Medical Books of the 17th–18th Centuries from the Siberian Archives: Structural-and-Grammatical Aspect

The article presents a comparative study of two medical books from the Siberian archives dating back to the 17 th –18 th centuries: Tobolsk Lechebnik (TL) kept in Tobolsk Book Depository, and Altai Lechebnik (AL) stored in Altai Museum of Local Lore – both stemming from the text of the medical book called "Prokhladnyi Vertograd (The Cool Garden)" from the collection of the Rumyantsev Museum (PV). Our findings show that Siberian medical books demonstrate different degrees of structural and grammatical transformation of the source PV text, conventionally considered by the authors of the research to be a list, which is chronologically closer to the original text. It was established that TL can be regarded as a list derived from the PV, and AL – a source reflecting a further stage in the process of text generation in the institutional medical discourse. We claim that the intentional and grammatical perspective of the medical text formation is associated with the modal variability of verbal lexemes: the prevailing in PV and TL personal verb forms reflect the presence of the subject of speech as an agent in special communication; in AL these are replaced by infinitives which transform the real modality of the message about an action "from experience" (in PV and TL) into a syntactic categorical imperative.It was also determined that the subject of the action expressed by personal verb forms is typically generalized (in this case, special actions of the doctor and the patient can be detected through the difference in the verbal lexemes). The subject is not grammatically defined with the infinitive verb forms.

A study on the attenuation of ATO cardiotoxicity by SOG though Nrf2/ARE pathway

Arsenic trioxide (ATO, Trisenox) is an ancient Chinese medicine which have good clinical effects for acute promyelocytic leukemia (APL). However, ATO has serious cardiotoxicity which has restricted its widely applied in clinic. Saposhnikovia divaricata (Trucz.) Schischk was an antidote to ATO in Chinese medical book. Sec-O-Glucosylhamaudol (SOG) is one of its four main active ingredients. So we explore if SOG can detoxify the ATO’s cardiotoxicity through the Nuclear factor erythroid 2-related factor 2(Nrf2) signal pathway and apoptosis pathway. We added 10 μM ATO and 10, 50, 100 μM SOG in Rat cardiac myocyte-like H9c2 cells. The results indicate SOG can active Nrf2 signal pathway, improve Nrf2 phosphorylation levels, promote the expression of Nrf2, HO-1, NQO1 gene and protein, increase the contents of antioxidant enzyme SOD, CAT and GSH-PX, reduce the ROS levels, increase cell activity. By testing the apoptosis-related protein Bax, Bcl-2 and caspase-3, also proved that 10 μM SOG can improve ATO-induced cell apoptosis. So SOG can plays a role in detoxifying ATO cardiac toxicity.

Jeremiah Barker: Background, Education, and Writings

An overview of Barker’s life includes a brief genealogy of his family, his marriages and children, the Penobscot Expedition, and a description of the geographic, social, religious, economic, and demographic setting of Gorham and Portland, Maine, in the late 1700s. The provenance of the Barker manuscript is followed by a summary of its contents, including material from the diary of Portland’s Rev. Thomas Smith detailing epidemics and diseases from 1735 to 1780 and Barker’s own discussion of mental illness, consumption, and a wide assortment of ailments and issues such as epidemic fever, bloodletting, childbed fever, cancer, public health, consumption, yellow fever, and the “dangers of spirituous liquors.” The chapter concludes with Dr. Samuel Mitchill’s 1798 article on medical geography and its relationship to epidemics in the United States and Britain, comments on the American medical book trade, a list of Barker’s articles published in the first and second US medical journals, and comments on yellow fever in Maine.

IDENTIFYING PSYCHOLOGICAL SUBJECT AS A THEME: FOCUSING ON ENGLISH DECLARATIVE CLAUSES

This research discusses one of the types of subjects functioning as a theme proposed by Halliday (1985) in the English Declarative Clause which is called the Psychological Subject. Halliday claims the interpretation of Psychological subject into as something which is the concern of the message. It is the first constituent which becomes a ‘subject-matter’ of the clause. The data are taken from two kinds of books. The first one is an autobiography book and the second one is a medical book. The aim of this research is to identify the kinds of the theme found in psychological subjects in the English Declarative Clause and also categories found in psychological subjects functioning as a theme. The method used is a descriptive method and the technique employed is paraphrasing. The descriptive method was used to depict the empirical data discovered in those sources. Meanwhile, the paraphrasing technique was employed in order to explore the characteristics of psychological subject functioning as a theme, types of theme and categories of syntactic units. The study shows that Psychological Subject (PS) functioning as a theme can be filled by words and groups which could be realized by nominal groups (nouns and pronouns), nominal group complexes, adverbial groups or prepositional phrases. Nominal groups (nouns and pronouns) and nominal group complexes can be identified as unmarked themes which are ordinary, expected, and usual form according to Deterding (2001), Gerot and Wignel (1994) identified as the subject of the sentence. Meanwhile, adverbial groups and prepositional phrases could be identified as marked themes because they become the first constituents which perform the point of the departure of the message in the clause.

Evaluating a historical medical book collection

Background: After several years of storing a large number of historical medical books that had been weeded from the general collection, the University of New Mexico Health Sciences Library and Informatics Center developed a set of evaluation criteria to determine whether the material should be kept and included in the library catalog or discarded. The purpose of this article is to share lessons learned in evaluating and processing a historical medical book collection. The authors share how we determined review criteria as well as cataloging and processing procedures.Case Presentation: Best practices for evaluating, cataloging, and processing historical library material were determined through a literature search and then reviewed and adapted for application to this project. Eight hundred sixty-two titles were selected to add to the catalog and were added to a shelving location in our offsite storage facility.Conclusions: These materials are now discoverable in the library’s catalog for library users who are interested in historical research, and the materials have been processed for easy retrieval as well as preservation purposes.

Medical management of urolithiasis in the Middle Ages: Thesaurus Pauperum of Pope John XXI

Background/Objective: This paper will present a brief description of medicine in the Middle Ages, and more comprehensive analysis of the medical management of urolithiasis in Thesaurus Pauperum, the main text of Pedro Hispano. Method: An in-depth reading of the Italian translation of Thesaurus Pauperum, and a review of the literature of the life of Pedro Rebuli Guiliani, known as Pedro Hispano, was performed. Result: Pedro Hispano was born in Portugal around 1205. He studied philosophy, theology and medicine in Paris. He was named professor of medicine at the University of Siena in 1247 and was elected Pope, as John XXI, in 1276. His primary medical book was Thesaurus Pauperum (‘Treasure of the Poor’), a prescription handbook for common diseases, directed not only to physicians but also to ordinary people. We focused on the description of medical management of urolithiasis in Thesaurus Pauperum. Conclusion: This text is interesting not so much on account of the pharmacopoeia used, but instead, because it is, probably, one of the first medical text reporting therapeutics close to the modern evidence-based medicine.