Masters of Healing: Cocaine and the Ideal of the Victorian Medical Man

This article offers a new perspective on the relationship between cocaine and medical practitioners in late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century Britain. Cocaine is often understood as one of a number of potentially addictive substances to which Victorian physicians and surgeons were regularly exposed, and tempted to indulge in. However, while cocaine has frequently been associated with discourses of addiction, this article proposes that it was also widely represented as a technological triumph, and that the drug was frequently used as a symbol for the scientific and moral virtues of the medical man himself. The argument draws on popular journalism, medical publications, and fiction to establish the cultural context of cocaine at the fin-de-siècle. In 1884, cocaine was revealed to be the first effective local anaesthetic, and this article traces the processes by which cocaine came to be regarded as the iconic achievement of nineteenth-century therapeutic science. This aura of innovative brilliance in turn communicated itself to the medical professionals who employed cocaine in their work, so that many patients and practitioners alike depicted cocaine as most fitting emblem for the idealised selfhood of the modern medical man. This idea also informs portrayals of the drug in fiction, and I conclude with a detailed analysis of L. T. Meade’s 1895 short story, ‘The Red Bracelet,’ (published in The Strand Magazine as part of Meade’s series, ‘Stories from the Diary of a Doctor’) as an example of the way in which cocaine functions as metaphor for the physician’s unassailable moral primacy, as well as his aesculapian exceptionalism

Equilibrium in the system calcium, calcium hydride, hydrogen

Moissan first showed in a qualitative way that hydrogen and calcium form a combination which is very little dissociated below 700 degrees C. He also showed that this compound can be expressed by the chemical formula CaH2 and seemed to be a well defined compound. Gautier makes a statement that calcium hydride begins to dissociate as soon as the hydrides of strontium and barium (about 675 degrees C.) Moldenhauer and Roll-Hansen made a systematic study of the dissociation from 780 degrees C. to 1027 degrees C. These workers point out that the equilibrium pressures may be masked by the action of the calcium and calcium hydride on the reaction vessel

Primative doctor and eugenic priest: Grant Allen, M.P. Shiel, and the future of the Victorian medical man

M.P. Shiel’s 1895 short story “The S.S.” ends with the protagonist, Prince Zaleski, contemplating the future of the medical profession. Zaleski imagines a future where eugenic health is venerated as a new religion, and where the physician has been remade into “the Sacrificial Priest.” A similar image of the medical future appears in Grant Allen’s story “The Child of the Phalanstery,” (1884) which depicts a future world where the healthy body is viewed as sacred to “divine humanity” and in which each community’s chief “physiologist” is responsible for sacrificing any deformed children on the “alter of humanity.” This article argues that Allen and Shiel’s images of the future medical man represent a confluence of hitherto overlooked trends in fin-de-siècle anthropological, medical, and eugenic discourse. Victorian Anthropological analyses asserted that the primitive doctor was identical with the priest, and that the body had occupied a central position in man’s earliest religious thought. Concurrently, proponents of eugenics presented their movement as a potential religion of the future, which would sanctify the human body. As such, this article examines both the imagined past and future of the fin-de-siècle medical man to reveal the medical profession’s role as a potential priesthood of the body

Acute lobar pneumonia: with special reference to its treatment

Acute Lobar Pneumonia is one of the most important diseases with which we have to deal, on account of the appalling mortality with which it is attended. In his "Clinical Studies”, Bramwell says "There is perhaps no disease which cuts off so many valuable lives as Acute Croupous Pneumonia, killing as it does so many people at the height of their full vigour, activity, and usefulness”,In Great Britain alone, about 1,000 lives per week are terminated by this malady.Although most fatal at the extremes of life, no age escapes its ravages, and many of the apparently most robust fall victims to it.The percentage mortality varies considerably in different epidemics, and under different physicians, but it is usually from 20 - 30$. Out of the huge total of 465,000 cases collected, by E. F. Wells from all sources, 94,826 died, giving a mortality of 20.4$

Interaction of laser beams with relativistic electrons

Motivated by the desire to put a free electron laser (FEL) weapon on a ship, the FEL and the related process of Compton backscattering are studied. The theme of the majority of this work is the interaction of the Gaussian optical mode with a beam of relativistic electrons. Classical FEL theory is reviewed in Chapter II. Simulations based on the classical theory are used in Chapter III to study a proposed I kW (kilowatt) infrared FEL. In Chapter IV, simulation is used to study the problem of electron beam/optical mode overlap in an ultraviolet (UV) FEL. A new concept, the FEL with a short Rayleigh length, is sttidied in Chapter V. The idea is tested on the UV FEL, then used to design and simulate a megawatt-class FEL for ship self-defense. An analytical calculation of the Compton backscattering of laser light is performed in Chapter VI. A quantum electrodynamics (QED) formalism is used to find the spectrum and angular distribution of photons scattertd out of a Gaussian optical mode by relativistic electronshttp://archive.org/details/interactionoflas109458547Lieutenant, United States NavyApproved for public release; distribution is unlimited

Dementia's jester: the Phantasmagoria in metaphor and aesthetics from 1700-1900

In 1792, the inventor and illusionist Paul Philidor unveiled the ‘Phantasmagoria’ to the people of Paris. Coined by combining the Greek words ‘phantasma’ (appearance, vision, ghost) and ‘agora’ (assembly), Philidor had intended the name to suggest a vast crowd of the undead, a riotous carnival of phantoms. He promised his audience that, using the projections of a magic lantern and other ingenious mechanical devices, he would show them the illusory shapes of ghosts and monsters, reunite lovers separated by death, and call fiends out of hell. However, this exhibition of illusory spectres was to become something far more than a mere footnote in the history of Romantic popular entertainment. The Phantasmagoria was to assume a metaphorical function in the mindscape of the period; this cavalcade of spectres was to come to serve as an image for not only the fantastic terrors of dreams and hallucinations, but also for the unbounded creative power of the imagination. Besides this, the metaphor of the phantasmagoria was to subsume into itself an idea which had its origin in the ‘Curiosity Culture’ of the previous century: the curious collection. As time wore on, this Curious – or Phantasmagorical – collection became a symbol by which writers of the late Nineteenth Century could signal their resistance to bourgeois conformity and their own paradoxical celebration and rejection of consumer culture. This work examines the evolution of the Phantasmagoria metaphor as well as the development of its associated aesthetic: the aesthetic of the curious collection – the collection of weird and fabulous objects that astonishes the senses and confuses the mind, erasing the boundaries between reality and fantasy

A normative study of students selected at random on the H.M.H. plus and minus binocular rock test

A normative study of students selected at random on the H.M.H. plus and minus binocular rock tes

Neighborhood Social Environment and Patterns of Adherence to Oral Hypoglycemic Agents among Patients with Type 2 Diabetes Mellitus

This study examined whether neighborhood social environment was related to patterns of adherence to oral hypoglycemic agents among primary care patients with type 2 diabetes mellitus. Residents in neighborhoods with high social affluence, high residential stability, and high neighborhood advantage, compared to residents in neighborhoods with one or no high features present, were significantly more likely to have an adherent pattern compared to a nonadherent pattern. Neighborhood social environment may influence patterns of adherence. Reliance on a multilevel contextual framework, extending beyond the individual, to promote diabetic self-management activities may be essential for notable public health improvements