[The Migration and Health Teaching Network: consolidating and developing education and training].

Patients with migration history often encounter barriers to accessing healthcare in Germany, which lowers the quality of care available to them and can affect their overall health. These barriers in access to healthcare are due to both adverse health policies and a lack of migration-related - and diversity-sensitive - content in medical and other health profession teaching. Although most healthcare professionals regularly care for patients with individual or generational migration experience in Germany, teaching content relevant to the healthcare of these patients has not yet been anchored in the curriculum.

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"Staining is the Best Policy". Visualization in the work of Paul Ehrlich. For nearly all of his life, the biomedical scientist Paul Ehrlich dedicated himself to work on dyes and staining at the interface between so-called color-chemistry and histopathology.

[When no doctor is on call. Medical works for lay persons in late antiquity].

The article offers a survey of the chief medical texts for lay persons in Latin, followed by a more detailed discussion of two examples, hare's brain for teething troubles and remedies for nosebleed.

[Looking for the "sugar girl". Sexuality and partnership in the Journal "Der Diabetiker" (1951-1970)].

This paper examines discussions of intimacy and sexuality between diabetes mellitus patients and their physicians in West Germany after 1945 and considers their effect on the patient-physician relationship. As shown in the Journal Der Diabetiker, founded in 1951 as the organ of the Deutsche Diabetikerbund (German Diabetics Association), diabetic patients not only claimed acceptance of their own needs and attitudes but also, as early as 1956, brought the taboo subject of sexuality out into the open. By this means patients took issue with their physicians' traditional eugenic ideas still prevailing after 1945.

[LONI & Co: about the epistemic specificity of digital spaces of knowledge in cognitive neuroscience].

In the neurosciences digital databases more and more are becoming important tools of data rendering and distributing. This development is due to the growing impact of imaging based trial design in cognitive neuroscience, including morphological as much as functional imaging technologies. As the case of the 'Laboratory of Neuro Imaging' (LONI) is showing, databases are attributed a specific epistemological power: Since the 1990s databasing is seen to foster the integration of neuroscientific data, although local regimes of data production, -manipulation and--interpretation are also challenging this development.

How to make sense of broadly applied medical classification systems: introducing epistemic hubs.

What are medical classification systems good for? Taking this question as a starting point, this paper argues that different answers have to be given depending on the scope of application of the classification system. While the use of restricted and specialised classification systems can be described rather well with the existing scientific taxonomy account, this account falls short to make sense of the function that systems play that are heterogeneous and imprecise but broadly applied, such as the International Statistical Classification of Diseases and Health-Related Problems (ICD). Given that the causal complexity and inter-individual heterogeneity of disease manifestation and progression challenge obtaining unambiguous, universally applicable definitions of the units of classification, this paper aims to introduce a pluralist account that relies on the concept of "epistemic hubs.

[Controversial interpretations of the Lorsch medical codex].

Next to the late Heinrich Schipperges, Gundolf Keil, M.D. and Ph.

[Rationalities of knowledge production: on transformations of objects, technologies and information in biomedicine and the life sciences].

Since decades, scientific change has been interpreted in the light of paradigm shifts and scientific revolutions. The Kuhnian interpretation of scientific change however is now more and more confronted with non-disciplinary thinking in both, science and studies on science. This paper explores how research in biomedicine and the life sciences can be characterized by different rationalities, sometimes converging, sometimes contradictory, all present at the same time with varying ways of influence, impact, and visibility.

[Cultural aspects of ethical decisions at the end of life and cultural competence].

Advances in medical science and technology offer new medical interventions at the end of life. These new medical measures create new ethical issues, which increase in complexity in a multicultural society. This paper discusses three cases, in which cultural value systems play a decisive role.

["Dieu et cerveau, rien que Dieu et cerveau!" Johann Gottfried von Herder (1744-1803) and the neurosciences of this time].

The impact of Johann Gottfried von Herder on the broad spectrum of the history of ideas can hardly be estimated by separate categories derived from individual disciplines. It transcends the spheres of philosophy, theology, historiography and even medical anthropology--also because Herder, unlike many of his contemporary philosophers and hommes de lettres, was particularly interested in the neurophysiological and -anatomical investigations of his time. Herder's universal interest in human learning is reflected in numerous personal contacts to contemporary academic scholars and natural scientists, such as the Swiss theologian Johann Caspar Lavater, whose physiognomic doctrine mapped out a comprehensive research programme on character analysis, or the Mainz anatomist Samuel Thomas von Soemmering.

[Advance health care directives: perception and reality. Results of a random survey].

Background: Knowledge and values prevalent with regard to advanced directive in the general German population have so far not been adequately taken into account as a topic of regulatory initiatives. This leads to unnecessary uncertainty about actual decision-making concerning therapeutic measures.

Methods: 95 randomly chosen persons were included in a differentiated, online-supported survey consisting of multiple-choice questions as well as open interview questions, both question types addressing knowledge and values prevalent in our populations concerning advanced health care directives.

[Medical ethical aspects of culture in social interactions with Muslim patients].

In today's world, the plurality of values is considered to be a constitutive feature of modern societies. In these societies, transcultural patient-physician relationships are a part of daily medical practice. Culturally determined value systems can be crucial for understanding the perception of notions such as "health" and "illness", leading to fundamental differences in assessing medical interventions and therapeutic objectives.

[The brave new world of prevention? On the prerequisites and scope of public health genetics].

Recent developments in molecular genetics and genomics have not only provided new insights into the biological foundation of life but have also brought about significant changes in the ways health and disease are understood. Nowadays, understanding how the human genome interacts with health-related behaviour and diverse environments is recognised to be the key for biomedical innovation. Even though advances in genetics and genomics have unveiled a whole new complexity of the genetic underpinnings of health and disease and clearly show the need for further investigation, studies of health-related genetic traits already give rise to novel approaches to prevention.

Report on the conference on 'Men, women, and medicine: a new view of the biology of sex/gender differences and aging' held in Berlin, 24-26th February 2006.

The first world wide symposium on the topic of gender-specific medicine provided the latest research on differences in sex and/or gender in medicine and medical care. The presentations ranged beyond the topic of reproduction to encompass the entire human organism. This report critically reviews three issues that emerged during the Conference: gender mainstreaming, the concept of sex/gender differences and the issue of men's health.