context of face-to-face encounters with providers. This paper provides an overview of digital “encounterless” utilization, discusses the weaknesses of traditional conceptual frameworks of access, presents a new access framework, provides recommendations for how to measure access in the new framework, and discusses future directions for research on access

La agenda naturalista de las pasiones en la filosofía de la modernidad temprana

In this paper we will try to characterize the main theoretical grounds that promoted the change of view from Scholasticism to Early Modern Philosophy on the emotive and cognitive faculties; to achieve this task, we will summarize the intellectual background for the study of passions; then, we will differentiate two mainly “naturalistic” trends of thought: First, the reductionist thesis, adopted by Thomas Hobbes, Pierre Gassendi and René Descartes, among others; and second, the attempt to establish and describe the dynamics of mental life, which was developed by Thomas Hobbes, John Locke and David Hume. On giving this account, we expect also to gain a clearer comprehension about the changes of perspective that were proposed by some Early Modern thinkers, whose views developed towards a new naturalized philosophical anthropology.En este artículo trataremos de caracterizar las principales razones teóricas del cambio de perspectiva del escolasticismo a la filosofía de la modernidad temprana en lo concerniente al estudio de las facultades cognitivas y emotivas. Para lograr nuestro objetivo, sintetizaremos el contexto intelectual del estudio de las pasiones; después, distinguiremos dos grandes corrientes del pensamiento naturalista: en primer lugar, la tesis reduccionista que fue adoptada, entre otros, por Thomas Hobbes, Pierre Gassendi y René Descartes; en segundo lugar, el proyecto de establecer y describir la “dinámica de la vida mental” que fue desarrollado por Thomas Hobbes, John Locke y David Hume. Al dar cuenta de esto, esperamos también obtener una comprensión más clara sobre los cambios de perspectiva que fueron propuestos por algunos filósofos de la modernidad temprana, cuyas ideas avanzaron hacia la naturalización de la antropología filosófica

Making Sense of Sensors: How New Technologies Can Change Patient Care

This report describes the early phase of development and adoption of passive sensors - sensors that do not require active engagement for their use or data transmission - for patient care outside the hospital; it assesses the current landscape, the drivers and barriers and the promise of these technologies which could proliferate in patients' daily lives to support healthy lifestyles, self-care, and more personalized medicine, yet be almost invisible to the user

The Connected Patient: Charting the Vital Signs of Remote Health Monitoring

Examines the research on the efficacy of devices that collect and transmit a patient's health data to a healthcare provider for clinical review and intervention when applicable, definitions, market drivers, barriers, and models and prospects