Restoring and attributing ancient texts using deep neural networks.

Ancient history relies on disciplines such as epigraphy-the study of inscribed texts known as inscriptions-for evidence of the thought, language, society and history of past civilizations1. However, over the centuries, many inscriptions have been damaged to the point of illegibility, transported far from their original location and their date of writing is steeped in uncertainty. Here we present Ithaca, a deep neural network for the textual restoration, geographical attribution and chronological attribution of ancient Greek inscriptions. Ithaca is designed to assist and expand the historian's workflow. The architecture of Ithaca focuses on collaboration, decision support and interpretability. While Ithaca alone achieves 62% accuracy when restoring damaged texts, the use of Ithaca by historians improved their accuracy from 25% to 72%, confirming the synergistic effect of this research tool. Ithaca can attribute inscriptions to their original location with an accuracy of 71% and can date them to less than 30 years of their ground-truth ranges, redating key texts of Classical Athens and contributing to topical debates in ancient history. This research shows how models such as Ithaca can unlock the cooperative potential between artificial intelligence and historians, transformationally impacting the way that we study and write about one of the most important periods in human history.

Masturbation as a Cause of "Sexual Neurasthenia": Anton Chekhov's Medical Report (1883).

ABSTRACT: In the 18th and 19th centuries, in Europe and the United States, masturbation was seen not only as a deviant form of sexual activity but also as a cause of nervous diseases. Masturbation was originally thought to cause insanity, but with the introduction of George Miller Beard's concept of neurasthenia, it came to be considered a form of nervous exhaustion. In the current article, we analyzed the almost forgotten medical report of a "sexual neurasthenic," written by the famous Russian writer and physician Anton Chekhov (1860-1904). This report gives us detailed information about the treatment of a patient allegedly experiencing the effects of masturbation, and thus reflects the medical discourse on masturbation in Russia in the early 1880s. It shows that although the international debate on the causes of neurasthenia had just begun, the concept of neurasthenia toward masturbation had already been put into practice at the Moscow University Clinic in 1883.

'Pruning a genius': marginalia by Richard Dadd.

After falling into mental illness as a young man, the British artist Richard Dadd (1817-86) spent some 20 years as a patient at Bethlem Hospital in London. A rare example of his writings from these years survives in the form of marginalia in a copy of Lectures on Painting and Design by Benjamin Robert Haydon, held in the Morgan Library & Museum in New York. This article presents a transcription of the notes, along with an introduction setting them in the contexts of Dadd's career and his relationship with the senior staff at Bethlem.

La escritura, el primer universo virtual

Reflexión sobre cómo evolucionaron el acceso y la producción de la escritura y la lectura, especialmente luego de los últimos adelantos tecnológicos.

Felipe Trigo: un escritor médico (cuasi) olvidado / Felipe Trigo: a physician writer (almost) forgotten

Felipe Trigo (1864-1916) fue uno de los médicos escritores más importantes de la época de la Restauración borbónica. Fue médico rural y médico militar pero fue especialmente conocido por su obra literaria y periodística. Entre sus obras más importantes figuran El médico rural (1912) y Jarrapellejos (1914), donde realiza una profunda crítica de la sociedad española de la época. Trigo fue conocido por sus obras de literatura erótica por las que fue atacado en su tiempo, lo que contribuyó a su olvido después de su muerte. El médico rural contiene numerosos elementos autobiográficos del tiempo que ejerció como la medicina en pueblos extremeños. Tiene un notable interés para conocer cómo era la práctica de los médicos, su conocimiento de los avances médicos del siglo XIX y las relaciones que ese establecían con el pueblo llano y la estructura caquicil dominante. Después de décadas de práctico olvido, Trigo vuelve a ser considerado como uno de los médicos escritores más notables de su generación

Felipe Trigo (1864-1916) was one of the most important writers of the Borbonic Restoration period. He was a country physician and military physician, but he was especially known by his literary and journalistic work. Among his most important literary, we should show up El médico rural (1912) and Jarrapellejos (1914), where he performed a strong critical approach of the Spanish society of his time. He was also known by his erotic novels, which were strongly attacked at the time. This fact contributed to the oblivion of his works after the Trigo’s death. El médico rural contains many autobiographical elements of the time he worked as physician in country villages of Extremadura. The novel has an outstanding interest to know how was the medical practice of country physicians, their knowledge of the medical advances of the late nineteenth century and their social relationships with plain people and the local rulers. After decades of being almost forgotten, Trigo is now recognized as one of the physician writers more noteworthy of his generation

The Crisis of Crisis: Rethinking Epidemics from Hong Kong.

