In Roe v. Wade much of Justice Blackmun's judgment was devoted to the history of abortion in Anglo-American law. He concluded that a constitutional right to abortion was consistent with that history. In Webster v. Reproductive Health Services, 281 American historians signed an amicus brief which claimed that Roe was consistent with the nation's history and traditions. This article respectfully ...

An eighteen year old Christian male, diagnosed as Bipolar Affective Disorder, 2nd manic episode with mood congruent psychotic features presented during the episode with the explicit wish for sex reassignment surgery. He even claimed to be married to a local man. With effective management of the manic episode, his wish for sex reassignment surgery has completely subsided. This report discusses t...

In the early twentieth century, Paul Kammerer, a zoologist working at the Vivarium in Vienna, Austria, experimented on sea-squirts (Ciona intestinalis [2]). Kammerer claimed that results from his experiments demonstrated that organisms could transmit characteristics that they had acquired in their lifetimes to their offspring. Kammerer conducted breeding experiments on sea-squirts and other org...

HE Chinese winter of 1910-1911 was one of death and discontent: an epidemic of pneumonic plague—the greatest since the Black Death of the fourteenth century—scourged China's three Eastern Provinces (Manchuria), and famine afflicted the Central Provinces. The Manchurian plague claimed some fifty thousand lives in four months, and the famine took thousands more. Not all the hungry died, but no on...

In the early twentieth century, Paul Kammerer, a zoologist working at the Vivarium in Vienna, Austria, experimented on sea-squirts (Ciona intestinalis [2]). Kammerer claimed that results from his experiments demonstrated that organisms could transmit characteristics that they had acquired in their lifetimes to their offspring. Kammerer conducted breeding experiments on sea-squirts and other org...

K. Rastle and M. Coltheart (1999; see also M. Coltheart & K. Rastle, 1994) reported data demonstrating that the cost of irregularity in reading aloud low-frequency exception words is modulated by the position of the irregularity in the word. They argued that these data implicated a serial process and falsified all models of reading aloud that operate solely in parallel, a conclusion that M. Zor...

Malpighi's De polypo cordis (1666) represents a significant contribution to the understanding of blood, its composition and its clotting. In this work, written during his occupation of the primary Chair of Medicine at Messina (1662-66),l he recognized, albeit dimly, fibrinogen as a regular component of blood, and began to investigate the conditions which provoke or prevent clotting, either intr...

A Danish engineer, Alexis Køhl (1846–1920), invented a number of cryptographic systems between 1876 and 1919. Some of these systems were simple, others were more complicated machine systems. Few of Køhls systems were ever used. One system was used to some extent in the Nordic countries, but generally Køhl felt that his ‘‘genius’’ was not properly recognized. There were no sensational cryptograp...

In 1908 Neisser applied the principles of the tuberculin test to the diagnosis of syphilis, using extracts of syphilitic organs (Neisser, 191 1). Noguchi (1911) used a suspension of killed cultures of T. pallidum which he called "luetin". While the organ extracts proved more satisfactory than "luetin", the results were unreliable and this original "luetin" test was largely abandoned. Rottmann (...