[The trembling heart of the monarch-Insights into the heart condition of Emperor Maximilian II]. / Das zitternde Herz des Monarchen ­ Hintergründe zum Herzleiden von Kaiser Maximilian II.

It has long been known in historical research that the Habsburg Emperor Maximilian II (1527-1576) suffered from heart complaints throughout his life. Numerous biographers mention this fact. His medical history and even the results of the autopsy of his body have been handed down; however, it has not been sufficiently investigated how Maximilian's physicians explained his heart condition, often referred to as "tremor cordis", and what causes and triggers they held responsible for this complaint in general and in the specific case of their famous patient. This article addresses these questions, primarily on the basis of a detailed consultation by the imperial personal physician Andrea Gallo, dating from 1555. Gallo's consilium, which has been ignored by scholares so far, first summarizes the state of knowledge on heart tremors at that time. It then turns to Maximilian's case and provides revealing insights into his mental state.

Lamellar Ionenes with Highly Dissociative, Anionic Channels Provide Lower Barriers for Cation Transport.

Solid polymer electrolytes have the potential to enable safer and more energy-dense batteries; however, a deeper understanding of their ion conduction mechanisms, and how they can be optimized by molecular design, is needed to realize this goal. Here, we investigate the impact of anion dissociation energy on ion conduction in solid polymer electrolytes via a novel class of ionenes prepared using acyclic diene metathesis (ADMET) polymerization of highly dissociative, liquid crystalline fluorinated aryl sulfonimide-tagged ("FAST") anion monomers. These ionenes with various cations (Li+, Na+, K+, and Cs+) form well-ordered lamellae that are thermally stable up to 180 °C and feature domain spacings that correlate with cation size, providing channels lined with dissociative FAST anions. Electrochemical impedance spectroscopy (EIS) and differential scanning calorimetry (DSC) experiments, along with nudged elastic band (NEB) calculations, suggest that cation motion in these materials operates via an ion-hopping mechanism. The activation energy for Li+ conduction is 59 kJ/mol, which is among the lowest for systems that are proposed to operate via an ion conduction mechanism that is decoupled from polymer segmental motion. Moreover, the addition of a cation-coordinating solvent to these materials led to a >1000-fold increase in ionic conductivity without detectable disruption of the lamellar structure, suggesting selective solvation of the lamellar ion channels. This work demonstrates that molecular design can facilitate controlled formation of dissociative anionic channels that translate to significant enhancements in ion conduction in solid polymer electrolytes.

Chemistry-Informed Machine Learning for Polymer Electrolyte Discovery.

Solid polymer electrolytes (SPEs) have the potential to improve lithium-ion batteries by enhancing safety and enabling higher energy densities. However, SPEs suffer from significantly lower ionic conductivity than liquid and solid ceramic electrolytes, limiting their adoption in functional batteries. To facilitate more rapid discovery of high ionic conductivity SPEs, we developed a chemistry-informed machine learning model that accurately predicts ionic conductivity of SPEs. The model was trained on SPE ionic conductivity data from hundreds of experimental publications. Our chemistry-informed model encodes the Arrhenius equation, which describes temperature activated processes, into the readout layer of a state-of-the-art message passing neural network and has significantly improved accuracy over models that do not encode temperature dependence. Chemically informed readout layers are compatible with deep learning for other property prediction tasks and are especially useful where limited training data are available. Using the trained model, ionic conductivity values were predicted for several thousand candidate SPE formulations, allowing us to identify promising candidate SPEs. We also generated predictions for several different anions in poly(ethylene oxide) and poly(trimethylene carbonate), demonstrating the utility of our model in identifying descriptors for SPE ionic conductivity.

[Artisanal Surgery in the Early 17th Century. The Practice Journal of a Barber-Surgeon in Münster]. / Handwerkschirurgie im frühen 17. Jahrhundert. Das Praxisjournal eines Münsteraner Barbiers.

This paper presents and analyzes the practice journal of a barber-surgeon in the town of Münster, in Northern Germany, in which he recorded about 950 cases he treated between 1602 and 1614. Based on this source, it examines the clientele and the fees of a German barber-surgeon in the early seventeenth century, and looks at the injuries and complaints for which patients sought his treatment.