Writing in the late 1980s in the midst of the AIDS crisis in the United States, historian Charles Rosenberg suggested that epidemics furnished "useful sampling devices" for examining "fundamental patterns of social value and institutional practice." This paper reconsiders Rosenberg's seminal essay and the central question it addresses-what is an epidemic?-from the vantage of a historian in Hong Kong working on colonial and postcolonial Asia in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic. The paper begins by setting Rosenberg's essay in its historical context and then considers whether explanatory models developed in a Northern American context may be applicable (or not) to other non-Western settings. The paper makes the case for a re-interrogation of the "epidemic" as an epidemiological and social category, and it concludes by suggesting that COVID-19 is challenging underlying assumptions about what a "crisis" is to the extent that the pandemic may be understood as a crisis of crisis itself.

"The books and the night", neurological perspective on Jorge Luis Borges' blindness

The works of Argentinian scholar Jorge Luis Borges (1899-1986) have captivated physicians. An assiduous reader, he was given, with magnificent irony, "books and the night". Borges suffered from chronic and irreversible blindness, which influenced much of his work and has been the subject of different literary and diagnostic analyses from the ophthalmological point of view. However, the characteristics of his visual impairment have escaped the neurological approach, which is why we reviewed his work looking for data suggesting a concomitant brain injury. On his autobiography, he recounts how, during an episode of septicemia, he suffered hallucinations and loss of speech; in addition, in some poems and essays he describes data that suggest "phantom chromatopsia", a lesion of cortical origin. After that accident, Borges survived with a radical change in literary style. Although a precise diagnosis is impossible, his literary work allows recognizing some elements in favor of concomitant brain involvement.

[Failure in the construction of the ego in confessional poetry - Sylvia Plath and Attila Jozsef].

The two poets, an American Sylvia Plath and a Hungarian, Attila József were separated by a quarter of century of time, they lived and worked in different spaces, cultures, but both created in their poetry a radically new style of self-expression, called confessional poetry. The "Belated Lament" of Attila József was written in 1936, and in the following year its author - after repeated earlier attempts - committed suicide. The "Daddy" of Sylvia Plath was written in 1962. She, again, after several attempts, killed herself the following year. They both talk about the powerful effect of the disruptive effect of unresolved Oedipal memories, both are deeply concerned with mourning of the Oedipal other a father and a mother (who died several decades before), and they also construct the death of their own. They both present themselves as an unsuccessful Oedipus and articulate a disturbing and disruptive arrival to Kolonos.

[On Sylvia Plath's Personality].

In this early study, written in 1985, I examined six of the most important personality traits of Sylvia Plath, the poet and writer (1). Sylvia oscillated between positions of dependency and independence; she was characterised by sexual inhibition and promiscuity, writer's block and an explosion of writing, achievement con- straint and liberation from the constraint, emotional dependence and independence. Paradoxically, she committed suicide when far more things (children, productive creative period, publication of her novel) tied her to life than was the case before her first suicide attempt (2). Her life was spent in the perspective of death; death was her main point of reference, and at the same time was a constantly present alternative solution (3). Her neurasthenic, sometimes bipolar mode of existence determined her everyday behaviour: fatigue, irritability, a low ability to tolerate failure, a tendency to somatisation, anxious attitude, low self-esteem (4). She lived between extremes: insensitivity and over-sensitivity, bad and good moods, ego systole and ego diastole, ambivalence towards close family members (father, mother, Ted), relationship fluctuating between adoration and hate (5). Her poetry persona was characterised by object phobia: in her poems objects become hooks, loops, traps (6). She was ambivalent towards both women and men: she hated women, while her effective therapist was a woman; she was jealous of men, she was not capable of a symmetrical partner relationship, she was either subordinate or superior. In Plath's poetry the incompatible dichotomy of soft worm and hard mask refers to the irreconcilable contradiction between the male and female world.

[The "price" of creativity? Predictive and protective factors in the suicide of Sylvia Plath].

An increasing number of studies deal with the potential correspondence between suicidal behaviour and creativity nowadays. Psychobiographical analysis of the life of well known artists may help the better understanding of this phenomenon. In the present study predictive and protective factors of suicide are presented through the case of the well known suicidal poet and writer, Sylvia Plath. The most important predictive factors of suicide in her case are: affective disorder, comorbid anxiety disorder, prior attempt of suicide, and also her seriously affected personality, that mainly appears in her affective dependence. Her life events, both causes and effects of these, are also predisposing suicide. The early loss of her father, ambivalent relation with her mother and her marriage foredoomed to failure are the most significant of them. Although she used to write since her early childhood, the constant fluctuation of her psychological state had serious effect on her ability to write and also her motivation, both being an additional source of stress, due to her performance pressure. The fear of the acceptance of her works could also lay to increased amount of stress and anxiety on her sensitive personality. Her tragical life events, her psychiatric illness and her relentless templets towards herself could cause such a pressing stress, that neither creation, nor motherhood (the most important protective factor for women) could predominate. Neither moving to England, nor her last confessional book, "The Bell Jar" could cure her many kind of wounds, and these factors together lead to the suicide.

