Jácaras and narcocorridos in context : what early modern Spain can tell us about today's narco-culture

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Violence, humor and Sancho’s resistance to carnival

Many critics have designated Don Quixote's Sancho Panza as a carnivalesque figure, an embodiment of pleasurable physicality in contrast to Don Quixote‟s austere and self-denying nature. This article looks at three moments in the novel when Sanchos resists such a designation because of the often violent nature of humorous carnivalesque activity. The analysis reexamines scholarship on the subject of Sancho and carnival in light of what the character himself has to say about it.Publisher PDFPeer reviewe

The rhetoric of healthcare and the moral debate about theatre-funded hospitals in early modern Spain

While early modern Spain may seem a world away, it is an extremely rich and relevant context for gaining a better understanding of the Rhetoric of Health, specifically the power of metaphor, in the related spheres of policy-making and public debate. It was a time and place in which the urban populace’s physical well-being depended upon the fortunes of theatrical performances due to a system of alms for hospitals driven by ticket receipts. Anti-theatricalists argued that the immoral nature of theatrical performances made them spiritually and medically detrimental to society. Pro-theatricalists argued that plays were always a public good on balance because they raised much-needed funds for hospitals. Instead of producing a conflict between morality and public health, each side reinforced their connection until the two topics became nearly inseparable in the sphere of public debate. While pro-theatricalists mainly stayed with their arguments about funding hospitals, anti-theatricalists developed a new strategy of literalising the metaphor of theatre as a “plague of the republic” and arguing that immoral entertainment brought literal disease to the populace as a punishment from God. This exemplifies Stephen Pender’s observation of how, in an early modern medical context, “Rhetoric as a way of perceiving probabilities and adjusting one’s argument to the audience and circumstance offers a model of ethical action and interaction.” This article is organised chronologically to track specific adjustments to a specific public-health debate that rely upon moral metaphors of medicine. Each side wrangled over these metaphors in an effort to break a deadlock in a public-health policy debate with entertainment, finance, and morality at its centre. By the end of the seventeenth century, anti-theatricalists finally found their best rhetorical weapon in the literalisation of the “plague of the republic” metaphor, but it only offered a short-term solution to banning theatre contingent upon the ebb and flow of epidemics. Simultaneously, the finance structure of funding hospitals began to erase role of hospitals from the longstanding debate about the morality of public theatre. The case of early modern Spain provides valuable lessons about the power of metaphor in the Rhetoric of Healthcare that are still applicable today.Peer reviewe

“Iglesia me llamo”: realidad y ficción en los alias criminales del Siglo de Oro

Este estudio tiene el propósito combinado de anunciar de nuevo un rico caudal de datos sobre los numerosos apodos criminales del siglo XVII y demostrar que la creatividad y hasta exageración patentes en los apodos reales no son menores que las de las creaciones literarias de los autores de la época. A veces, hasta la realidad es más extraña que la fi cción, como suele decirse en inglés. Será este artículo una invitación a volver a las fuentes para intentar librarnos de encadenamientos circulares de citas encontradas en ediciones modernas de comedias, poemas y novelas del Siglo de Oro. Estos encadenamientos pueden atraparnos sin que podamos averiguar si lo que leemos en una obra es pura fi cción, inspirada por algo real, o informe sobre una realidad indiscutible. Es importante notar que, como mis predecesores, no he intentado hacer una lista exhaustiva de apodos y su sentido, sino ofrecer unos ejemplos que pertenecen a unas tendencias particulares.This study has both the purpose of reintroducing scholars to a rich trove of information about many criminal nicknames from the seventeenth century and the purpose of demonstrating that the creativity, and even exaggeration, present in the real nicknames are no less than those of the era’s author’s literary creations. At times truth is stranger than fiction, as the old saying goes. This article will be an invitation to return to the source in order to free ourselves from circular chains of association based on citations found in modern editions of comedias, poems, and novels from the Golden Age. These associations can trap us and impede us from verifying if what we are reading in a work is pure fi ction, inspired by something real, or information from an undeniable reality. It is important to note that, as with my predecessors, I have not attempted to make an exhaustive list, but rather offer to some examples that belong to particular tendencies

Medical merchandising and legal procedure in late sixteenth-century Spain : the case of petroleum as imported medicine

The author is grateful to the Wellcome Trust for awarding a Small Grant in Medical Humanities (project reference 108792/Z/15/Z) to allow for travel to archives in Spain in the summer of 2015.This article examines the historical context and particular case of Italian merchant Guido Mondones (also named as ‘Modones’) who sold petroleum as medicine in Spain in the late sixteenth century. The first two-thirds of the article uses printed sources as a way to demonstrate that this merchant was likely not disadvantaged by being a foreigner and itinerant. Nor would he have been considered a suspect for selling oil with healing properties, as it was a fully accepted practice, including among university-trained professionals. All the materials for Mondones’s particular case are archival and contained within a lawsuit from Valladolid that contains a wealth of information about the merchant’s relationship with legal and medical authorities. Through these sources, we learn that he managed to be financially successful by navigating Spain’s particular medical–legal landscape at the time and skillfully defending himself against accusations of tax evasion and selling false medicine.Publisher PDFPeer reviewe