Accelerating amorphous polymer electrolyte screening by learning to reduce errors in molecular dynamics simulated properties.

Polymer electrolytes are promising candidates for the next generation lithium-ion battery technology. Large scale screening of polymer electrolytes is hindered by the significant cost of molecular dynamics (MD) simulation in amorphous systems: the amorphous structure of polymers requires multiple, repeated sampling to reduce noise and the slow relaxation requires long simulation time for convergence. Here, we accelerate the screening with a multi-task graph neural network that learns from a large amount of noisy, unconverged, short MD data and a small number of converged, long MD data. We achieve accurate predictions of 4 different converged properties and screen a space of 6247 polymers that is orders of magnitude larger than previous computational studies. Further, we extract several design principles for polymer electrolytes and provide an open dataset for the community. Our approach could be applicable to a broad class of material discovery problems that involve the simulation of complex, amorphous materials.

Learning anatomy in late sixteenth-century Padua.

Based on the newly discovered, extensive manuscript notes of a virtually unknown German medical student by the name of Johann Konrad Zinn, who studied in Padua from 1593 to 1595, this paper offers a detailed account of what medical students could expect to learn about anatomy in late sixteenth-century Padua. It highlights the large number and wide range of anatomical demonstrations, most of which were private anatomies for a small circle of students and do not figure in Acta of the German Nation, the principal source historians have so far relied upon. While the large audience in the big, celebrated public anatomies made it difficult if not impossible for the students to see the details of the anatomical structures, the much more numerous private anatomies offered a view from close up. As Zinn's notes show, the two leading Paduan anatomists, Hieronymus Fabricius Aquapendente and Giulio Casseri often focused on a specific part of the body, like the brain or the pregnant uterus, and, following the Galenic model, consistently linked the demonstration of the fabric of that part to a discussion of its action and uses. In this sense, the different kinds of valves in the body, including those in the veins, were shown and discussed, as a subsection on William Harvey underlines, and the vivisection of animals for a group of students even allowed them to see the beating heart and other organs in action. In retrospect, much of the anatomical knowledge that students acquired in late sixteenth-century Padua was of limited relevance for medical practice but the anatomists did their best to point out such clinical uses and even used anatomical demonstrations to show different kinds surgical interventions on the corpse.

Universal Relationship between Molecular Structure and Crystal Structure in Peptoid Polymers and Prevalence of the cis Backbone Conformation.

Peptoid polymers are often crystalline in the solid-state as examined by X-ray scattering, but thus far, there has been no attempt to identify a common structural motif among them. In order to probe the relationship between molecular structure and crystal structure, we synthesized and analyzed a series of crystalline peptoid copolymers, systematically varying peptoid side-chain length (S) and main-chain length (N). We also examined X-ray scattering data from 18 previously reported peptoid polymers. In all peptoids, we found that the unit cell dimensions, a, b, and c, are simple functions of S and N: a (Å) = 4.55, b (Å) = [2.98]N + 0.35, and c (Å) = [1.86]S + 5.5. These relationships, which apply to both bulk crystals and self-assembled nanosheets in water, indicate that the molecules adopt extended, planar conformations. Furthermore, we performed molecular dynamics simulations (MD) of peptoid polymer lattices, which indicate that all backbone amides adopt the cis conformation. This is a surprising conclusion, because previous studies on isolated molecules indicated an energetic preference for the trans conformer. This study demonstrates that when packed into supramolecular lattices or crystals, peptoid polymers prefer to adopt a regular, extended, all-cis secondary structure.

Approaches to the History of Patients: From the Ancient World to Early Modern Europe.

This chapter looks from an early modernist's perspective at some of the major questions and methodological issues that writing the history of patients in the ancient world shares with similar work on Patientengeschichte in medieval and early modern Europe. It addresses, in particular, the problem of finding adequate sources that give access to the patients' experience of illness and medicine and highlights the potential as well as the limitations of using physicians' case histories for that purpose. It discusses the doctor-patient relationship as it emerges from these sources, and the impact of the patient's point of view on learned medical theory and practice. In conclusion, it pleads for a cautious and nuanced approach to the controversial issue of retrospective diagnosis, recommending that historians consistently ask in which contexts and in what way the application of modern diagnostic labels to pre-modern accounts of illness can truly contribute to a better historical understanding rather than distort it.

