[Performing madness: the clinic as stage]. / Der demonstrierte Wahnsinn--Die Klinik als Bühne.

In the second half of the nine- teenth century, clinical demonstrations became the dominant teaching method in psychiatry, playing a key role in medical-professional disputes, as well. This paper traces this widely used though historiographically neglected practice of knowledge implementation and mediation, as demonstrated in the psychiatric clinic of the Berlin Charité (Psychiatrische und Nervenklinik der Berliner Charité) from 1881 to 1927. Documentation of this practice, found within individual medical records, forms the basis of this research. The concept of 'theatricality' assists in uncovering the dramatic quality of the clinical demonstration: Psychiatric knowledge was not simply disseminated through such a practice; rather, such knowledge was first performatively created through the very logic of its presentation of exemplary patient histories, as well as through the examination and diagnostic positioning of its patients. The 'success' of such presentations depended on many variables, related to staff, time, place, and other situational factors. These include the presence of appropriate lecture halls, the availability and calculated selection of patients, and the employment of specific performative techniques by doctors for the sake of producing desired results. As one effect, clinical demonstrations also encouraged patients to both learn and rehearse behavior considered relevant to the particular diagnosis that was to be demonstrated.

Constraining the axion-photon coupling with massive stars.

We point out that stars in the mass window ~8-12M([circumpunct]) can serve as sensitive probes of the axion-photon interaction, g(Aγγ). Specifically, for these stars axion energy losses from the helium-burning core would shorten and eventually eliminate the blue loop phase of the evolution. This would contradict observational data, since the blue loops are required, e.g., to account for the existence of Cepheid stars. Using the MESA stellar evolution code, modified to include the extra cooling, we conservatively find g(Aγγ)

Neutrino scattering and flavor transformation in supernovae.

We argue that the small fraction of neutrinos that undergo direction-changing scattering outside of the neutrinosphere could have significant influence on neutrino flavor transformation in core-collapse supernova environments. We show that the standard treatment for collective neutrino flavor transformation is adequate at late times but could be inadequate in early epochs of core-collapse supernovae, where the potentials that govern neutrino flavor evolution are affected by the scattered neutrinos. Taking account of this effect, and the way it couples to entropy and composition, will require a new approach in neutrino flavor transformation modeling.

[Medical normativity in the diagnosis of schizophrenia at the Charité Hospital around 1920. An application of Grounded Theory to historical patient records]. / Arztliche Normativität in der Schizophrenie-Diagnostik an der Charité um 1920. Eine Anwendung der Grounded Theory auf historische Krankenakten.

This paper tests the applicability of the qualitative analytical method known as "Grounded Theory" for examining archival patient records. We take the introduction of schizophrenia as a diagnosis in the "Psychiatrische und Nervenklinik der Charité" in Berlin around 1920 as an example to ask about the norms that influenced psychiatrists' clinical judgments. In a first, introductory section of the essay, we demonstrate the specific steps of an analysis based on Grounded Theory by applying it to our material and highlighting some of the difficulties we encountered in the process. In the second part of the essay, we identify three levels of medical normativity: first, general norms for dealing with patients in the course of the clinic's procedures; second, norms that extend the diagnostic gaze in time to the period before the patients' hospitalization; and third, norms for evaluating symptoms according to emotional knowledge when psychiatrists lacked objective methods for measuring affects. In the last part of the paper, we discuss the advantages and disadvantages of applying this method to archival patient records.

Self-induced suppression of collective neutrino oscillations in a supernova.

We investigate collective flavor oscillations of supernova neutrinos at late stages of the explosion. We first show that the frequently used single-angle (averaged coupling) approximation predicts oscillations close to, or perhaps even inside, the neutrinosphere, potentially invalidating the basic neutrino transport paradigm. Fortunately, we also find that the single-angle approximation breaks down in this regime; in the full multiangle calculation, the oscillations start safely outside the transport region. The new suppression effect is traced to the interplay between the dispersion in the neutrino-neutrino interactions and the vacuum oscillation term.

Self-refraction of supernova neutrinos: mixed spectra and three-flavor instabilities.

Neutrinos in a core-collapse supernova undergo coherent flavor transformations in their own background. We explore this phenomenon during the cooling stage of the explosion. Our three-flavor calculations reveal qualitatively new effects compared to a two-flavor analysis. These effects are especially clearly seen for the inverted mass hierarchy: we find a different pattern of spectral "swaps" in the neutrino spectrum and a novel "mixed" spectrum for the antineutrinos. A brief discussion of the relevant physics is presented, including the instability of the two-flavor evolution trajectory, the three-flavor pattern of spectral "swaps," and partial nonadiabaticity of the evolution.