Olaus Magnus, Cervantes, and a world of marvels

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Dispersed Activity during Passive Movement in the Globus Pallidus of the 1-Methyl-4-Phenyl-1,2,3,6-Tetrahydropyridine (MPTP)-Treated Primate

Parkinson's disease is a neurodegenerative disorder manifesting in debilitating motor symptoms. This disorder is characterized by abnormal activity throughout the cortico-basal ganglia loop at both the single neuron and network levels. Previous neurophysiological studies have suggested that the encoding of movement in the parkinsonian state involves correlated activity and synchronized firing patterns. In this study, we used multi-electrode recordings to directly explore the activity of neurons from the globus pallidus of parkinsonian primates during passive limb movements and to determine the extent to which they interact and synchronize. The vast majority (80/103) of the recorded pallidal neurons responded to periodic flexion-extension movements of the elbow. The response pattern was sinusoidal-like and the timing of the peak response of the neurons was uniformly distributed around the movement cycle. The interaction between the neuronal activities was analyzed for 123 simultaneously recorded pairs of neurons. Movement-based signal correlation values were diverse and their mean was not significantly different from zero, demonstrating that the neurons were not activated synchronously in response to movement. Additionally, the difference in the peak responses phase of pairs of neurons was uniformly distributed, showing their independent firing relative to the movement cycle. Our results indicate that despite the widely distributed activity in the globus pallidus of the parkinsonian primate, movement encoding is dispersed and independent rather than correlated and synchronized, thus contradicting current views that posit synchronous activation during Parkinson's disease

Rescuing Loading Induced Bone Formation at Senescence

The increasing incidence of osteoporosis worldwide requires anabolic treatments that are safe, effective, and, critically, inexpensive given the prevailing overburdened health care systems. While vigorous skeletal loading is anabolic and holds promise, deficits in mechanotransduction accrued with age markedly diminish the efficacy of readily complied, exercise-based strategies to combat osteoporosis in the elderly. Our approach to explore and counteract these age-related deficits was guided by cellular signaling patterns across hierarchical scales and by the insight that cell responses initiated during transient, rare events hold potential to exert high-fidelity control over temporally and spatially distant tissue adaptation. Here, we present an agent-based model of real-time Ca2+/NFAT signaling amongst bone cells that fully described periosteal bone formation induced by a wide variety of loading stimuli in young and aged animals. The model predicted age-related pathway alterations underlying the diminished bone formation at senescence, and hence identified critical deficits that were promising targets for therapy. Based upon model predictions, we implemented an in vivo intervention and show for the first time that supplementing mechanical stimuli with low-dose Cyclosporin A can completely rescue loading induced bone formation in the senescent skeleton. These pre-clinical data provide the rationale to consider this approved pharmaceutical alongside mild physical exercise as an inexpensive, yet potent therapy to augment bone mass in the elderly. Our analyses suggested that real-time cellular signaling strongly influences downstream bone adaptation to mechanical stimuli, and quantification of these otherwise inaccessible, transient events in silico yielded a novel intervention with clinical potential

Resistance to MPTP-Neurotoxicity in α-Synuclein Knockout Mice Is Complemented by Human α-Synuclein and Associated with Increased β-Synuclein and Akt Activation

Genetic and biochemical abnormalities of α-synuclein are associated with the pathogenesis of Parkinson's disease. In the present study we investigated the in vivo interaction of mouse and human α-synuclein with the potent parkinsonian neurotoxin, MPTP. We find that while lack of mouse α-synuclein in mice is associated with reduced vulnerability to MPTP, increased levels of human α-synuclein expression is not associated with obvious changes in the vulnerability of dopaminergic neurons to MPTP. However, expressing human α-synuclein variants (human wild type or A53T) in the α-synuclein null mice completely restores the vulnerability of nigral dopaminergic neurons to MPTP. These results indicate that human α-synuclein can functionally replace mouse α-synuclein in regard to vulnerability of dopaminergic neurons to MPTP-toxicity. Significantly, α-synuclein null mice and wild type mice were equally sensitive to neurodegeneration induced by 2′NH2-MPTP, a MPTP analog that is selective for serotoninergic and noradrenergic neurons. These results suggest that effects of α-synuclein on MPTP like compounds are selective for nigral dopaminergic neurons. Immunoblot analysis of β-synuclein and Akt levels in the mice reveals selective increases in β-synuclein and phosphorylated Akt levels in ventral midbrain, but not in other brain regions, of α-synuclein null mice, implicating the α-synuclein-level dependent regulation of β-synuclein expression in modulation of MPTP-toxicity by α-synuclein. Together these findings provide new mechanistic insights on the role α-synuclein in modulating neurodegenerative phenotypes by regulation of Akt-mediated cell survival signaling in vivo

Reconsidering literary criminality in Don Quixote

This study uses Cervantes's biography and the increasing popularity of the 'jácara' and 'comedia de valentón' as means to finding alternative explanations of criminality that do not rely on the picaresque as a model. While recognising that the picaresque does play a role, an examination of the wit, wordplay, fatalism, and unfiltered violence of other genres reveals a complex approach that is easily recognised as Cervantine, but remains mostly undiscovered in relation to the author's treatment of criminals in his novel.proo