his lifetime included the American Medical Association, the Board of Scientific Directors of the Rockefeller Institute, the Executive Committee of the Carnegie Institution of Washington, and the National Academy of Sciences. Fittingly, the last major responsibility he assumed during his life was that of chair of the history of medicine at Johns Hopkins. Fleming does an excellent job of integrat...

We introduce a new method to construct approximation algorithms for combinatorial optimization problems using semidefinite programming. It consists of expressing each combinatorial object in the original problem as a constellation of vectors in the semidefinite program. When we apply this technique to systems of linear equations mod p with at most two variables in each equation, we can show tha...

Cypriot Greek has been cited as “the last surviving Modern Greek dialect” (Contossopoulos 1969:92, 2000:21), and differences between it and Standard Modern Greek are often seen as seriously disruptive of communication by Mainland and Cypriot Greeks alike. This paper attempts an anatomy of the linguistic ‘difference’ of the Cypriot variety of Greek. By placing this in the wider context of the hi...

Greek is one of the most thoroughly studied languages there is, rivalling perhaps only English and Chinese in this regard, and there is an enormous scholarly literature covering all aspects of its grammar and use. Moreover, Greek itself is like a laboratory for historical linguistics, inasmuch as the recorded history of Greek spans some 3500 years, from Mycenaean Greek of the Bronze Age to the ...

The Arab cultural heritage was an era of invaluable preservation and development of numerous teachings, including biomedical sciences. The golden period of Arab medicine deserves special attention in the history of medicine and pharmacy, as it was the period of rapid translation of works from Greek and Persian cultures into Arabic. They preserved their culture, and science from decay, and then ...

'Rheum' comes from the Greek-a 'watery discharge' (OED)-and rheumatological literature as we scan it today has had two main historical sources for its now ever faster running river of words: (a) the spa waters and hydrology from the Middle Ages onward, beautifully illustrated in mediaeval woodcuts, and (b) the more modern mainstream of general medicine itself, even more widely and more strongly...

Natural products always receive utmost attention due to their wide utility in traditional medicinal system worldwide whether it is Indian, Egyptian, Chinese, or Greek. A number of herbal preparations either in wholesome or in their components have been shown to translate protection both in vivo and in vitro. Scientifically proven beneficial effects of diet containing fruits, vegetables and cert...

The ancient science of herbal medicine was born many centuries ago and speaks Symptomatic, the language which is cast in magnificent Greek and imperial Latin. Symptomatic describes effects of herbal medicines on the human body at the organismal level, as experienced by a patient and observed by a physician. Numerous herbs have been used in traditional medicines against liver complaints and have...