Medical planning for extended remote expeditions.

Remote extended expeditions often support scientific research and commercial resource exploration or extraction in hostile environments. Medical support for these expeditions is inherently complex and requires in-depth planning. To be successful, this planning must include substantial input from clinicians with experience in remote, emergency, and prehospital medicine and from personnel familiar with the proposed working environment. Using the guidelines discussed in this paper will help ensure that planners consider all necessary, medically relevant elements before launching an extended remote expedition. The 10 key elements of a workable remote healthcare system are to: 1. Optimize workers' fitness. 2. Anticipate treatable problems. 3. Stock appropriate medications. 4. Provide appropriate equipment. 5. Provide adequate logistical support. 6. Provide adequate medical communications. 7. Know the environmental limitations on patient access and evacuation. 8. Use qualified providers. 9. Arrange for knowledgeable and timely consultations. 10. Establish and distribute rational administrative rules. Planners using these guidelines may better be able to generate a strategy that optimizes the participants' health benefits, the expedition's productivity, and the expedition sponsor's cost savings.

Robert Musil frente a Ernst Mach / Robert Musil versus a Ernst Mach

Sobre las teorías de Mach (TD de R. Musil) rebate que la representación científica tienda a construir un claro y completo inventario de hechos. Pues Mach se ve obligado a presuponer relaciones constantes en la naturaleza; pero esta regularidad de los fenómenos implica que la ley es algo más que cierto «cuadro», que las meras dependencias que defiende están en un segundo plano y que una relación teórica en física es mucho más que una relación de orden. Su concepción de laeconomía científica como «adaptación natural» significa un monismo biológico opuesto a las dualidades propias de un empirista (AU)

On Mach’s Theories (DT of R. Musil) rejects that the scientific representation tends to build a clear and complete inventory of facts. Mach finds himself obliged to presuppose constant relationshipsin nature; but this regularity of phenomena implies that the law is something more than a «table», that its mere dependencies are pushed into the background, and that a theoretical relationship in Physics is much more than an order relationship. His conception of scientific economy as a «natural adaptation» implies a biological monism opposed to the characteristic dualities of an empiricist (AU)

Polynesia and polygenism: the scientific use of travel literature in the early 19th century.

Christoph Meiners (1747-1810) was one of 18th-century Europe's most important readers of global travel literature, and he has been credited as a founder of the disciplines of ethnology and anthropology. This article examines a part of his final work, "Untersuchungen über die Verschiedenheiten der Menschennaturen" [Inquiries on the differences of human natures], published posthumously in the 1810s. Here Meiners developed an elaborate argument, based on empirical evidence, that the different races of men emerged indigenously at different times and in different places in natural history. Specifically this article shows how a sedentary scholar who never left Europe constructed a narrative of human origins and migrations on the basis of (1) French theory from the 1750s (Charles de Brosses and Simon Pelloutier) and (2) data gathered by explorers as reported in travel literature (J.R. Forster, Pérouse, Cook, Marsden).

The fate of the bird specimens from Cook's voyages possessed by Sir Joseph Banks.

Joseph Banks possessed the greater part of the zoological specimens collected on James Cook's three voyages round the world (1768-1780). In early 1792, Banks divided his zoological collection between John Hunter and the British Museum. It is probable that those donations together comprised most of the zoological specimens then in the possession of Banks, including such bird specimens as remained of those that had been collected by himself and Daniel Solander on Cook's first voyage, and those that had been presented to him from Cook's second and third voyages. The bird specimens included in the Banks donations of 1792 became part of a series of transactions during the succeeding 53 years which involved the British Museum, the Royal College of Surgeons of England, and William Bullock. It is a great pity that, of the extensive collection of bird specimens from Cook's voyages once possessed by Banks, only two are known with any certainty to survive.

Botany and zoology in the late seventeenth-century Philippines: the work of Georg Josef Camel SJ (1661-1706).

Georg Josef Camel (1661-1706) went to the Spanish colony of the Philippine Islands as a Jesuit lay brother in 1687, and he remained there until his death. Throughout his time in the Philippines, Camel collected examples of the flora and fauna, which he drew and described in detail. This paper offers an overview of his life, his publications and the Camel manuscripts, drawings and specimens that are preserved among the Sloane Manuscripts in the British Library and in the Sloane Herbarium at the Natural History Museum, London. It also discusses Camel's links and exchanges with scientifically minded plant collectors and botanists in London, Madras and Batavia. Among those with whom Camel corresponded were John Ray, James Petiver, and the Dutch physician Willem Ten Rhijne.

Good for a national cemetery: questions of land use and an 1888 Botanical Expedition across Northern Michigan.

In the second half of the nineteenth century, lumbermen logged the virgin pine forests of northern Michigan. The assumption was that the "plow would follow the axe," and agriculture would dominate the region as it did in the southern half of the state. When farming did not quickly take root, William James Beal and Liberty Hyde Bailey led an expedition of scientists and journalists on a trip across northern Michigan in June 1888 to collect botanical samples, to find a site for a state forest reserve, and to recommend appropriate farming enterprises. This essay contends that without a key reforestation advocate in charles Garfield the explorers focused too much on the questions related to botany and agriculture.While agriculture would ultimately thrive in some parts of the cutover, much of the region was unsuitable for intensive farming. The failure of the scientists to convey these limits adequately in newspaper articles and subsequent reports allowed for their work to be used by agricultural boosters throughout the region. The result was a cycle of erosion, fire, and farm abandonment that proved to be a political problem in Michigan for the first three decades of the twentieth century.