Anatomically-based skeletal coordinate systems for use with impact biomechanics data intended for anthropomorphic test device development.

Post-mortem human subjects (PMHS) are frequently used to characterize biomechanical response and injury tolerance of humans to various types of loading by means of instrumentation installed directly on the skeleton. Data extracted from such tests are often used to develop and validate anthropomorphic test devices (ATDs), which function as human surrogates in tests for injury assessment. Given that the location and orientation of installed instrumentation differs between subjects, nominally similar measurements made on different PMHS must be transformed to standardized, skeletal-based local coordinate systems (LCS) before appropriate data comparisons can be made. Standardized PMHS LCS that correspond to ATD instrumentation locations and orientations have not previously been published. This paper introduces anatomically-defined PMHS LCS for body regions in which kinematic measurements are made using ATDs. These LCS include the head, sternum, single vertebrae, pelvis, femurs (distal and proximal), and tibiae (distal and proximal) based upon skeletal landmarks extracted from whole body CT scans. The proposed LCS provide a means to standardize the reporting of PMHS data, and facilitate both the comparison of PMHS impact data across institutions and the application of PMHS data to the development and validation of ATDs.

"The older staff, myself included, we were pretty institutionalized ourselves": authority and insight in practitioner narratives of psychiatric deinstitutionalization in Prairie Canada.

In the early 1960s, Canada's provinces began radically to reduce the in-patient populations of their psychiatric services. This was part of a wider project of trans-institutionalization through which vulnerable people and those who cared for them were shifted across institutional contexts within Canada's evolving welfare state apparatus. This article draws on interviews with Psychiatric Nurses who worked through the transformative mental health reforms of the 1960s and 1970s, and it makes a case for practitioner history. Practitioner narratives offer a window on the vital tensions between the manifest and the latent functions of welfare institutions, between the impulse to support and the impulse to control, and between paternalism and respect for the rights of the mentally ill. It draws upon the authority of practitioners who, retrospectively, have gained insight into their involvement with prior regimes of caring and control and have come to discern institutional logics previously so hegemonic as to have been largely invisible to them.

The end of the asylum (town): community responses to the depopulation and closure of the Saskatchewan Hospital, Weyburn.

Never is the fraught relationship between the state-run custodial mental hospital and its host community clearer than during the period of rapid deinstitutionalization, when communities, facing the closure of their mental health facilities, inserted themselves into debates about the proper configuration of the mental health care system. Using the case of Weyburn, Saskatchewan, site in the 1960s of one of Canada's earliest and most radical experiments in rapid institutional depopulation, this article explores the government of Saskatchewan's management of the conflict between the latent functions of the old-line mental hospital as a community institution, an employer, and a generator of economic activity with its manifest function as a site of care made obsolete by the shift to community models of care.

"They gave their care, but we gave loving care": defining and defending the boundaries of skill and craft in the nursing service of a Manitoba mental hospital during the great depression.

The School of Nursing at the Brandon Hospital for Mental Diseases was established in 1921 to equip the hospital with a corps of nurses equal to those found in urban general hospitals. While the school replicated the form of the general hospital training school, its credential was rejected by the national association of graduate nurses. Without the possibility of registration the mental nurses of the 1920s evolved a culture of resistance to the strictures of the training school, one which included affiliation with a trade union. Although still shut-out by the general nursing community, the nurses of the 1930s, arriving with a different sense of their occupational and social mobility, were more disposed to embrace the professional ideology of the training school. By invoking their superior ability to care and their learned capacity to function in the unpredictable environment of the mental hospital, they constructed mental nursing as a skilled craft based on proprietary knowledge, different from the work of both the general hospital nurse and the untrained ward attendant.