Tropicalizing the Portable Radio: Electronics and the U.S. Military's Battle against Fungi in the Pacific War.

As the U.S. military became embroiled in "jungle warfare" across the Pacific during World War II, it was caught off guard by the rapid deterioration of materials and equipment in the tropics, where the air was hot, humid, and teeming with fungal spores. This article tells the story of how American scientists and engineers understood the "tropical deterioration" of portable radios and electronics and developed techniques to counteract it. Examining scientific efforts to prevent tropical decay reveals how exposure to tropical conditions during World War II shaped the development of portable electronics. Contributing to envirotech history and environmental media studies, this article uncovers the importance of climate proofing to the history of electronics miniaturization. Tropical deterioration, furthermore, provides a technology-focused lens for enriching our historical understanding of the tropics as an environmental imaginary.

Severe prenatal shocks and adolescent health: Evidence from the Dutch Hunger Winter.

This paper investigates health impacts at the end of adolescence of prenatal exposure to multiple shocks, by exploiting the unique natural experiment of the Dutch Hunger Winter. At the end of World War II, a famine occurred abruptly in the Western Netherlands (November 1944-May 1945), pushing the previously and subsequently well-nourished Dutch population to the brink of starvation. We link high-quality military recruits data with objective health measurements for the cohorts born in the years surrounding WWII with newly digitised historical records on calories and nutrient composition of the war rations, daily temperature, and warfare deaths. Using difference-in-differences and triple differences research designs, we first show that the cohorts exposed to the Dutch Hunger Winter since early gestation have a higher Body Mass Index and an increased probability of being obese at age 18. We then find that this effect is partly moderated by warfare exposure and a reduction in energy-adjusted protein intake. Lastly, we account for selective mortality using a copula-based approach and newly-digitised data on survival rates, and find evidence of both selection and scarring effects. These results emphasise the complexity of the mechanisms at play in studying the consequences of early conditions.

Early-Life Exposure to War and Later-Life Physical Functional Health.

OBJECTIVES: A growing body of research shows that early-life exposure to war has adverse effects on later-life health. Research has emphasized the importance of exposure timing implicating domain-specific developmental processes and associated critical/sensitive periods. This study looks at the impacts of early childhood war exposure and the repercussions for later-life physical and functional health, with a focus on time of exposure as a source of variability. METHODS: We use residential histories from the Survey of Health Ageing, and Retirement in Europe linked to external data on the location and timing of hostilities to examine the impact of early-life exposure to World War II on later-life physical and functional health. RESULTS: Exposure to war increases the risk of objective (grip strength, chair rise, and peak expiratory flow) and self-reported (mobility limitations and activities of daily living) measures of functional health. Effects are especially pronounced for those born during the war and for those with more prolonged exposures. There is little evidence that the impact of war is mediated by war-related hardships, socioeconomic conditions, health behaviors, or adult chronic disease. DISCUSSION: Our results suggest early-life exposure to war has a lasting impact on physical functional health. Exposure appears to largely operate via direct effects, indicative of altered initial development of physical capacity in early life. Because exposure was so pervasive among some cohorts of older individuals, understanding the health of present older European populations requires wrestling with the residual consequences of wartime exposure at the start of their lives.

Contemporary History of Spine Fractures Following Deck-Slap Injury: From Deck Blast During World War II Naval Battles to Axial Trauma During Touristic Speedboat Sea Cruise in 21st Century.

In large-scale naval battles during World War II, sailors sometimes sustained serious lower limb injuries when explosion blast of sea mines was transmitted from underneath through the metal deck of the ships. Some of these sailors were thrown in the air due to the blast and sustained axial trauma of the spine when they landed on the hard deck, which was thus called a deck slap by Captain Joseph Barr in 1946, among others. Nowadays, this peculiar mechanism has shifted to the civilian setting. Tourists unaware of the danger may sustain spine compression fractures when they sit at the bow of speed boats while underway on a calm sea. When the craft unexpectedly crosses the wake of another ship, tourists are thrown a few feet in the air before suffering a hard landing on their buttocks. This historical vignette is presented as a preventive message to help to reduce this poorly known yet avoidable "summer wave of vertebral fractures."

[HE GAVE EVERYTHING HE HAD: DR. SHLOMO GURFINKEL - A LAST DESCENDANT].

