How the Seven Countries Study contributed to the launch and development of cardiovascular epidemiology in Italy. A historical perspective.

The Italian research group of the Seven Countries Study of Cardiovascular Diseases (SCS), through the independent use of the national cohorts and data, had the lucky opportunity, starting in the early 1960, to launch the Italian research in epidemiology of cardiovascular diseases (CVD). In this way, the Italian Section of that international study became the first investigation with baseline measurements in various cohorts, subsequent re-examinations, systematic search for morbid events, and follow-up for mortality up to 50 years. A large number of scientific aspects has been tackled including estimates of morbidity and mortality rates, the association of risk factors with cardiovascular events and total mortality, the role of risk factor changes, the use of multivariable models, the role of lifestyle behavior, the determinants of all-cause mortality including risk factors rarely measured in other studies, the identification of characteristics of a condition called Heart Disease of Uncertain Etiology (HDUE), the production of predictive tools for practical use and several other issues. All this has been enhanced by the availability of extremely long follow-up data rarely found in other studies. Field work organization, measurement techniques, diagnostic criteria, data handling and computing had the limitations and difficulties typical of those times, the mid of last century, when CVD epidemiology was at its beginning. All this represented anyhow the start of CVD epidemiology research in the country and was the stimulus to the start of other studies and a valuable collaboration with some of them.

[First municipal sanitary stations in Russia: history and main activities (to the 125th anniversary since foundation)].

First municipal sanitary stations in Russia were founded in 1891 in the cities of Moscow and St. Petersburg. They were financed by municipal public self-governments. With performing essential laboratory tests and studies, stations were an important element of the organization of sanitary inspection in cities. In the article there is considered the history of the creation offirst sanitary stations and main directions of their activity: control in the sphere offood trade and in the sphere of municipal water supply.

[Hygiene and urban health as seen by physicians, architects and planners during the first half of the twentieth century]. / Higiene y salud urbana en la mirada de médicos, arquitectos y urbanistas durante la primera mitad del Siglo XX en Chile.

Physicians took part in the promotion of public policies that regulated urban and architectural work, before engineers, architects, planners, and even before the State had a chance to take part in the formulation of such policies. Starting in the late nineteenth century, and especially during the first decade of the twentieth century, the State began to lead on the issue of hygiene and public health. This paper focuses on the role of these professionals, who generated debates within their respective disciplines, or provided -as ministries, public servants or consultants- technical knowledge to the central government. These debates are still relevant for two reasons. First, they serve as reminders of the way in which the voice of these professionals was crucial not only within their respective disciplines, but also in order to place the issue of hygiene and public health on the agenda and to promote public policies related to the urban environment and its population. Secondly, these debates represent a challenge to current planners, as this historic context provides insight on the complex relationship between public health and planning, which hitherto has received little attention.

[FOUNDER PERM PROVINCIAL MEDICINE--"PEOPLE'S DOCTOR" F. H. GRAIL].

The article presents the biography of one wonderful doctors, who have high human, civil and professional qualities, Fyodor Ch. Gral.

Lessons learned? Nurses and health demonstration projects in New York City, 1920-1935.

This historical case study looks at two foundation-funded health demonstration projects in New York City from 1920 to 1935. It specifically examines the disciplinary interests, the work, and the aspirations of nurses and social workers as they tried to provide coordinated and cost-effective care to the individuals and families with whom they worked. It attends to the processes--not just the outcomes--involved in the coming together and moving apart of the different organizations, disciplinary interests, knowledge domains, and spheres of public and private responsibilities involved in caring for those in need. It locates the problems of coordination within disciplinary tensions as nurses and social worker--working within a web of gender, class, race, and power--sought to advance their own disciplinary interests even as they searched for better ways to care for the families in their charge.

[Scoliotic young girls and orthopaedics in Belle Epoque: the urban surge of mecanotherapy in Lausanne and Geneva]. / Jeunes filles scoliotiques et orthopédie a la Belle Epoque: l'essor urbain de la mécanothérapie a Lausanne et Genève.

In Belle Epoque towns marked by the industrial and medical surge, a new technical therapy, called mechanotherapy, emerged, stemming from Swedish medical gymnastics and auxiliary to orthopaedics. Aiming mostly at treating scoliosis, this therapy by movement attracted a sizeable female clientele to these towns, because of the hygienic and social conceptions feeding collective imagination linked to the bodies of scoliotic young girls. Taking the French-speaking Swiss towns of Lausanne and Geneva as examples, the article first seeks to describe the emergence of mechanotherapy as a medical and urban phenomenon. It then addresses the role played by scoliosis in this orthopaedic practice, and examines the clientele attracted to the towns, among which well-born young girls seem to be predominant.

Providing local color?: "cape coloreds," "cockneys," and Cape Town's identity from the late nineteenth century to the 1970s.

