The production of medicoethical misconduct: medical ethics and vivisection in Wilkie Collins's Heart and Science.

Even as Wilkie Collins's Heart and Science continues in the tradition of cautionary tales of medicine and science, it also integrates nineteenth-century discussions of medical ethics, vivisection and women, further building on earlier criticisms of scientific hubris. By indicting a fictional medical doctor and his methodology, Heart and Science depicts the extremes of good and bad, ethical and unethical medicine-whether the doctor can care, and not simply solve the medical enigma-in light of a changing medical field that prized objectivity and distance from the subject over the old holistic way of listening to a patient in order to understand her malady. In reading Collins within his historical context and against a changing environment within the medical sciences, literary critics discern a gendered doctor-patient relationship and observe a Victorian author's attempts to combat the fears of scientific advancement by using or aligning himself with a proto-feminist perspective.

The public science of Louis Pasteur: the experiment on anthrax vaccine in the popular press of the time.

The paper focuses on Pasteur's public experimentation of the anthrax vaccine (Pouilly-le-Fort, 1881) as portrayed in the English and French popular press of the time. It is argued that this 'popular' level of representation did not merely provide additional publicity for Pasteur's ideas. Rather, the nature and meaning of the experiment itself and of the related controversy on immunisation were substantially negotiated and shaped within the public arena. The multifold consequences of this framing at the public level are explored. In particular, attention is drawn to the relationships that in such process were established with other issues debated at the same time in the arena, namely homeopathy, vivisection and vaccination.

[Anatomia sacra. Religiously motivated interventions on human or animal bodies]. / Anatomia sacra. Religiös motivierte Eingriffe in menschliche oder tierische Körper.

Controlled surgery in the interior of human or animal bodies in classical antiquity was allowed only under certain circumstances. Bloody animal sacrifice and its rules for the interpretation of entrails as well as the rare examples of 'ritual anatomy' presented a religious framework for the opening of bodies. Greek mythology provided several examples of medical operations, for example, the Caesarean section, transplantations and plastic surgery. Great cultic significance was given to organ votives or reproductions of human inner organs which were offered in temples ex voto or with request for their curing. The anatomical knowledge transported along with these offerings represents a separate tradition different from the state of anatomical knowledge found in medical literature of the period.