A Legacy of Scientific Racism: William Osler's "An Alabama Student".

William Osler's essay "An Alabama Student" made John Young Bassett (1804-1851) a widely admired avatar of idealism in medicine. However, Bassett fiercely attacked the idea that all humans are members of the same species (known as monogenesis) and asserted that Black inferiority was a justification for slavery. Antebellum physician-anthropologists bequeathed a legacy of scientific racism that in subtler forms still runs deep in American society, including in the field of medicine.

The pioneers of nephrology - Professor Natalia Tomilina: courage, passion and humanism in medicine.

Listening to the interview of Natalia Tomilina is an inspiring experience, and not one reserved purely for young physicians. Within these pages, one can discover Tomilina's determination and passion for learning that has been with her throughout her life, even during difficult and testing times. A great resolve that she developed through the teachings of her parents and her mentor, Prof. Maria Ratner.It is clear that her ties to her cultural roots are strong, allowing her to have a greater understanding of her patients ("the doctor has to understand the patient"), and with this, she has developed a humanist approach to medicine. These great attributes have ensured that Tomilina's contributions to the field of nephrology have been significant - her belief being that her discoveries in medicine belong to the patients and not to the physicians.Those who are older will find the stories of her trials and tribulations in old Russia fascinating, as you rediscover what life was like for a female scientific researcher behind the "Iron Curtain".I think that, regardless of age, the nephrology community would like to join us in paying homage to a great woman, whose life tells us that changing the world is possible."Prosperity is not the main point, and it is not prosperity that gives you satisfaction."The interview was recorded in Prague in June 2011.

[Psychiatric nurses experiences of the humanization movement during the first and second waves of deinstitutionalization in Quebec (1960-1990)]. / Les infirmières psychiatriques témoins d'un mouvement d'humanisation au cours des premières et deuxièmes vagues de la désinstitutionnalisation au Québec (1960-1990).

Introduction : This study examines the humanization movement at the Saint-Jean-de-Dieu psychiatric hospital between the 1960s and the 1990s.Context : Conducting a historiography of psychiatric deinstitutionalization in Quebec during the twentieth century shows that the institution was a place of social control and, above all else, a place where psychiatric patients were neglected and dehumanized.Objective : While the historiography since the 1960s has focused on a largely one-dimensional and critical reading of the way in which deinstitutionalization took place in Quebec, I have instead chosen to focus on the changes that took place within the Quebec hospital's walls.Method : In addition to the medical records of the patients who were interned in 1961, I conducted interviews to examine the experiences and emotions of nurses who worked in the psychiatric hospital between the 1960s and 1990s.Results : The examination of medical records revealed patients' reluctance and resistance to reintegrate into society. The interviews with nurses revealed that they often felt close to their patients.Discussion : The words and memories of nurses enrich and deepen the complexity of the history of psychiatric nursing practices, extend the existing historiography, and open new avenues for research in the field.Conclusion : The deinstitutionalization movement promoted mental health policies that transformed the old psychiatric hospital. This new analytical approach contributed to renewing the history of psychiatric nursing practices.

Antiquity's Missive to Transhumanism1.

To reassure those concerned about wholesale discontinuity between human existence and posthumanity, transhumanists assert shared ground with antiquity on vital challenges and aspirations. Because their claims reflect key misconceptions, there is no shared vision for transhumanists to invoke. Having exposed their misuses of Prometheus, Plato, and Aristotle, I show that not only do transhumanists and antiquity crucially diverge on our relation to ideals, contrast-dependent aspiration, and worthy endeavors but that illumining this divide exposes central weaknesses in transhumanist argumentation. What is more, antiquity's handling of these topics suggests a way through the impasse in current enhancement debates about human "nature" and helps to resolve a tension within transhumanists' accounts of what our best moments signify about the ontological requirements for real flourishing.

Psychiatry and humanism in Argentina.

The authors of the present selection of Latin American Psychiatry texts were characterized by a common deep humanistic attitude. These prolific writers were able to establish or extend the scope of the discipline in which they chose to act, questioning the establishment of rigid boundaries within the framework of a rigorous epistemological reflection. Thus the systematizing spirit of Jose Ingenieros' in the context of positivist evolutionism, resulted in the act of founding a discipline that integrated the biological and the social. In the case of Guillermo Vidal his conception of mental health went beyond the biomedical to consider psychotherapies as an emotional commitment, continence and empathic understanding; with regard to César Cabral his formation and extensive clinical practice resulted in a work defined by the inquiring into the theoretical concepts underlying Psychiatry and Clinical Psychology. This brief selection does not exhaust the issues or the level of ideas and discussions of Psychiatry in Argentina, but constitutes a textual corpus representative of a disciplinary conception understood as scientific and humanistic endeavor.

