Film, observation and the mind.

This special issue considers the significance of film to the establishment and development of scientific approaches to the mind. Bonnie Evans explores how the origins of film technologies in 1895 in France encouraged a series of innovative collaborations, influencing both psychological theorisation, and new filming techniques. Jeremy Blatter explains how Harvard psychologist Hugo Münsterberg created early films specifically designed to engage audiences using psychological tactics.

The origins of film, psychology and the neurosciences.

The invention of film technologies in France at the end of the 19th century inspired neurologists and associated professionals to engage with this new medium to demonstrate their theories of the brain, the nervous system, and the mind. Beginning with the origins of cinema in Paris, this article explores how film technologies were used at La Salpêtrière, and beyond, to visualise internal mental processes, and to support the burgeoning sciences of the mind. This film-making became increasingly sophisticated by the late 1910s and early 1920s, creating innovative ways to present psychological experiences on film.

Child development, film evidence, and epidemiological sciences: Elwyn James Anthony and the 1957 Zurich International Congress of Psychiatry.

In 1957, the British-Indian child psychiatrist Dr Elwyn James Anthony travelled to the Zurich International Congress of Psychiatry to show a film featuring 70 children with such complex symptomatology and behaviour that they betrayed the certainty of contemporary theories of developmental psychology and psychoanalysis. This article examines the significance of Anthony's film to the creation of new scientific models in international developmental psychology and psychiatric epidemiology. It marked a significant change in the use of filmed evidence that sought to create a truly global and universalist approach to atypical child development based purely on scientific observations.

Neurodevelopmental and cognitive disabilities: Historical overview.

This chapter explores the history of the developmental sciences and their impact on the study of neurodevelopmental and cognitive disabilities from the start of the 20th century to the present day. It covers the origins of intelligence testing and developmental schedules and the importance of early laboratory testing on identifying the causes of developmental differences. It also explores the importance of major legal and institutional changes after the Second World War in reframing approaches to developmental conditions.

N1-Benzofused Modification of Fluoroquinolones Reduces Activity Against Gram-Negative Bacteria.

The fluoroquinolone class of antibiotics has a well-established structure-activity relationship (SAR) and a long history in the clinic, but the effect of electron-rich benzofused substituents at the N1 position remains poorly explored. Because groups at this position are part of the topoisomerase-DNA binding complex and form a hydrophobic interaction with the major groove of DNA, it was hypothesized that an electron-rich benzofused N1 substituent could enhance this interaction. Molecular modeling techniques were employed to evaluate the binding of certain N1-modified fluoroquinolones to DNA gyrase targets from both and species compared with ciprofloxacin and norfloxacin.

New Broad-Spectrum Antibiotics Containing a Pyrrolobenzodiazepine Ring with Activity against Multidrug-Resistant Gram-Negative Bacteria.

It is urgent to find new antibiotic classes with activity against multidrug-resistant (MDR) Gram-negative pathogens as the pipeline of antibiotics is essentially empty. Modified pyrrolobenzodiazepines with a C8-linked aliphatic heterocycle provide a new class of broad-spectrum antibacterial agents with activity against MDR Gram-negative bacteria, including WHO priority pathogens. The structure-activity relationship established that the third ring was particularly important for Gram-negative activity.

The foundations of autism: the law concerning psychotic, schizophrenic, and autistic children in 1950s and 1960s britain.

While the origins of child psychiatry in Britain can be traced to the interwar period, contemporary concepts and methodological approaches to pathological mental development in children were not created until the 1950s and 1960s. It was at this time that one of the most salient and lasting diagnoses in child psychiatry, autism, was established through a network of intellectual, institutional, and legal changes in Britain. This article argues that the work of child psychiatrists at the Maudsley Hospital was central in driving these changes and uses archival sources from this hospital, along with other legal and intellectual sources, to explore attempts to conceptualize pathological thought in infants in the 1950s and 1960s.

How autism became autism: The radical transformation of a central concept of child development in Britain.

This article argues that the meaning of the word 'autism' experienced a radical shift in the early 1960s in Britain which was contemporaneous with a growth in epidemiological and statistical studies in child psychiatry. The first part of the article explores how 'autism' was used as a category to describe hallucinations and unconscious fantasy life in infants through the work of significant child psychologists and psychoanalysts such as Jean Piaget, Lauretta Bender, Leo Kanner and Elwyn James Anthony. Theories of autism were then associated both with schizophrenia in adults and with psychoanalytic styles of reasoning.

Organ extracts and the development of psychiatry: hormonal treatments at the Maudsley Hospital 1923-1938.

The use of organ extracts to treat psychiatric disorder in the interwar period is an episode in the history of psychiatry which has largely been forgotten. An analysis of case-notes from The Maudsley Hospital from the period 1923-1938 shows that the prescription of extracts taken from animal testes, ovaries, thyroids, and other organs was widespread within this London Hospital. This article explores the way in which Maudsley doctors justified these treatments by tying together psychological theories of the unconscious with experimental data drawn from laboratory studies of human organs.

Managing the 'unmanageable': interwar child psychiatry at the Maudsley Hospital, London.

When opened as a post-graduate teaching and research hospital in 1923, the Maudsley made virtually no provision for the treatment of children. Yet its children's department saw sustained growth during the interwar period. This expansion is explored in relation to novel behaviourist hypotheses and the forging of formal links with local government and charitable bodies.