[The risk of imagination, or orgy of anger. Trying to reconstruct and understand the Sylvia Plath-phenomenon].

To clarify the relationship between literature and psychiatry we can call on the help of the American-English writer Sylvia Plath, who was given electroconvulsive therapy and psychotherapy on a number of occasions for psychiatric illness and later took her own life. This study seeks an answer to five questions. Did Sylvia Plath suffer from psychiatric illness? Did she show signs of the bipolar triad (bipolar affective disorder, trait aggression, substance or behavioural dependence)? Did her activity as a writer have a therapeutic effect? What was the nature of her "confessionalism"? To what extent does her oeuvre reflect her life? Sylvia Plath very probably suffered from a psychiatric illness, namely bipolar 2 affective disorder. The unsuitable treatment of her illness and the interruption of intensive psychotherapy could have contributed to her early death. Together with the bipolar affective disorder, she was also characterised by serious dispositional aggression and emotional dependence. For her, writing was both a source of stress, because her dysthymia intensified her inhibitions, and at the same time self-healing and a self-fulfilling prophecy. The roots of her confessionalism can be found in her personality development suspended in the stage of becoming an adult, and the failure to work through her traumas. Unlike Goethe and Salinger who killed their heroes, having them commit suicide in The Sorrows of Young Werther and A Perfect Day for Bananafish, while both writers recovered from their crisis, Sylvia Plath described a positive development in The Bell Jar and in Ariel, her verse cycle, then put her head in the gas oven. Would she have stayed alive if she had followed the patterns of Goethe and Salinger?

Il n'y a pas d'amour heureux pour Casanova: Chemical- and bio-analysis of his Memoirs.

The original manuscript of Casanova's Memoirs is stored at the Bibliothèque Nationale de France in Paris. We have gained access to it and explored the surfaces of chapters one and two (via the ethylene vinyl acetate [EVA] film technology, i.e., of diskettes of ethylene vinyl acetate with embedded strong cation and anion exchangers and C8 resins) in search of potential diseases of the author, especially of the gonorrhea bacterium, since Casanova reported that he had several bouts of this pathology along his adventurous life. Although the bacterium was not found, we have detected high levels of HgS as red spots along the lines of the manuscript, suggesting that Casanova was using this chemical as a cure for his venereal disease. Additionally, among the several bacteria identified on the surface via mass spectrometry, we could detect traces of Streptococcus uberis, a typical animal infection, found also in humans, together with a few strains of Lactobacilli, probably present in his saliva. The EVA film technology appears to open new horizons for investigating the world Cultural Heritage.

"The books and the night", neurological perspective on Jorge Luis Borges' blindness.

The works of Argentinian scholar Jorge Luis Borges (1899-1986) have captivated physicians. An assiduous reader, he was given, with magnificent irony, "books and the night". Borges suffered from chronic and irreversible blindness, which influenced much of his work and has been the subject of different literary and diagnostic analyses from the ophthalmological point of view. However, the characteristics of his visual impairment have escaped the neurological approach, which is why we reviewed his work looking for data suggesting a concomitant brain injury. On his autobiography, he recounts how, during an episode of septicemia, he suffered hallucinations and loss of speech; in addition, in some poems and essays he describes data that suggest "phantom chromatopsia", a lesion of cortical origin. After that accident, Borges survived with a radical change in literary style. Although a precise diagnosis is impossible, his literary work allows recognizing some elements in favor of concomitant brain involvement.

Public Representations of Loss in Death Announcements, 1912 to 2002.

This work presents a historical analysis of death announcements ( N = 1,443) posted in the New York Times between 1912 and 2002. Announcements were coded according to two main categories: the genre of the announcement and the presence of emotion words. Four distinct main genres emerged: death notices, memorials, recognition postings by organizations, and recognition postings by nonorganizational parties (friends and family). The proportion of death notices declined steadily from 1912 to 2002, while the proportion of announcements paying tribute to the deceased increased. The announcements were also analyzed in terms of emotion words used, and it is argued that the increasing frequency of emotion words used in the death announcements reflects a progressive emotionalization and psychologization of grief and loss.