INTRODUCTION: Holocaust survivors gave a significant contribution to Israel's fighting forces and to the victory in the War of Independence. Many of them lost their lives in the battlefields. Many doctors who were survivors took an active part in the war, and afterwards in the building of the base of public medicine in the country. The "Last Descendants" were those Holocaust survivors who remained the last remnant of their nuclear family (parents, brothers, sisters, sons and daughters), who immigrated to Israel, joined the army and fell in battle, thus ending forever their family legacy. One of them was Dr. Shlomo Gurfinkel. During World War II he was a member of the Jewish underground and served as a doctor in Vilna's ghetto and in the ranks of the partisans. In the War of Independence, he was a doctor in a "Haganah" battalion and lost his life in the battles in Jerusalem. By telling his personal story, we intend to throw light on the heroic actions of those Holocaust survivors, amongst them medical personnel, who came to Israel and joined the fighting forces, including those who were "last descendants".

CONTRIBUTION TO THE UNDERSTANDING OF THE HEALTH SITUATION WITHIN THE POPULATION IN SLAVONIA AND SRIJEM DURING THE SECOND WORLD WAR WITH AN EMPHASIS ON INFECTIOUS DISEASES / Prilog poznavanju zdravstvenih prilika stanovnistva u Slavoniji i Srijemu tijekom Drugoga svjetskog rata, s naglaskom na zarazne bolesti

During World War II, the population of agricultural areas of Slavonia and Srijem lived in privation, but there was no famine. A more serious threat was infectious diseases, such as malaria, typhoid fever, and dysentery, which were also present within the population in the post-war period. Major epidemics broke out mostly in areas under partisan control, especially in the areas of western and central Slavonia, where major epidemic typhus contagious broke out. Venereal diseases, less common in the Slavonian area before the war, were also on the rise. Two factors had an impact on the health situation within the population ­ state medical institutions and partisan medical corps. Health care and measures to combat infectious diseases were provided by state authorities, and that is still an insufficiently explored area in historiography. During the first years of the war, the partisan medical corps personnel, initially mostly semiskilled and lacking necessary medical equipment and medications, relied on the support from the population to a greater extent than they were able to provide medical care to them. With the arrival of professional staff and the acquisition of medicines and medical equipment, mainly sourced from medical institutions in areas under partisan control, they assumed a more active role in supporting civilian authorities under the "people's rule"­specifically, the people's liberation committees. Their focus shifted to healthcare for the civilian population, primarily aimed at suppressing and preventing infectious diseases. Further research on this topic will contribute to a more realistic perception of the civilian population's everyday life during the war, which was presented in memoir literature and historiography of the socialist period as a heroic act of resistance rather than a struggle for survival in the conditions of privation and diseases; it will also complete the picture of the human losses of the civilian population caused by infectious diseases.

Past meets present: Reviving 80-year-old Canadian dried serum from World War II and its significance in advancing modern freeze-dried plasma for prehospital management of haemorrhage.

During World War II, Charles H. Best utilized Charles R. Drew's plasma isolation and drying technique to lead Canada's initiative to provide dried serum as a means of primary resuscitation for British casualties on the frontlines. Serum was likely utilized over plasma for its volume expansion properties without the risk of clotting during prolonged storage. We reconstituted dried serum from 1943 and discovered intact albumin, as well as anti-thrombin, plasminogen, protein C and protein S activity. Proteomic analysis identified 71 proteins, most prominent being albumin, and positive for hepatitis B by serological testing. Transmission of blood-borne diseases ended the programme, until modern advances in testing and pathogen reduction revived this technology. We tested the latest iteration of Canadian freeze-dried plasma (FDP), which was stored for 4 years, and demonstrated that its clotting capacity remained equivalent to fresh frozen plasma. We recommend that FDP is a strong alternative to contemporary prehospital resuscitation fluids (e.g. normal saline/lactated Ringer's) in managing prehospital haemorrhage where whole blood is unavailable.

Attitudes to Male Homosexuality Within the British Medical Association in the 1950s.

The British Government appointed a departmental committee to review anti-homosexuality laws in 1954 following a marked increase in the number of arrests for homosexuality after World War II. The committee invited the British Medical Association (BMA) and other institutions to provide scientific and medical evidence relating to homosexuality. In 1954, the BMA established the Committee on Homosexuality and Prostitution to present its view on how the law impacted upon homosexuals and society. This paper analyses the BMA's attitudes to homosexuality by examining its submission to the Departmental Committee. Whilst the BMA supported implicitly the decriminalization of certain homosexual acts, it remained strongly opposed to homosexuality from a moral perspective and insisted that it was an illness. It is concluded that the BMA's submission was driven primarily by a desire to control the "unnatural deviant" behavior of homosexuals and to protect society from that behavior rather than to protect homosexuals.