Jim Dyos, founding-father of British urban history, argued that cities have commonly acknowledged "individual characteristics" that distinguish them. Such distinctive characteristics, though usually based on material realities, are promoted through literary and visual representations. This article argues that those who seek to convey a city's distinctiveness will do so not only through describing its particular topography, architecture, history or functions but also by describing its "local colour": the supposedly unique customs, manner of speech, dress, or other special features of its inhabitants. In colonial cities this process involved white racial stereotyping of "others". In Cape Town, depictions of "Coloured" inhabitants as unique "city types" became part of the city's "destination branding". The article analyses change and continuity in such representations. To this end it draws on the insights of Gareth Stedman Jones into changing depictions of London's "Cockneys" and the insights of Stephen Ward into historical "place-selling".

Enhancing livelihoods and the urban environment: the local political framework for integrated organic waste management in Diadema, Brazil.

Drawing on a participatory study of integrated organic waste management, this article explores the local political barriers and preconditions for its implementation in Diadema, Brazil. Solid waste management in Brazil is embedded in and mediated by a political framework that is characterised by uneven power geometries. This article explores how the local political context affects the potential for integrated organic waste management in Diadema, paying particular attention to relations between stakeholders. The discussion addresses the contested nature of deliberative decision-making spaces and the need for pro-active socio-environmental policies. The findings underline the importance of a praxis of everyday public participation that goes beyond rhetoric.

Symptoms of another life: time, possibility, and domestic relations in Chile's credit economy.

In this article, I explore the synergy and disjunctures of the consumer credit system and care for the mentally ill and addicted in the lifeworlds of the urban poor in Santiago, Chile. In Chile, the expansion of the credit system has had a double-edged effect on the poor. Although it produces perpetual indebtedness, it also is a resource amid unstable labor. Following an extended family over several years, this article examines how women take up credit through a wider field of domestic relations and institutions to care for kin with mental illness and addiction within the home. Such gestures of care enact a temporality of waiting, allowing different, but unpredictable, aspects of others to emerge. Through longitudinal ethnographic research with this family, I demonstrate both how possibility is actualized within the home as symptoms of illness and forms of domestic violence, and how a wider network of dependencies­from neighbors to lending institutions­shapes the temporality of relations within the home. Such a study of care in relation to the credit economy may offer other analytic perspectives on discourses of individualism, consumerism, and cost-effectiveness accompanying the expansion of consumer credit as they are absorbed into the everyday.

African American students' reactions to Benjamin Cooke's "Nonverbal Communication Among Afro-Americans: An Initial Classification".

The nonverbal communication behavior of Black people continues to take new forms as time progresses. In Kochman's 1972 book, Rappin' and Stylin' Out: Communication in Urban Black America, Benjamin Cooke introduced an initial classification and code of nonverbal behaviors among people of African descent. In this study, students react to Cooke's study conducted in the late 1960s by commenting on Cooke's initial findings in comparison to nonverbal behaviors practiced among Black people as of late. Respondents suggest that while differences and variations exist between the expression of nonverbal behaviors exhibited by the original group studied and people recently observed, there yet remains a similarity in the cultural significance and motivation behind the displays.

Marrying in the city in times of rapid urbanization.

Economic, social, political, and demographic processes changed Western European cities strongly during the nineteenth century. Especially during this time, the northern part of Belgium (Flanders) became highly urbanized. Investigating the long-term development of the marriage pattern in the cities of Antwerp, Aalst, and Ghent gives a detailed picture of the evolution of the urban marriage pattern. In this article, specific emphasis is on gender, social, and migration distinctions. The results confirm that there is a male-female difference and variation among various social and migrant groups in the age at first marriage during the period 1800-1906. Moreover, regional differences are also visible. In the port city of Antwerp, massive immigration caused a unique evolution in the age at first marriage during the last decades of the nineteenth century, which did not appear in the textile cities of Aalst and Ghent during this time.

Sauvons le Luxembourg: urban greenspace as private domain and public battleground, 1865-1867.

This article examines the way in which public response to a municipal proposal concerning greenspace reduction in Paris during the Second Empire reflected not only political antipathy but also an ever-increasing understanding of public urban greenspace as part of the private domain. By examining archival records concerning the proposal, essays, newspaper accounts, and memoirs, this article argues that a particular proprietary sensibility, fomented by expansive public greenspace development in Paris, intersected with extant social constructs and political tensions to create a public, coordinated, and sustained challenge to the authoritarian regime. Thus, the battle over the Luxembourg Garden became more than just a fight to prevent a reduction in size of a particular public urban greenspace. Rather, public debate surrounding alteration of this garden underscores the extent to which public greenspace, in general, was urban space that blurred the public­private boundary and presented unique opportunities for community formation, social integration, and political action.

The "swinish multitude": controversies over hogs in antebellum New York City.