Félix Voisin and the genesis of abnormals.

This article traces the genealogy of the category of 'abnormals' in psychiatry. It focuses on the French alienist Felix Voisin (1794-1872) who played a decisive role in the creation of alienist knowledge and institutions for problem children, criminals, idiots and lunatics. After a presentation of the category of 'abnormals' as understood at the end of the nineteenth century, I identify in the works of Voisin a key moment in the concept's evolution. I show how, based on concepts borrowed from phrenology and applied first to idiocy, Voisin allows alienism to establish links between the medico-legal (including penitentiary) and medical-educational fields (including difficult childhood). I stress the extent to which this enterprise is related to Voisin's humanism, which claimed to remodel pedagogy and the right to punish on the anthropological particularities of individuals, in order to improve them.

Strange history: the fall of Rome explained in Hereditas.

In 1921 Hereditas published an article on the fall of Rome written by the famous classical scholar Martin P:son Nilsson. Why was a paper on this unexpected topic printed in the newly founded journal? To Nilsson, the demise of the Roman Empire was explained by the "bastardization" occurring between "races" from different parts of the realm. Offspring from mixed couples were of a less stable "type" than their parents, due to the breaking up by recombination of the original hereditary dispositions, which led to a general loss of competence to rule and govern. Thus, the "hardness" of human genes, together with their recombination, was - according to Nilsson - the main cause of the fall of Rome. Nilsson's argument is not particularly convincingly presented. Human "races" are taken to have the same genetic structure as inbred crop strains, and Nilsson believes in a metaphysical unity between the individual and the race to which it belongs. However, in my view, Martin P:son Nilsson and his friend Herman Nilsson-Ehle had wider aims with the article than to explain a historical event. The article can be read as indicating strong support from the classical human sciences to the ambitious new science of genetics. Support is also transferred from genetics to the conservative worldview, where the immutability and inflexibility of the Mendelian genes are used to strengthen the wish for greater stability in politics and life. The strange article in Hereditas can, thus, be read as an early instance in the - still ongoing - tug-of-war between the conservative and the liberal ideological poles over how genetic results best are socially interpreted.

Eloquence in the Marketplace: Erudition and Pragmatic Humanism in the Restoration of Chymia.

This chapter focuses upon the relation between textual and social practices that influenced the formation of a communal approach to acquiring chemical knowledge in the early seventeenth century. It also describes the utilitarian purpose of a humanist-inspired program of chemical learning that blended practices of textual/linguistic expertise and artisanal know-how. Humanism, made pragmatic, sought to define the principles for "making things well." In the design of Andreas Libavius (ca. 1555-1616), interpretive intuitions resulting from practiced reading of ancient and medieval texts combined with a knowledge of workshop language to build consensus about chymia's tools, procedures, and materials and to define its principia artificialia.

[From candle's light to neon's brightness. Analysis of the historical progression of the notion of transhumanism in its relation to transcendence]. / De la luz del cirio al brillo del neón. Análisis de la progresión histórica de la noción de transhumanismo en su relación con la trascendencia.

This study presents the most representative notions of the transhumanism concept in light of its temporal development, starting from the first time that there is a record of a similar conception, with the aim of drawing a common thread between all of them and elucidating the relationship that these may have. For this, the works of Dante, Julian Huxley, FM-2030, Max More, Nick Bostrom and Raymond Kurzweil will be reviewed. From this analysis it will be extracted that all these different conceptions of transhumanism are united by their search for transcendence in the human being and the longing for a future state of divinity; Likewise, they differ in the way these common elements are understood. Such common and divergent notions allow a deeper understanding of what transhumanism is and promote a new perspective to understand these cutting-edge ideas.

Ideas that persist for centuries - by Erasmus of Rotterdam, the prince of humanists.

The paper highlights the personality of the founder of European student exchange program ERASMUS (EuRopean Community Action Scheme for the Mobility of University Students) Erasmus of Rotterdam. He was one of the leading European humanists and has left a literary legacy of large dimensions. His thoughts, ideas, opinions, and mainly the works have a great benefit for society even today. From 16th century to the present time they are the subject of unchanged interest.

[The clinical views of the humanist doctor F.P. Haas (the first quarter of the XIXth century). On the occasion of the 200th anniversary of the publication of F.P. Haas' book "Ma visite aux Eaux d'Alexandre en 1809 et 1810" (M., 1811)].