"You have no good blood in your body". Oral communication in sixteenth-century physicians' medical practice.

In his personal notebooks, the little known Bohemian physician Georg Handsch (1529-c. 1578) recorded, among other things, hundreds of vernacular phrases and expressions he and other physicians used in their oral interaction with patients and families. Based primarily on this extraordinary source, this paper traces the terms, concepts and images to which sixteenth-century physicians resorted when they explained the nature of a patient's disease and justified their treatment. At the bedside and in the consultation room, Handsch and his fellow physicians attributed most diseases to a local accumulation of impure, putrid or otherwise pathological humours. The latter were commonly said to result, in turn, from an insufficient concoction and assimilation of food and drink in the stomach and the liver or from an obstruction of the humoral flow inside the body and across its borders. By contrast, other notions and explanatory models, which had a prominent place in contemporary learned medical writing, hardly played a role at all in the physicians' oral communication. Specific disease terms were rarely used, a mere imbalance of the four natural humours in the body was almost never inculpated, and the patient's personal life-style and other non-naturals did not attract much attention either. These striking differences between the ways in which physicians explained the patients' diseases in their daily practice and the explanatory models we find in contemporary textbooks, are attributed, above all, to the physicians' precarious situation in the early modern medical marketplace. Since dissatisfied patients were quick to turn to another healer, physicians had to explain the disease and justify their treatment in a manner that was comprehensible to ordinary lay people and in line with their expectations and beliefs, which, at the time, revolved almost entirely around notions of impurity and evacuation.

Metaphors and images of cancer in early modern Europe.

Drawing on learned medical writing about cancer and on nonmedical texts that used cancer as a metaphor for hateful cultural, social, religious, or political phenomena that warranted drastic measures, this article traces the metaphors and images that framed the perception and experience of cancer in the early modern period. It finds that cancer was closely associated with notions of impurity and a visible destruction of the body's surface and was diagnosed primarily in women, as breast and uterine cancer. Putrid, corrosive cancerous humor was thought not only to accumulate and eat its way into the surrounding flesh but also to spread, like the seeds of a plant, "infecting" the whole body. This infectious quality, the putrid secretions, and the often horrendous smell emanating from cancer victims raised fears, in turn, of contagion and were taken to justify a separation of cancer patients from the rest of society.

John Locke's "new method of making common-place-books": tradition, innovation and epistemic effects.

In 1676, the English physician and philosopher John Locke published a new method of commonplacing. He had developed this method and, in particular, a new approach to organizing and indexing the entries, in the course of 25 years of personal note-taking and it proved quite influential. This paper presents the three major approaches to commonplacing as practiced by physicians and other scholars before Locke--the systematic or textbook approach, the alphabetical approach and the sequential or index-based approach--and it analyzes the ways in which Locke himself applied them in his own commonplace books. In comparison with established approaches, his new method offered a maximum degree of flexibilitywhile facilitating the later retrieval of notes and minimising waste of space and paper. Thanks to these features, it was particularly well suited for physicians and natural philosophers who were interested in the infinite variety of natural particulars rather than in elegant quotes on a very limited set of classical topics. In conclusion, the potential epistemic impact of commonplacing on early modern medicine and natural philosophy is discussed, in particular its importance for contemporary debates about species and disease entities and for the emergence of the notion of "facts"!

Bedside teaching and the acquisition of practical skills in mid-sixteenth-century Padua.

Very little is known to this point about the practical skills which sixteenth-century physicians needed and applied at the bedside and even less about how these skills were taught to students. Drawing on student notebooks and on printed collections of consilia by Padua professors, this paper outlines the different settings in which case-centered and, more specifically, bedside teaching was imparted in mid-sixteenth-century Padua. It describes the range of diagnostic and therapeutic skills that students acquired thanks to this hands-on training at the patient's bedside, from uroscopy and feeling the pulse to the manual exploration of the patient's abdomen, which, historians have wrongly believed, physicians performed very rarely or not at all, and surgical skills. Taking a closer look, more specifically, at the role of teaching in the Hospital of San Francesco in Padua, the paper provides evidence that not only Giovanna Battista da Monte but also at least one other mid-sixteenth-century professor, Antonio Fracanzani, made systematic use of the teaching opportunities which the hospital offered. Ultimately, the paper will argue that clinical teaching in the hospital did not differ fundamentally from forms of bedside teaching in the patients' homes, however. Both became increasingly popular in Padua and elsewhere at the time, reflecting a growing appreciation for the practical and sensory skills which future physicians needed in addition to theoretical learning if they hoped to be successful in the highly contested early modern medical marketplace.

