Practical recommendations for the management of patients with gastroenteropancreatic and thoracic (carcinoid) neuroendocrine neoplasms in the COVID-19 era

Neuroendocrine neoplasms (NENs) are a heterogeneous family of uncommon tumours with challenging diagnosis, clinical management and unique needs that almost always requires a multidisciplinary approach. In the absence of guidance from the scientific literature, along with the rapidly changing data available on the effect of COVID-19, we report how 12 high-volume NEN centres of expertise in 10 countries at different stages of the evolving COVID-19 global pandemic along with members of international neuroendocrine cancer patient societies have suggested to preserve high standards of care for patients with NENs. We review the multidisciplinary management of neuroendocrine neoplasms during the COVID-19 pandemic, and we suggest potential strategies to reduce risk and aid multidisciplinary treatment decision-making. By sharing our joint experiences, we aim to generate recommendations for proceeding to other institutions facing the same challenges

The spectacular anus of Joseph Pujol: Recovering the Pétomane’s unique historic context

Joseph Pujol, the ‘Pétomane’ performed to packed audiences at the Moulin Rouge in the early 1890s. By 1906 one of his contemporaries would remark that ‘this artist’s specialty was no longer in fashion’. When legal battles occurred between Pujol and the Moulin Rouge, newspaper commentaries were filled with hilarity that a man whose anus was the source of his income was now trying to gain a fortune from it. What might the spectacular anus of Pujol, and its pecuniary trials and tribulations, tell us about bodily imagination in late nineteenth-century France? Pujol’s idiosyncratic career has rarely been considered as an historical object; and when it has, the gaze has been light-hearted and filled with puns, much like those that surrounded him in his lifetime. But if the temptation to giggle is resisted for a moment, the Pétomane can teach us much about symbolic meanings that were ascribed to the anus in late nineteenth-century Paris