This paper is devoted to the analysis of clinical principles of physician humanist F.P. Haas expounded in his book "Ma visite aux Eaux d'Alexandre en 1809 at 1810" by F.P. Haas (M., 1811). The translation of this book into the Russian language gave an idea of the clinical views of the medical profession in this country in the beginning of the XIXth century (before the Patriotic War of 1812) including relationship between doctors and their patients and medical ethics. Haas proposed a well-substantiated therapeutic strategy with the use of mineral waters taking into consideration residual assimilative capacity of the patient's organism.

The humanising power of medical history: responses to biomedicine in the 20th century United States.

Most American historians of medicine today would be very hesitant about any claim that medical history humanises doctors, medical students or the larger health care enterprise. Yet, the idea that history can and ought to serve modern medicine as a humanising force has been a persistent refrain in American medicine. This essay explores the emergence of this idea from the end of the 19th century, precisely the moment when modern biomedicine became ascendant. At the same institutions where the new version of scientific medicine was most energetically embraced, some professional leaders warned that the allegiance to science driving the profession's technical and cultural success was endangering humanistic values fundamental to professionalism and the art of medicine. They saw in history a means for rehumanising modern medicine and countering the risk of cultural crisis. While some iteration of this vision of history was remarkably durable, the meanings attached to 'humanism' were both multiple and changing, and the role envisioned for history in a humanistic intervention was transformed. Starting in the 1960s as part of a larger cultural critique of the putative 'dehumanisation' of the medical establishment, some advocates promoted medical history as a tool to help fashion a new kind of humanist physician and to confront social inequities in the health care system. What has persisted across time is the way that the idea of history as a humanising force has almost always functioned as a discourse of deficiency-a response to perceived shortcomings of biomedicine, medical institutions and medical professionalism.

Bruteau's philosophy of spiritual evolution and consciousness: foundation for a nursing cosmology.

The ontological foundation of the modern world view based on irreconcilable dichotomies has held hegemonic status since the dawn of the scientific revolution. The post-modern critique has exposed the inadequacies of the modern perspective and challenged the potential for any narrative to adequately ground a vision for the future. This paper proposes that the philosophy of Beatrice Bruteau can support a foundation for a visionary world view consistent with nursing's respect for human dignity and societal health. The author discusses the key concepts of Bruteau's perspective on societal evolution based on an integrated study of science, mathematics, religion, and philosophy. This perspective is discussed as a foundation to move beyond the dichotomous influence of the modern world view and the deconstructive critique of the post-modern perspective. The author suggests spiritual evolution and a participatory consciousness as an ontological foundation for a cosmology congruent with nursing's social mandate.

[Jean Fernel and the humanist spirit]. / Jean Fernel et l'esprit humaniste.

Jean Fernel (1497-1558) embodied the humanist spirit of the Renaissance. He studied philosophy (especially Aristotle), astrology, arithmetic, mathematics and Latin literature before devoting his life to medicine. He conducted a comprehensive synthesis of the medical system of Galen, and invented the terms "physiology" and "pathology". His taste for teaching, his extensive clinical practice, his benevolent attitude to the sick, and his consideration for individuals and for human nature all contribute to Jean Fernel's image as a humanist. He was the most famous physician of his time, although his work relying on philosophy and galenic dogmatism eventually became obsolete. Forgotten for half a millennium, this distant precursor of holistic medicine is worthy of renewed interest.

Objectivity, abstraction, and the individual: the influence of Søren Kierkegaard on Paul Feyerabend.

This paper explores the influence of Søren Kierkegaard upon Paul Feyerabend by examining their common criticisms of totalising accounts of human nature. Both complained that philosophical and scientific theories of human nature which were methodologically committed to objectivity and abstraction failed to capture the richness of human experience. Kierkegaard and Feyerabend argued that philosophy and the science were threatening to become obstacles to human development by imposing abstract theories of human nature and reality which denied the complexities of both. In both cases, this took the form of asserting an 'existential' criterion for the assessment of philosophical and scientific theories. Kierkegaard also made remarks upon the inappropriateness of applying natural scientific methods to human beings which Feyerabend later expanded and developed in his criticisms of the inability of the 'scientific world-view' to accommodate the values necessary to a flourishing human life. I conclude by noting some differences between Kierkegaard and Feyerabend's positions and by affirming the value of existential criticisms of scientific knowledge.

[The traditions of "the saint doctor" Gaas in Russian clinic: A.N. Kazem-Bek and V.A. Kazem-Bek (Kazan-Harbin)].

The article retrace the process of maintaining and passing on the humanistic traditions of Russian medicine founded by Doctor F.P. Gaas in the late XIXth - early XXth centuries. The biographies of Kazan physicians are presented, including eminent therapist professor A.N. Kazem-Bek (the representative of N.A. Vinogradov clinical school) from Kazan University and his son, Doctor V.A. Kazem-Bek, who practised medicine in Harbin.