The history of social medicine in Italy between the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was characterised by a marked presence of gender and the consequent commitment of women of Jewish origin to the issues of early childhood education, as well as safeguarding of work and motherhood and health prevention with regard to social and cultural fragility. Some of the roles of women engaged in social medicine campaigns have been widely studied in the historiography of medicine, having recognized their roles and commitment to attempting to create a fair society through their expertise in medicine and health. However, there are some biographies and professional lives that are still unpublished and worthy of attention by historical medical research.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFObjective: There is little doubt that there are currently obstacles in measuring the impact of the history of medicine within medical training. Consequently, there is a clear need to support a vision that can historicize Euro-Western medicine, leading to a greater understanding of how the medical world is a distinct form of reality for those who are about to immerse themselves in the study of medicine.
Methods: History teaches that changes in medicine are due to the processes inherent to the interaction among individuals, institutions, and society rather than individual facts or individual authors.
The Iliad, by the Greek poet Homer, is a precious mine of examples of war traumatology. In the specific case of spear wounds in the chest, the death of the Trojan warrior Alcathous is particularly interesting from the point of view of the history of medicine and the evolution of cardiology and knowledge of the heart at the time of ancient Greece. In particular this paper aims to evidence and reconstruct the main anatomical and physiological knowledge of the heart at that time.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFInt J Paleopathol
March 2023
Objective: This paper provides some conceptual guidelines for interpreting the phenomenon of impairment-disability between Antiquity and the Middle Ages from an historical-medical perspective. The paper illustrates application of these guidelines in an historical-medical reassessment of a published paleopathological case-study.
Materials And Methods: The skeletal remains of a woman who experienced bone fusion and osteoarthritis (Rome, VIII century AD) were selected.
One of the most challenging issues with the sources of ancient medicine is to be able to identify the correspondence between the diseases we know today and those reported in ancient medical texts. Ancient diseases' definitions rarely help us, and the symptoms described often correspond to more than one disease. This is especially true about tuberculosis, a disease that historians of medicine habitually associates with the Greek words phthi(n)o (φθίνω), verb, phthisis/phthoe (φθίσις/φθόη), noun, phthinodes/phthisikos (φθινώδης/φθισικός), adjective, all etymologically linked to an Indo-European root that expresses the idea of consumption in a broad sense.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe increasingly swift changes in the field of medicine require a reassessment of the skills necessary for the training of technically qualified doctors. Today's physicians also need to be capable of managing the complex issue of personal relationships with patients. Recent pedagogical debates have focused on so-called "soft skills", whose acquisition is presented in literature as a quite recent addition to medical studies.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: An article published in 2012 in the Journal of Cosmetic Dermatology discussed the historical sources presenting the Byzantine Empress Zoe Porphyrogenita as an expert in cosmetic and pharmacological remedies that could give their users a youthful appearance and a kind of eternal youth. However, it did not take into account a dermatological recipe attributed to Zoe which text transmission has preserved.
Aims: To examine some ingredients of Zoe's recipe from a historical medical point of view and contextualize the text in the tradition of ancient medical matter, physiology of aging, and gender pharmacological skills.
This paper aims to provide a first glimpse into the genomic characterization of individuals buried in Casal Bertone (Rome, first-third centuries AD) to gain preliminary insight into the genetic makeup of people who lived near a tannery workshop, Therefore, we explored the genetic characteristics of individuals who were putatively recruited as fuller workers outside the Roman population. Moreover, we identified the microbial communities associated with humans to detect microbes associated with the unhealthy environment supposed for such a workshop. We examined five individuals from Casal Bertone for ancient DNA analysis through whole-genome sequencing via a shotgun approach.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: The availability of fine-grained, culture-specific psychometric outcomes can favor the interpretation of scores of the Montreal Cognitive Assessment (MoCA), the most frequently used instrument to screen for mild cognitive dysfunctions in both instrumental and non-instrumental domains. This study thus aimed at providing: (i) updated, region-specific norms for the Italian MoCA, by also (ii) comparing them to pre-existing ones with higher geographical coverage; (iii) information on sensitivity and discriminative capability at the item level.
Methods: Five hundred and seventy nine healthy individuals from Northern Italy (208 males, 371 females; age: 63.
Background: The increasing attention to the potential application of technology in medicine represents a dangerous warning in the direction of a reductionist approach. The academic system should therefore be strongly engaged to ensure even in medical practice the greatest enhancement of the human dimension. Targets: How much space is offered to the teaching of History of Medicine (HM) in Italian Universities? This work aims to answer this question through an in-depth analysis of the teaching plans of the degree courses in Medicine and Surgery (CLMC) activated in Italy.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: Deficits of executive functioning (EF) are frequently found in neurological disorders. The Frontal Assessment Battery (FAB) is one of the most widespread and psychometrically robust EF screeners in clinical settings. However, in Italy, FAB norms date back to 15 years ago; moreover, its validity against "EF-loaded" global cognitive screeners (e.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFIn death and mourning, why should we think that rites adapt to psychology and not vice-versa? Or believe that psychological workings grow into a rite or ritual? When analysing practices related to rites of passage, death emerges as a rupture - or breakage - of social status.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFTuberculosis (TB) and humans have coexisted for more than 40,000 years; however TB remains a global threat to human kind. The international community has developed new tools for early detection, but TB strains evolved acquiring resistance to first-line therapeutic drugs with increasing treatment challenges. Furthermore, TB has formed also an alliance with human immunodeficiency virus; in this way the poorest populations are most affected.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe article is the first step of a research project aimed at investigating new perspectives and aspects of Morgagni's role and work. His activities as a medical examiner and forensic doctor are yet to be truly discovered. Manuscripts, written by Morgagni when he was a forensic expert for the Health Magistrate of Venice, currently preserved at the City Library in Forli (Italy), shed light on a new aspect of his cultural background.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFTuberculosis is an ancient infectious disease caused by the bacillus Mycobacterium tuberculosis that is still nowadays afflicting humans all over the world. It causes ill-health for 10 million people each year. Tuberculosis (TB) has been the leading cause of death from a single infectious agent, ranking above HIV/AIDS.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFStarting in 1865, regulations pursuant to public hygiene issued by the Unitary Government provided for administrative and political control of the funerary practice. Specifically, they regulated the management of cemeteries and the burials, increasingly drawing the funeral rituals from the control of the Church and of Catholicism, therefore secularising death for the construction of a new political religion. Hygiene became fundamental in order to promulgate cremation as a system of preserving the integrity of the bodies, preserving the ashes as a tangible and indestructible product of body matter and as a measure to protect public health by eliminating the risk of miasmatic pollution of the air caused by the cadaveric fumes.
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