Quantifying Healthy Aging in Older Veterans Using Computational Audio Analysis.

BACKGROUND: Researchers are increasingly interested in better methods for assessing the pace of aging in older adults, including vocal analysis. The present study sought to determine whether paralinguistic vocal attributes improve estimates of the age and risk of mortality in older adults. METHODS: To measure vocal age, we curated interviews provided by male U.S. World War II Veterans in the Library of Congress collection. We used diarization to identify speakers and measure vocal features and matched recording data to mortality information. Veterans (N = 2 447) were randomly split into testing (n = 1 467) and validation (n = 980) subsets to generate estimations of vocal age and years of life remaining. Results were replicated to examine out-of-sample utility using Korean War Veterans (N = 352). RESULTS: World War II Veterans' average age was 86.08 at the time of recording and 91.28 at the time of death. Overall, 7.4% were prisoners of war, 43.3% were Army Veterans, and 29.3% were drafted. Vocal age estimates (mean absolute error = 3.255) were within 5 years of chronological age, 78.5% of the time. With chronological age held constant, older vocal age estimation was correlated with shorter life expectancy (aHR = 1.10; 95% confidence interval: 1.06-1.15; p < .001), even when adjusting for age at vocal assessment. CONCLUSIONS: Computational analyses reduced estimation error by 71.94% (approximately 8 years) and produced vocal age estimates that were correlated with both age and predicted time until death when age was held constant. Paralinguistic analyses augment other assessments for individuals when oral patient histories are recorded.

Expeditionary Surgeons: Essential to Surgical Leadership in World War II and Today.

This presidential address, given during the Annual Symposium of the Excelsior Surgical Society of the American College of Surgeons, explores the origins of the expeditionary surgeon. The essential traits of such a surgeon-leader are defined using examples from history and are then used to examine the leadership of Edward D Churchill during World War II as the prototypical expeditionary surgeon. In the future, identifying key military surgical leaders as expeditionary surgeons would serve our nation's interests well in preserving our fighting force on the battlefield. Consideration should be given to formally training and designating such surgical leaders for the military and other austere settings.

Scientizing the 'environment': Solly Zuckerman and the idea of the School of Environmental Sciences.

In 1960 Sir Solly Zuckerman proposed the idea of an interdisciplinary department of 'environmental sciences' (ENV) for the newly established University of East Anglia (UEA). Prior to this point, the concept of 'environmental sciences' was little known: since then, departments and degree courses have rapidly proliferated through universities and colleges around the globe. This paper draws on archival research to explore the conditions and contexts that led to the proposal of a new and interdisciplinary grouping of sciences by Zuckerman. It argues that the activities of Zuckerman and other scientists in Britain during the Second World War and in the post-war period helped to create fertile conditions for a new kind of scientific authority to emerge as a tool of governance and source of policy advice. In particular, the specific challenges of post-war Britain - as addressed through scientific advisers and civil servants - led to the 'environment' becoming both the subject of sustained scientific study and an object of concern.

The 'social' in psychiatry and mental health: quantification, mental illness and society in international scientific networks (1920s-1950s).

The post-World War II international mental health movement placed significant emphasis on the concept of the 'social environment', a true paradigm shift in thinking about the causes of mental illness. Rather than focusing on individual risk factors, experts and policy-makers began to consider the interplay between social context and mental health and illness. Also, during this period, quantification gained prominence within the expanding field of Western psychiatry. Eventually, the concept of the 'social' became fragmented into quantifiable social determinants that could be correlated with mental illness and subjected to systematic neutralization. This trajectory paved the way for the prevailing biomedical psychiatric epidemiology. This broader inquiry challenges us to redefine our understanding of the 'social' in the context of mental health research and practice.

Sir Terence Ward CBE MBE (Mil) (1906-1991) and maxillofacial surgery at Queen Victoria Hospital.

Terence Ward was a major maxillofacial surgeon in World War II, working with Sir Archibold McIndoe to treat badly injured forces personnel, especially air crew. He was important when the time came to establish his speciality in the post-war NHS. Sir Terence played an important role in the Royal College of Surgeons of England, where he was dean of its Faculty of Dental Surgery and raised a great deal of money for the Department of Dental Science.

