The renaissance of Peiresc: Aubin-Louis Millin and the postrevolutionary republic of letters.

This essay argues for the emergence of a cultural and epistemological divide between amateur savants and members of the Royal Academy of the Sciences in late Old Regime and revolutionary France and suggests that the amateur ideal rose in significance even as intellectual activity came to be increasingly centralized in the postrevolutionary era. At the crux of the tensions between the amateur ideal and the professionalizing reality in the immediate postrevolutionary period stood Aubin-Louis Millin and his journal, the Magasin Encyclopédique. The essay examines, in particular, the revival in the pages of the Magasin Encyclopédique of interest in Nicolas-Claude Fabri de Peiresc, the seventeenth-century icon of an amateur ideal in which investigations in the natural sciences and scholarship were private, decentralized, often provincial activities.

Evaluation of pediatric patients with mild-to-moderate hypertension: yield of diagnostic testing.

Objective: Children and adolescents with newly diagnosed hypertension undergo various tests to define the cause and target organ consequences of the elevated blood pressure. We tested the hypothesis that the diagnostic yield of individual components of the currently recommended assessment does not justify performance for all patients with mild-to-moderate hypertension.

Methods: A retrospective chart review was conducted of patients who were referred between July 2002 and June 2007 for mild-to-moderate hypertension, defined as maximum blood pressure at >or=95% + 20/10 mmHg.