101 Hepatitis A The first descriptions of hepatitis (epidemic jaundice) are generally attributed to Hippocrates. Outbreaks of jaundice, probably hepatitis A, were reported in the 17th and 18th centuries, particularly in association with military campaigns. Hepatitis A (formerly called infectious hepatitis) was first differentiated epidemiologically from hepatitis B, which has a long incubation ...

Inheritance powder is the name that was given to poisons, especially arsenic, that were commonly used in the 17th and early 18th centuries to hasten the death of the elderly. For most of the 17th century, arsenic was deadly but undetectable, making it nearly impossible to prove that someone had been poisoned. The first arsenic test produced a gas—hardly something that a scientist could show to ...

Excellence in science and technology is surely vital to global economic and political influence. Most countries now understand and accept that science furthers technological progress at home and their nation s prestige abroad. With the growth of hypothesis-driven science in the centuries following the Renaissance, Europe quite simply came to dominate the world during the Industrial Revolution. ...

Sea otter (Enhydra lutris) populations experienced widespread reduction and extirpation due to the fur trade of the 18th and 19th centuries. We examined genetic variation within four microsatellite markers and the mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) d-loop in one prefur trade population and compared it to five modern populations to determine potential losses in genetic variation. While mtDNA sequence var...

Automation is “the application of machines to tasks once performed by human beings, or increasingly, to tasks that would otherwise be impossible”, Encyclopaedia Britannica [1]. The term automation itself was coined in the 1940s at the Ford Motor Company. The idea of automating processes and systems started many years earlier than this as part of the agricultural and industrial revolutions of th...

http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/S0001-2092(12)00723-5 © AORN, Inc, 2012 M edical tourism (ie, traveling to another country for nonurgent medical care) is not a new custom. In the 18th and 19th centuries, people traveled to spas to “take the waters” as a means of improving their health and, in remote colonies and less developed countries, people have always traveled to reach clinics or physicians.1,2 ...

Although the legitimacy of using the eye as an essential instrument in photometric experiments had been questioned by critics, the practitioners of visual photometry in the 18th and 19th centuries were convinced that the eye was reliable and capable of making accurate judgments in comparing brightness. They demonstrated their belief through their efforts in searching for the optimal conditions ...

antiquity The era of ancient (from the Western perspective, mostly the Middle Eastern and Mediterranean) civilizations extant between prehistory and the Middle Ages. determinism A doctrine claiming that human actions are determined by external factors; its prominent varieties include environmental and geographic determinism. early modern world The period immediately following the Middle Ages, v...

Dancing mania is a clinical and cultural phenomenon which occurred in Western Europe between 13th and 18th centuries. The term dancing mania is derived from the Greek words choros, a dance, and mania, a madness. An Italian variant was known as tarantism as victims were believed to have been bitten by tarantula spider. Although symptoms of dancing manias were well documented in contemporary writ...

This article, which deals with the 17th and 18th centuries, is concerned with the presence of death in the melancholiac's life as revealed in both the accounts written by sufferers themselves and medical works. It shows the exceptional place which melancholiacs consider themselves to occupy, compared to the rest of the living, as they inhabit the no-man's-land between life and death. The privil...