'Abhorreas pinguedinem': Fat and obesity in early modern medicine (c. 1500-1750).

Contrary to a widely held belief, the medicalization of obesity is not a recent development. Obesity was extensively discussed in leading early modern medical textbooks, as well as in dozens of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century dissertations. Drawing upon ancient and medieval writings, these works discussed the negative impact of obesity upon health and linked it with premature death. Obesity was particularly associated with apoplexy, paralysis, asthma and putrid fevers, and a range of therapeutic options was proposed. This paper offers a first survey of the medical understanding of the causes, effects and treatment of obesity in the early modern period. It examines the driving forces behind the physicians' interest and traces the apparently rather limited response to their claims among the general public. Comparing early modern accounts of obesity with the views and stereotypes prevailing today, it notes the impact of changing medical, moral and aesthetic considerations and identifies, among other things, a shift in the early modern period from concepts of pathological compression to images of the obese body as lax and boundless.

The Würzburg Anatomical Institute and its supply of corpses (1933-1945).

The Würzburg Anatomical Institute was one of the largest institutions of its kind in early 20th-century Germany. Little is known so far, however, about its history in the Third Reich. This paper presents the first results of current research on the Institute's directors Hans Petersen (1925-1940) and Curt Elze (1940-1945) and the sources from which it received its corpses during that period. For both directors there is little evidence for a marked affinity to National-Socialist ideology but a substantial degree of opportunism emerges from the surviving sources, at least in the case of Elze. Elze not only joined the NSDAP, by his own admission, without strict necessity. He also did not protest when Werner Heyde, principal medical actor in the Nazi "euthanasia" program, supplied him with 80 corpses of men and women who clearly had been murdered with carbon monoxide. The Institute's supply of corpses is analyzed based on the registers of received corpses and other, supplementary sources. Before 1933, the Würzburg Institute received most of its corpses from hospitals, old age homes. Between 1933 and 1945 some marked changes occurred. In particular, the number of corpses not only from psychiatric hospitals but also from other places of institutional care declined, presumably due, at least to a substantial degree, to "euthanasia". On the other hand, the number of corpses delivered from execution sites, prisons and Gestapo rose dramatically, reflecting the massive increase of the number of death sentences as well as, by all appearances, that of deaths from physical violence and torture in the prisons.

[The first hospice for the dying in Europe? The 'Hundertsuppen'--hospital in Nuremberg 1770-1813]. / Europas altestes Sterbehospiz? Das Nürnberger Kranken- haus "Hundertsuppe", 1770-18131.

Hospices for terminally ill and dying patients have so far been considered an 'invention' of the late 19th century. Based on the analysis of admission journals and other archival sources, this paper presents the hospital 'Hundertsuppe' in Nuremberg as an institution which already exhibited most characteristics of a modern hospice 100 years before that. Established, in 1770, as a hospital for chronic diseases, it served almost from the start primarily as an institution for fatally ill, poor patients, who could spend the last months, weeks or days of their life in relative comfort, with nursing and spiritual and medical care. This primary function was explicitly accepted by those in charge of the hospital. It is evidenced by an extraordinarily high mortality of almost 70%, with almost two-thirds of the patients staying for less than 3 months and 'consumption' being the foremost cause of death. In conclusion, the 'Hundertsuppe' is discussed as an exemplary case of an institution for the dying which arose due to the insufficient care for incurable and dying patients in the new 'curative' hospitals; the first English hospices in the late 19th century and the influential St. Christopher's Hospice in the 1960s, commonly attributed to charismatic individual founding figures like Howard Barrett and Cicely Saunders, are shown to have originated from similar contexts.