In the first half of the nineteenth century, New Yorkers fought passionately over the presence of hogs on their streets and in their city. New York's filthy streets had cultivated an informal economy and a fertile environment for roaming creatures. The battles­both physical and legal­reveal a city rife with class tensions. After decades of arguments, riots, and petitions, cholera and the fear of other public health crises ultimately spelled the end for New York's hogs. New York struggled during this period to improve municipal services while adapting to a changing economy and rapid population growth. The fights between those for and against hogs shaped New York City's landscape and resulted in new rules for using public space a new place for nature in the city.

"The very model of modern urban decay": outsiders' narratives of industry and urban decline in Gary, Indiana.

In the eyes of many, the steel city of Gary, Indiana, entered a period of decline in the middle of the twentieth century. The once great city was seemingly racked by job loss, crime, racial division, or moral decay. Which of these caused the decline of the city depended upon the perspective of the story's teller. Each narrative of decline contained a different moment where the city went wrong and it began to decay. For some it was the moral decay of the 1950s, for others it was the rise of black power and politics in the 1960s, for still others it was the white backlash against civil rights in the 1970s. Some saw a microcosm of America, some saw a dangerous cauldron of race and ethnicity. The source of decline and the origins of the urban crisis were largely in the eye of the beholder. The stories people chose to tell about Gary mattered because for much of the twentieth century, Gary was at the center of American narratives about industrialism. These were outsider narratives of decline read onto the Indiana steel city because Gary represented larger debates. People read onto Gary their changing expectations and anxieties about industry and industrial spaces. This article traces the changing attitudes outsiders held toward Gary from the middle of the twentieth century through the period of deindustrialization at the end of the century and examines American narratives about deindustrialization and urban decline.

Envisioning disaster in the 1910 Paris flood.

This article uncovers the visual narratives embedded within the photography of the 1910 Paris flood. Images offered Parisians multiple ways to understand and construe the significance of the flood and provided interpretive frameworks to decide the meaning of this event. Investigating three interlocking narratives of ruin, beauty, and fraternité, the article shows how photographs of Paris under water allowed residents to make sense of the destruction but also to imagine the city's reconstruction. The article concludes with a discussion of the role of visual culture in recovering from urban disasters.

Responding to the second ghetto: Chicago's Joe Smith and Sin Corner.

World War Two and its aftermath transformed Chicago's African American community. The Great Migration entered a second and more intense phase as black migrants flooded into Northern cities. This massive relocation of Southern blacks resulted in the expansion and reformulation of Chicago's ghettoes on both the West and South Sides of the city. The question of a response to this Second Ghetto from African Americans themselves presents itself. White politicians, cultural elites and businessmen still controlled the city and could impose their will on its neighborhoods simply redrawing ghetto boundaries to reflect the new realities of the postwar era. The strange case of Joe Smith and Sin Corner sheds some light on black agency in the 1950s. The African American middle class had resources it commanded to try and protect itself from racial injustice. These resources, however, were based on class privileges not enjoyed by most in the African American community.

"But burn - no": the rest of the crowd in three civil disorders in 1960s Chicago.

Examining the internal dynamics of three civil disturbances on the West Side of Chicago during the late 1960s, this article describes the presence of numerous people who were not participating in the upheaval. It pays particular attention to "counterrioters," civilian residents of the neighborhoods and members of local organizations, who tried to persuade those engaging in violence to stop. Local dissent from the tactic of violence suggests that historians should describe these events using the neutral language of social science rather than the politically loaded labels of "riot" or "rebellion." The article argues that American historians of urban disorders should use the methods of European scholars of the crowd to study the actions of participants in order to ascertain their political content, rather than relying on an examination of their motives.

Epidemiological transition and the double burden of disease in Accra, Ghana.

It has long been recognized that as societies modernize, they experience significant changes in their patterns of health and disease. Despite rapid modernization across the globe, there are relatively few detailed case studies of changes in health and disease within specific countries especially for sub-Saharan African countries. This paper presents evidence to illustrate the nature and speed of the epidemiological transition in Accra, Ghana's capital city. As the most urbanized and modernized Ghanaian city, and as the national center of multidisciplinary research since becoming state capital in 1877, Accra constitutes an important case study for understanding the epidemiological transition in African cities. We review multidisciplinary research on culture, development, health, and disease in Accra since the late nineteenth century, as well as relevant work on Ghana's socio-economic and demographic changes and burden of chronic disease. Our review indicates that the epidemiological transition in Accra reflects a protracted polarized model. A "protracted" double burden of infectious and chronic disease constitutes major causes of morbidity and mortality. This double burden is polarized across social class. While wealthy communities experience higher risk of chronic diseases, poor communities experience higher risk of infectious diseases and a double burden of infectious and chronic diseases. Urbanization, urban poverty and globalization are key factors in the transition. We explore the structures and processes of these factors and consider the implications for the epidemiological transition in other African cities.