medical texts of the period. The detailed evaluation of these recipes by comparison with scientific experiments on the plants used in the medical systems of, for example, India and Latin America then forms the second part of his argument. Riddle shows that most ancient writers after Soranus did distinguish between contraception and abortion; the grey area was instead between delayed menstruatio...

PREMEDICATION is one of the most valuable elements in the production of good anesthesia and is of great psychological importance. Every an3esthetist knows how difficult it is at times to get good relaxation, without deepening the anesthesia to a dangerous degree; with a suitable narcotic administered one hour before operation, these difficulties should be greatly lessened. There would seem to b...

T his article is about a form of neurosurgical postresidency depression: why it occurs more often than suspected, how I survived it, and some lessons I learned along the way. It is said that a smart man learns from his mistakes but a wise man learns from the mistakes of others. As a neurosurgeon in academia approaching the fourth quarter, I feel a responsibility to share what wisdom I have acqu...

Local histories have long examined both the ties that bind communities together and the developments that make them distinct. As is evident in the term itself, "local" history takes as the most fundamental of these ties the connection of a group of people to a particular location. It is curious, therefore, that writers of local history have often taken this geographic connection for granted. Th...

saqqā-ḵāna artists looked to cults, rituals, and visual elements of folk and local vernacular culture for inspiration. although many of these items appeared crude in their execution and lacked the artistic polish of artifacts made by professional calligraphers and painters, and were often created collaboratively as a kind of street art, their true significance was not lost to these artists. vie...

SOHEIR A. MORSY, Gender, sickness, and healing in rural Egxpt: ethnograph.v in historical context, Conflict and Social Change series, Boulder and Oxford, Westview Press, 1993, pp. xiv, 235, £30.00 (0-8133-8166-5). Dr Morsy is a leading medical anthropologist who has published numerous valuable studies on her native Egypt, based primarily on field work in a Nile delta village for which she uses ...

As ophthalmologists we tend to stick to what we know. We mostly use only four main groups of drugs that act on the eye—anti-infectives, anti-inflammatories, antiglaucoma medications, and lubricants—a limited formulary, but one that is evidence based according to our medical training. But there are alternative therapies which are becoming a growing part of our health care and for which eye condi...

FATEME KESHAVARZ: A descriptive and analytical catalogue ofPersian manuscripts in the Library ofthe Wellcome Institutefor the History ofMedicine, London, Wellcome Institute for the History of Medicine, 1986, 4to, pp. 705, illus., £35.00, $55.00. The investigation of Persian medicine in the Islamic period is still in its beginnings. Much of the source material spread in many libraries has still ...

The development of journal indexing since the early alphabetical tables to scientific works, culminating in current sophisticated cumulations, is traced. Standards for preparing indexes which have gradually evolved to cope with the increase in volume and complexity of the literature are described. Learned Publishing (2001)14, 123–130 Hazel Bell From herbals to Hotbot: the development of journal...