All three books, two written in the United States and one in France, demonstrate that valid cures can be obtained by means quite different from Western medicine in its present state, that anatomy and disease entities do not have to be the be-all and end-all of medical investigation, and that a system of functions and relationships between energies also seems to work. However, two of the writers...

The term “existentialism” is so ambiguous that it has essentially become a meaningless word: it is associated with a number of disparate philosophical doctrines, social-political movements, and artistic sensibilities, that it becomes slippery to pin down its core philosophical tenets to such a degree that an undertaking of this kind would be no less rendered moot. We may nevertheless say that e...

FOR many years, palaeopathology has been concerned with recording individual examples of disease in earlier peoples. Recent years have shown an increasing interest in the wider view of disease in antiquity, and it is within this context that the discipline of palaeoepidemiology has developed. The interaction of human disease and environment has always been complex. It is doubtful if there is an...

The symposium papers edited by Simpson will be a valued source for students of Black. The eight papers offer a number of insights on various aspects of Black's career. Robert Anderson provides a handy outline biography; Christopher Lawrence analyses Black's personal and intellectual links with Hume and Adam Smith, as well as contemporary natural philosophers; Henry Guerlac presents a stimulatin...

Certain major ancient engineering constructions, such as aqueducts and qanats, testify to high accuracies in the computation of elevation differences obtained using primitive levelling instruments. Based on the typology of ancient levelling instruments and the analysis of certain key ancient structures such as the (Eupalinos) tunnel at Samos Island (Greece), it became possible to specify the ac...

For long, widely divergent views (based on isolated pieces of historical evidence or broad geological evolution of the subcontinent, notably the rise of the Himalayas in mid-late Miocene), had prevailed regarding origin and antiquity of the Thar Desert. Studies of the past few decades have since provided a wealth of new information on landform styles, evolutionary processes and palaeoclimate hi...

The genus Rubus L., indigenous to six continents, includes blackberries, raspberries, and their hybrids and is commonly referred to as brambles or briers. Rubus species were a food and medicinal source for native peoples soon after the Ice Age. This short article presents only a sample of the wealth of historical reports of medicinal uses for Rubus. Brambles were documented in the writings of t...

CONSTANTINO MANUEL TORRES Archaeological evidence for the antiquity of psychoactive plant use in the Central Andes. This work presents an evaluation of the evidence for the antiquity of psychoactive plant use by the indigenous populations of the Central Andes. The first problem is to determine what constitutes clear archaeological evidence. The most direct form of evidence is the finding of pla...

In both the past and the present, the public’s perception of events is certainly shaped by the information transmitted to them through the popular media. Consider the example of the use of exotic animals over the ages. Today, many of us marvel at the sight of wild African and Asian beasts in zoos, circuses and other entertainment venues—an excitement paralleled in Roman antiquity in the arena g...

A brief introduction to the emergent discipline of in silico oncology along with its predominantly Platonic character is provided. The conceptual origins of the oncosimulator, one of the key notions and constructs of the discipline are traced back to antiquity.