[The voyage in 1547 to Stamboul (Constantinople) by the pharmacist-naturalist Pierre Belon from Mans]. / Le voyage en 1547 à Stamboul du médecin natualiste Pierre Belon du Mans.

Pierre Belon was born in Le Mans in 1517. After he had worked as apothecary assistant and he had studied botany, he was chosen to join in the embassy sent by French King François I to the Turkish Sultan in 1546. From 1553 he wrote his impressions upon his tour "Comments upon different peculiarities and memorable things". In Stamboul he dawdled around the typical Turkish drugstores and he observed and recorded the hygienic habit of the Turks. Not only are his "Comments" about the Eastern Countries a mine of useful information but they can be also considered as the foundation of renewal in the relationship between Europeans travellers and the Middle East.

Delivering the city's children: municipal programs and midwifery in Los Angeles.

In 1915, at the height of a movement in the United States to regulate midwifery, health officials in the city of Los Angeles devised an unusual plan for doing so: they put the city itself in the midwifery business. At the same time that public health officials in Los Angeles enacted traditional regulatory legislation to deal with the "midwife problem," they also established a Division of Obstetrics within the city's health department to provide prenatal and postnatal care for the poor. Unlike the maternity dispensaries of other municipalities, Los Angeles provided physicians to attend home-births. Thus, rather than trying to move the delivery room out of the home, Los Angeles moved physicians in.

[General situations of medical rescue at Shanghai public concession in the 30s of 20th century].

In the 30s of 20th century, Shanghai public concession is the largest concession of old China. Health Department of Work Bureau and Fire Department administrated the rescue works in concession. The affiliated first -- aid sections and hospitals were responsible for concrete rescue works of patients. The health workers were hardworking for the health, body and mind, of all kinds of people, inside and outside, and achieved clear results.

[The use of water as indication of the presence of life: technical ways of employment in the archaelogical documentation]. / L'acqua come segno di vita: modi e tecniche di utilizzo nel mondo romano alla luce della documentazione archeologica.

Ancient urbanization often is strictly connected with rivers and sources. In the ancient world, the usage of water is also linked with the idea of sacrum and with specific religious cults (i.e. the King's Numa mith or the legend of the nymph Egeria). A complex technique of rain water preservation has been elaborated in Rome by building structures of water supplying: the exemples of Segni's colony and Ventotene's imperial island are here examined. Due to the general absence of water supply directly in the houses, public fountains were largely present in the public ways.