The Mexica Empire reached an outstanding social, economic and politic organization among Mesoamerican civilizations. Even though archaeology and history provide substantial information about their past, their biological origin and the demographic consequences of their settlement in the Central Valley of Mexico remain unsolved. Two main hypotheses compete to explain the Mexica origin: a social r...

The concurrent development of political economy and the modern conception of medicine was reflected from the first decades of the seventeenth century by a degree of interdisciplinary borrowing based on analogy between the human body and the body politic. It seemed perfectly feasible that the growing knowledge of the human body and its diseases might inspire new concepts, and vindicate the use o...

In this paper, we explore the emergence of non-communicable diseases (NCDs) as an object of political concern in and for countries of the global South. While epidemiologists and public health practitioners and scholars have long expressed concern with the changing global distribution of the burden of NCDs, it is only in more recent years that the aetiology, politics and consequences of these sh...

The birth of a language is a historical process, which develops through almost six stages corresponding to six main properties (genetic distance, geographical isolation, adoption of a writing system, elaboration of a literary koine, national consciousness, official status), which are specific to Western civilization and limited to our concern, i.e. the languages in contemporary Europe. The two ...

'Space and place are central to the strategies and meaning of protest’ (p. xi) reads the opening sentence of Katrina Navickas's latest study, Protest and the Politics of Space and Place 1789–1848. Written, in part, as a response to the 'spatial turn' in History, Navickas makes a cogent and persuasive argument for attending to the importance of the particularities of 'place' rather than the abst...

In this comment, I build on Shiffman's call for the global health community to more deeply investigate structural and productive power. I highlight two challenges we must grapple with as social scientists carrying out the types of investigation that Shiffman proposes: the politics of challenging the powerful; and the need to investigate types of expertise that have traditionally been thought of...

Since about the midway point of the First Ministers' 10-year plan to strengthen healthcare, its impending expiry in 2014 has prompted the leading health professions to consider "what comes next," how to influence that decision and then, how best to position their messages in the politics of whatever might emerge. The Canadian Nurses Association (CNA), which has a century-long history of engagem...

The paper gives an overview of the different sentiment classification approaches and tools used for sentiment analysis. Starting from this overview the paper provides a classification of (i) approaches with respect to features/techniques and advantages/limitations and (ii) tools with respect to the different techniques used for sentiment analysis. Different application fields of application of ...

This paper explores the relationship between medicine and politics, between medical management of the human body and governmental management of the body politic. It argues that the increasing complexity both of society and of governmental administration of society in the modern age has made it impossible completely to separate medicine from politics. It demonstrates that, along with great poten...