Long-lasting effects of World War II trauma on PTSD symptoms and embodiment levels in a national sample of Poles.

The main aim of this study was to investigate the long-lasting influences of World War II (WWII) trauma in a national sample of Poles, based on Danieli's (1998) survivors' post-trauma adaptational styles (fighter, numb, victim) and their link with current post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) symptoms and embodiment level among participants. We also sought to investigate whether the level of knowledge about WWII trauma among ancestors could moderate that association. The study was conducted among a representative sample of 1598 adult Poles obtained from an external company. Participants filled out the Danieli Inventory of Multigenerational Legacies of Trauma, the knowledge about traumatic World War II experiences in the family questionnaire, the Posttraumatic Diagnostic Scale-5, and the Experience of Embodiment Scale. We observed a positive relationship between all survivors' post-trauma adaptational styles and current levels of PTSD symptoms among participants. In addition, PTSD level mediated the relationships between those adaptational styles and embodiment intensity; that mediation was additionally moderated by a lack of knowledge about WWII trauma among ancestors in our participants. Our study adds to the literature on intergenerational trauma by highlighting the importance of evaluating embodiment in understanding the mechanisms of trauma transmission. Furthermore, it highlights the moderating effect of knowledge of family history in this mechanism and the need to share family histories with subsequent generations.

Technical conferences as a technique of internationalism.

This paper looks at a genre of meetings that, while neither purely 'scientific' nor 'diplomatic', drew on elements from both professional spheres and gained prominence in the interwar decades and during the Second World War. It proposes to make sense of 'technical conferences' as a phenomenon that was made by and through scientific experts and politicians championing the organizing power of rationality, science and liberal internationalism. Against the background of swelling ranks of state-employed scientists, this paper documents the emergence of technical conferences as the forums where they got down to work. To make this case the paper traces the influence of a new way of thinking about the function and organization of conferences, originating in the time around the First World War, on one international organization in particular: the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA), as a new hub of scientists and technicians.

La Defensa Pasiva y su división médica de emergencia / Passive Defense and its emergency medical division / Passive Defence e sua divisão médica de emergência

Durante la Segunda Guerra Mundial el gobierno de Uruguay intentó prepararse para una eventual defensa militar del territorio y la defensa de la población civil en caso de sufrir ataques aéreos. La Defensa Pasiva, fue la estructura gubernamental que junto a la voluntad en todas las clases sociales, funcionó en todo el territorio nacional con la finalidad de proteger a la población civil de los ataques aéreos y guerra química, generando un espíritu de solidaridad a través de su División Médica de Emergencia.

During the Second World War, the government of Uruguay tried to prepare for an eventual military defense of the territory and the defense of the civilian population in case of air raids. The Passive Defense was the governmental structure that, together with the will of every social class, operated throughout the national territory with the purpose of protecting the civilian population from air raids and chemical weapons, generating a spirit of solidarity through its Emergency Medical Division.

Durante a Segunda Guerra Mundial, o governo uruguaio tentou se preparar para uma eventual defesa militar do território e para a defesa da população civil em caso de ataques aéreos. A Defesa Passiva era a estrutura governamental que, juntamente com a vontade de todas as classes sociais, operava em todo o território nacional com o objetivo de proteger a população civil de ataques aéreos e da guerra química, gerando um espírito de solidariedade por meio de sua Divisão Médica de Emergência.

Reconstruction of Wilhelm Wundt's last residence in Saxony and the search for subsequent use as a research institute, fellowship house, or museum of psychotechnics.

The German physiologist Wilhelm Wundt (1832-1920) is now recognized worldwide as the founding figure of academic psychology. He founded the first Institute for Experimental Psychology in Leipzig in 1879 and gained recognition during his lifetime. The scientist's last home in the small village of Großbothen in East Germany, about 100 miles (160 km) south of Berlin, was left to decay after German reunification in 1989/1990. Wundt's other homes in Leipzig were destroyed during World War II. During the GDR period, when the house was owned by the public sector, an inscription in honor of Wundt was added. It then stood empty for many years and fell into disrepair. In June 2016, an association was founded at Schloss Altranstädt near Leipzig with the aim of acquiring the rights to use the Wilhelm Wundt House. Thanks to their efforts, the house has now been entrusted to a conservationist as of 2018. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).