From University to Court: The Reversal of Stahl's Positions on Gold-Making.

Georg Ernst Stahl, an influential chymical-medical author of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, first believed in alchemical transmutation and reversed his position over the course of his career. This essay begins by placing Stahl's early teaching in alchemy in a larger background in which German princes and academics shared intense interest in gold-making. Then, tracing Stahl's intellectual development, it shows that he developed an increasing reservation about alchemy, though he remained open to the possibility of transmutation during his tenure at Halle.

Sorafenib with Transarterial Chemoembolization Achieves Improved Survival vs. Sorafenib Alone in Advanced Hepatocellular Carcinoma: A Nationwide Population-Based Cohort Study.

We hypothesized that sorafenib plus transarterial chemoembolization (TACE) would confer survival benefits over sorafenib alone for advanced hepatocellular carcinoma (aHCC). We investigated this while using the population-based All-Cancer Dataset to assemble a cohort ( = 3674; median age, 60; 83% men) of patients receiving sorafenib for aHCC (Child-Pugh A) with macro-vascular invasion or nodal/distant metastases. The patients were classified into the sorafenib-TACE group ( = 426) or the propensity score-matched sorafenib-alone group ( = 1686).

Risk and clinical predictors of osteoporotic fracture in East Asian patients with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease: a population-based cohort study.

Introduction: Osteoporosis is becoming an impending epidemic in the Asia-Pacific region. The association between risk of osteoporotic fracture (OTPF) and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) in East Asian patients is yet to be fully examined. We conducted a nationwide population-based retrospective cohort study of 98,700 patients aged ≥50 years with or without COPD using a national administrative claims dataset.

Clinical analysis of contributors to the delayed gallbladder opacification following the use of water-soluble contrast medium.

Objectives: Gallbladder opacification (GBO) on computed tomography (CT) imaging may obscure certain pathological or emergent conditions in the gallbladder, such as neoplasms, stones, and hemorrhagic cholecystitis. This study aimed to investigate the clinical contributing factors that could predict the presence of delayed GBO determined by CT.

Methods: This study retrospectively evaluated 243 consecutive patients who received enhanced CT or intravenous pyelography imaging and then underwent abdominal CT imaging within 5 days.

Communications of Chemical Knowledge: Georg Ernst Stahl and the Chemists at the French Academy of Sciences in the First Half of the Eighteenth Century.

Histories of eighteenth-century chemistry often assert that the works of the German chemist Georg Ernst Stahl (1659-1734), especially his ideas about phlogiston, were largely unknown to French chemists until the 1740s. A careful analysis of Stahl's writings and the publications of the Royal Academy of Sciences in Paris shows that academy chemists were well informed about, and even integrated, Stahl's chemical theories, experiments, and methods beginning in the 1710s, and that Stahl kept abreast of the work by his colleagues at the Paris Academy. It also reveals the frequency and significance of the communication between French and German chemical communities in the first half of the eighteenth century.

Alchemy as studies of life and matter: reconsidering the place of vitalism in early modern chemistry.

Early modern alchemy studied both matter and life, much like today's life sciences. What material life is and how it comes about intrigued alchemists. Many found the answer by assuming a vital principle that served as the source and cause of life.

Collaborative production and experimental labor: two models of dissertation authorship in the eighteenth century.

This article examines two early modern models of dissertation authorship that both relied on extensive collaboration between the degree candidate and his supervisor. The dissertation conducted on the traditional model, practiced until the eighteenth century at German universities, was a joint product of the supervisor, who prepared the thesis in writing, and the degree candidate, who defended it in the oral disputation. The two collaborators shared the credit for a successfully defended thesis in different forms: right for public recognition and rights to use and reproduce the thesis.

Multiple gastrointestinal stromal tumors in a patient with type I neurofibromatosis presenting with tumor rupture and peritonitis.

A young woman with type 1 neurofibromatosis (NF-1) complained of abdominal pain for 3 days. Computed tomography disclosed two jejunal tumors with rupture and peritonitis. Surgery revealed two tumors in the jejunum, one of which was ruptured.

Motus Tonicus: Georg Ernst Stahl's formulation of tonic motion and early modern medical thought.

This paper places in multiple contexts Stahl's formulation of tonic motion, a contractive and relaxative movement of body tissues that was thought to moderate the circulatory blood flowing through their porous structure. The paper analyzes Stahl's theory, elucidates its role in connecting his physiology and pathology, and situates its formulation in his conceptual development as well as the intellectual history of early modern medicine. The theory was at first a post-Harveyan attempt to explain occasional uneven blood flows; it was then expanded to account for the mechanism of blood circulation and metabolism, and formed a fundamental part of Stahl's effort to present a theory of animal heat and fever that would replace the traditional Galenic and fermentational theories.

Fermentation, phlogiston and matter theory: chemistry and natural philosophy in Georg Ernst Stahl's Zymotechnia Fundamentalis.

This paper examines Georg Ernst Stahl's first book, the Zymotechnia Fundamentalis, in the context of contemporary natural philosophy and the author's career. I argue that the Zymotechnia was a mechanical theory of fermentation written consciously against the influential "fermentational program" of Joan Baptista van Helmont and especially Thomas Willis, Stahl's theory of fermentation introduced his first conception of phlogiston, which was in part a corpuscular transformation of the Paracelsian sulphur principle. Meanwhile some assumptions underlying this theory, such as the composition of matter, the absolute passivity of matter and the "passions" of sulphur, reveal the combined scholastic and mechanistic character of Stahl's natural philosophy.