English translation of the second volume of Laurent Joubert’s 1578 French work Erreurs Populaires Joubert proposed to dispel folk remedies and folklore still relied on by doctors and care-givers in France. It also challenged medical theories and advice from classical Greek and Latin writers that French doctors followed uncritically. Gregory de Rocher’s skill as a translator brings this highly readable and very funny book to life. Many topics central to Joubert’s thesis in the 1500s remain contemporary themes in the popular and scholarly literature of the 1980s.
What we eat, who we are, and the relationship between the two. Eating and Being is a history of Western thinking about food, eating, knowledge, and ourselves. In modern thought, eating is about what is good for you, not about what is good. Eating is about health, not about virtue. Yet this has not always been the case. For a great span of the past—from antiquity through about the middle of the eighteenth century—one of the most pervasive branches of medicine was known as dietetics, prescribing not only what people should eat but also how they should order many aspects of their lives, including sleep, exercise, and emotional management. Dietetics did not distinguish between the medical and the moral, nor did it acknowledge the difference between what was good for you and what was good. Dietetics counseled moderation in all things, where moderation was counted as a virtue as well as the way to health. But during the nineteenth century, nutrition science began to replace the language of traditional dietetics with the vocabulary of proteins, fats, carbohydrates, and calories, and the medical and the moral went their separate ways. Steven Shapin shows how much depended upon that shift, and he also explores the extent to which the sensibilities of dietetics have been lost. Throughout this rich history, he evokes what it felt like to eat during another historical period and invites us to reflect on what it means to feel about food as we now do. Shapin shows how the change from dietetics to nutrition science fundamentally altered how we think about our food and its powers, our bodies, and our minds.
Laurent Joubert was an important figure in the medical world of the French Renaissance. Born in 1529, he became a doctor at age 29 and shortly thereafter was appointed personal physician to Catherine de Medici and later became physician to three French monarchs. Joubert was an educator as well as a physician, and he wrote several works of medical literature, including his most controversial work, Erreurs populaires. While the work focuses on popular misconceptions concerning medicine and physicians in France in the 1500s, it also represents a wealth of information on the social, economic, political, and religious worldviews that framed and thus supported the development and conduct of medical science. Gregory de Rocher’s skill as a translator brings this highly readable and very funny book to life. Many topics central to Joubert’s thesis in the 1500s remain contemporary themes in the popular and scholarly literature of the 1980s.
How to Do It shows us sixteenth-century Italy from an entirely new perspective: through manuals which were staples in the households of middlebrow Italians merely trying to lead better lives. Addressing challenges such as how to conceive a boy, the manuals offered suggestions such as tying a tourniquet around your husband's left testicle. Or should you want to goad female desires, throw 90 grubs in a liter of olive oil, let steep in the sun for a week and apply liberally on the male anatomy. Bell's journey through booklets long dismissed by scholars as being of little literary value gives us a refreshing and surprisingly fun social history. "Lively and curious reading, particularly in its cascade of anecdote, offered in a breezy, cozy, journalistic style." —Lauro Martines, Times Literary Supplement "[Bell's] fascinating book is a window on a lost world far nearer to our own than we might imagine. . . . How pleasant to read his delightful, informative and often hilarious book." —Kate Saunders, The Independent "An extraordinary work which blends the learned with the frankly bizarre." —The Economist "Professor Bell has a sly sense of humor and an enviably strong stomach. . . . He wants to know how people actually behaved, not how the Church or philosophers or earnest humanists thought they should behave. I loved this book." —Christopher Stace, Daily Telegraph
Enchanted Europe offers the first comprehensive account of Europe's long, complex relationship with its own folklore and popular religion. From debates over the efficacy of charms and spells, to belief in fairies and demons, Euan Cameron constructs a compelling narrative of the rise and fall of 'superstition' in the European mind.
Contemporary high-frequency engineering design heavily relies on full-wave electromagnetic (EM) analysis. This is primarily due to its versatility and ability to account for phenomena that are important from the point of view of system performance. Unfortunately, versatility comes at the price of a high computational cost of accurate evaluation. Consequently, utilization of simulation models in the design processes is challenging although highly desirable. The aforementioned problems can be alleviated by means of surrogate modeling techniques, the most popular of which are data-driven models. Although a large variety of methods are available, they are all affected by the curse of dimensionality. This is especially pronounced in high-frequency electronics, where typical system responses are highly nonlinear. Construction of practically useful surrogates covering wide ranges of parameters and operating conditions is a considerable challenge.Surrogate Modeling for High-Frequency Design presents a selection of works representing recent advancements in surrogate modeling and their applications to high-frequency design. Some chapters provide a review of specific topics such as neural network modeling of microwave components, while others describe recent attempts to improve existing modeling methodologies. Furthermore, the book features numerous applications of surrogate modeling methodologies to design optimization and uncertainty quantification of antenna, microwave, and analog RF circuits.
Experts estimate that as many as 98,000 people die in any given year from medical errors that occur in hospitals. That's more than die from motor vehicle accidents, breast cancer, or AIDSâ€"three causes that receive far more public attention. Indeed, more people die annually from medication errors than from workplace injuries. Add the financial cost to the human tragedy, and medical error easily rises to the top ranks of urgent, widespread public problems. To Err Is Human breaks the silence that has surrounded medical errors and their consequenceâ€"but not by pointing fingers at caring health care professionals who make honest mistakes. After all, to err is human. Instead, this book sets forth a national agendaâ€"with state and local implicationsâ€"for reducing medical errors and improving patient safety through the design of a safer health system. This volume reveals the often startling statistics of medical error and the disparity between the incidence of error and public perception of it, given many patients' expectations that the medical profession always performs perfectly. A careful examination is made of how the surrounding forces of legislation, regulation, and market activity influence the quality of care provided by health care organizations and then looks at their handling of medical mistakes. Using a detailed case study, the book reviews the current understanding of why these mistakes happen. A key theme is that legitimate liability concerns discourage reporting of errorsâ€"which begs the question, "How can we learn from our mistakes?" Balancing regulatory versus market-based initiatives and public versus private efforts, the Institute of Medicine presents wide-ranging recommendations for improving patient safety, in the areas of leadership, improved data collection and analysis, and development of effective systems at the level of direct patient care. To Err Is Human asserts that the problem is not bad people in health careâ€"it is that good people are working in bad systems that need to be made safer. Comprehensive and straightforward, this book offers a clear prescription for raising the level of patient safety in American health care. It also explains how patients themselves can influence the quality of care that they receive once they check into the hospital. This book will be vitally important to federal, state, and local health policy makers and regulators, health professional licensing officials, hospital administrators, medical educators and students, health caregivers, health journalists, patient advocatesâ€"as well as patients themselves. First in a series of publications from the Quality of Health Care in America, a project initiated by the Institute of Medicine
