'A sad inheritance of misery': the cultural life of hereditary scrofula in eighteenth-century England.

This essay argues that scrofula was one of several disorders, including gout, rickets, and venereal disease, that were 'rebranded' as hereditary in response to broader cultural changes that took place during the Restoration and eighteenth century in England. While the purposes of scrofula's recategorisation were more political than medical, they resulted in this heretofore relatively obscure childhood ailment assuming a new prominence within both medical and popular discourses of the period. Scrofula became both emblem and proof of the links between sexual promiscuity, financial profligacy, and physiological degeneration, its symbolic status reinforced by the legal and moral language used to model processes of hereditary transmission. By likening the inheritance of scrofula to the inheritance of original sin-or, more commonly, to the inheritance of a 'docked entail' or damaged estate-eighteenth-century writers and artists not only made this non-inherited ailment into a sign of catastrophic hereditary decline; they also paved the way for scrofula to be identified as a disease of aristocratic vice, even though its association with crowded, unsanitary living conditions likely made it more common among the poor. By the same token, financial models of disease inheritance facilitated a bias toward paternal transmission, with scrofula often portrayed as passing, like a title or an estate, from father to son rather than from mother to daughter.

The Jew's penis: circumcision and sexual pathology in eighteenth-century England.

This essay explores the contradictory, prejudicial attitudes towards circumcision and Jewish male sexuality circulating in eighteenth-century English print culture. I argue that while Jewish men had long been accused of lustfulness, effeminacy and sexual deviance, eighteenth-century culture added to these concerns a unique interest in sexual pathology, borne in part from the growing medical anxiety around venereal disease. Consequently, while Jewish men were still widely condemned for their lechery, they were also increasingly ridiculed for a range of penile and sexual disorders that were believed to make sex unsatisfying, difficult or even impossible-most notably impotence, a condition often associated with venereal disease. I link these paradoxical eighteenth-century characterisations of Jewish male sexuality with a similarly paradoxical understanding of circumcision as a procedure that could prevent, but also cause, various penile or sexual disorders. I conclude that these prejudices not only constitute an example of what Sander Gilman has identified as the 'bipolar' nature of anti-Semitism; they also indicate a darker trend towards the pathologising of the Jewish body.

Cancer and the emotions in 18th-century literature.

This essay argues that the emotional rhetoric of today's breast cancer discourse-with its emphasis on stoicism and 'positive thinking' in the cancer patient, and its use of sympathetic feeling to encourage charitable giving-has its roots in the long 18th century. While cancer had long been connected with the emotions, 18th-century literature saw it associated with both 'positive' and 'negative' feelings, and metaphors describing jealousy, love and other sentiments as 'like a cancer' were used to highlight the danger of allowing feelings-even benevolent or pleasurable feelings-to flourish unchecked. As the century wore on, breast cancer in particular became an important literary device for exploring the dangers of feeling in women, with writers of both moralising treatises and sentimental novels connecting the growth or development of cancer with the indulgence of feeling, and portraying emotional self-control as the only possible form of resistance against the disease. If, as Barbara Ehrenreich suggests, today's discourse of 'positive thinking' has been mobilised to make patients with breast cancer more accepting of their diagnosis and more cooperative with punitive treatment regimens, then 18th-century fictional exhortations to stay cheerful served similarly conservative political and economic purposes, encouraging continued female submission to male prerogatives inside and outside the household.

Establishment of reference intervals for aldosterone and renin in a Caucasian population using the newly developed Immunodiagnostic Systems specialty immunoassay automated system.

BACKGROUND: Measurement of aldosterone and/or renin is essential to aid the differential diagnosis of secondary hypertension, guide strategy for therapeutic management of hypertension and assess adequacy of mineralocorticoid replacement. AIM: The objective was to establish normative data for aldosterone and renin using the Immunodiagnostic Systems specialty immunoassay system platform in a Caucasian population. METHODS: Following informed consent, 365 subjects were recruited to this study. Subjects were ambulatory and attended clinic for blood pressure measurement and phlebotomy between the hours of 7:00 and 11:00. Blood pressure was measured according to the 2013 European Society of Hypertension/Cardiology guidelines. The inclusion criteria: age ≥18 years, BMI <30 kg/m(2), non-pregnant, blood pressure <140/90, normal electrolytes and kidney function and not taking prescribed/over the counter medications. Ninety-four subjects were excluded based on these criteria. A total of 271 volunteers (females n = 145), aged 18-65 years formed the reference cohort. Blood for aldosterone/renin was collected into ethylenediaminetetraacetic acid specimen tubes. Samples were kept at room temperature and transported within 30 min of blood draw to the laboratory for immediate processing (centrifugation, separation and freezing of plasma). Plasma was stored at -20℃ prior to analysis on the Immunodiagnostic Systems specialty immunoassay system instrument. RESULTS: The established reference intervals in an Irish Caucasian population for renin: females: 6.1-62.7 mIU/L, males: 9.0-103 mIU/L, for aldosterone: females: <138-1179 pmol/L, males: <138-670 pmol/L, respectively. CONCLUSION: This study demonstrates that reference intervals for aldosterone and renin should be gender specific. These automated immunoassays offer rapid stratification of patients with refractory hypertension and will better facilitate the optimization of therapeutic management.