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Anyone wishing to find out more about William Arthur Johnson will find little of relevance in the history of the Krebs cycle. Although Krebs makes fleeting reference to Johnson in his autobiography, no mention is made of Johnson's contribution in the Nobel Prize oration. Who was William Johnson and what role did he play in this crucially important work?
The relationships between early life variables, cognitive function, and neuropathology were examined in participants in the Nun Study who were between the ages of 75 and 95. Our early life variable was idea density, which is a measure of linguistic ability, derived from autobiographies written at a mean age of 22 years. Six discrete categories of cognitive function, including mild cognitive impairments, were evaluated, using the Consortium to Establish a Registry for Alzheimer's Disease (CERAD) battery of cognitive tests. Neuropathologic data included Braak staging, neurofibrillary tangle and senile plaque counts, brain weight, degree of cerebral atrophy, severity of atherosclerosis, and the presence of brain infarcts. Early-life idea density was significantly related to the categories of late-life cognitive function, including mild cognitive impairments: low idea density was associated with greater impairment. Low idea density also was significantly associated with lower brain weight, higher degree of cerebral atrophy, more severe neurofibrillary pathology, and the likelihood of meeting neuropathologic criteria for Alzheimer's disease.
PURPOSE: Hugh Hampton Young (1870-1945) is regarded as a major force in urology during the first half of the 20th century. While he is acknowledged for many advances in open and transurethral prostatic surgery, his contributions to pediatric urology have been less well recognized. MATERIALS AND METHODS: The manuscripts and autobiography of Hugh Hampton Young were reviewed and major contributions to pediatric urology were identified. Patient records corresponding to these areas were then obtained from the Alan Mason Chesney Medical Archives and reviewed. RESULTS: Hugh Hampton Young was the first clinically to recognize and surgically treat posterior urethral valves, the first to develop a procedure to correct incontinence in patients with the epispadias-exstrophy complex and the first to describe bilateral subtotal adrenalectomy for virilization secondary to congenital adrenal hyperplasia. He was successful in his endeavors and his techniques are still in use today or have become the building blocks of future modifications. CONCLUSIONS: The contributions of Hugh Hampton Young to pediatric urology were numerous. In addition to his accomplishments in academic and adult urology, Young should be recognized as a true pioneer in pediatric urology.
Illness narratives have become a central issue in medical anthropology. Many researchers have made use of narratives as data in a meaning-centered approach, analysing personal illness accounts as a kind of coping strategy by which human beings ascribe cultural meaning to suffering. Often such narratives are being presented as clinical case stories or as patients' accounts told in interviews to a researcher. But apart from being methodologically created data personal stories also have their own life. They are a way of expressing experience, and as reality manifests itself as experience in us, stories are fundamental to human understanding. In many therapeutic groups personal stories are told as a way of sharing experience in order to solve common problems. This article focuses on the social and processual nature of personal narratives as they are presented in Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) groups. The article is based on a study of AA and Minnesota Model treatment of alcoholism in Denmark from 1990 to 1993. Various genres of personal narratives told at AA meetings are identified and analysed referring to individual as well as social and cultural levels. By focusing on interpersonal relationships and the creation of a shared identity in the groups, the article suggests that the ongoing telling of personal narratives in Alcoholics Anonymous takes place in a continuum between autobiography and myth. Thus, individual and collective experience are merged into the same therapeutic process.
For many years, multiple linear regression models have been used at a residency program to generate preliminary rank lists of residency applicants. These lists are then used by the admissions committee as an aid in developing a final ranking to submit to the National Residency Match Program (NRMP). A study was undertaken to compare predictions made using linear regression with those generated by a newer technique, an artificial neural network. A prospective cohort design was used. Seventy-four applicants to an emergency medicine program were evaluated by faculty and resident interviewers with regard to medical school grades, autobiography, interviews, letters of recommendation, and National Board scores. Normalization of these scores (by linear transformation of interviewer means) was used to correct for differences among interviewers. Multivariate linear regression and neural network models were developed using data from the previous 5 years' applicants. These models were used to forecast provisional rank orderings of the candidates. These rankings were combined into a single hybrid list that was used by the admissions committee as the starting point for development of the final rank list by consensus. Each model's predictions were tested for goodness of fit against the final NRMP rank using Wilks' test. Using the final submitted NRMP rank order as the dependent variable, the neural network yielded a correlation coefficient of 0.77 and an R2 of 59.4%. The linear regression model exhibited a correlation coefficient of 0.74 and an R2 of 54.0%. No significant difference was found (chi 2 = 1.08, P = .7). A neural network performs as well as a linear regression model when used for forecasting the rank order of residency applicants.
During the nineteenth century, physicians either discovered or invented a variety of clinical autobiography called "traumatic memory." Freud produced two versions of this memory, the final version in the 1920s. A revolutionary nosology (DSM-III), adopted in 1980, promised to extirpate Freud and the concept of neurosis from American psychiatry. However, it made a tacit exception for Freud's concept of traumatic neurosis, renaming it "postraumatic stress disorder." The following decades have been a period of intense clinical and scientific interest in this disorder. An influential research program has investigated traumatic neurosis and its brain through variations in cortisol excretion. I describe the history of this program, and examine its distinctive knowledge product. its running narrative of its achievements. The narrative's structure is analyzed and found to resemble a crossword puzzle constructed from heterogenous kinds of inference, recalling The Interpretation of Dreams. My conclusion is that, far from extirpating Freud's neurosis, biological research has secured a place for it in today's post-Freudian psychiatry.
Petroleum ether (PE) and methanolic extracts of nine wild plant species were tested in vitro for their antimycotic activity against eight phytopathogenic fungi. The efficacy of PE extracts against all pathogens tested was higher than that of methanolic extracts. Wild marjoram (Origanum syriacum) PE extract showed the highest and widest range of activity. It resulted in complete inhibition of mycelial growth of six of eight fungi tested and also gave nearly complete inhibition of spore germination of the six fungi included in the assay, namely, Botrytis cinerea, Alternaria solani, Penicillium sp., Cladosporium sp., Fusarium oxysporum f. sp. melonis, and Verticillium dahlia. The other plant extracts showed differential activities in the spore germination test, but none was highly active against mycelial growth. Inula viscosa and Mentha longifolia were highly effective (>88%) in spore germination tests against five of six fungi tested, whereas Centaurea pallescens, Cichorium intybus, Eryngium creticum, Salvia fruticosa, and Melia azedarach showed >95% inhibition of spore germination in at least two fungi. Foeniculum vulgare showed the least antimycotic activity. Fractionation followed by autobiography on TLC plates using Cladosporium sp. as a test organism showed that O. syriacum PE extracts contained three inhibition zones, and those of Inula viscosa and Cichorium intybus, two, whereas the PE extracts of the remaining plants showed each one inhibition zone. Some of the major compounds present in these inhibition zones were identified by GC-MS. The possibility for using these extracts, or their mixtures, to control plant diseases is discussed.
In the continuous search for antifungal compounds from plants, the hydroxycoumarin scopoletin (1) was isolated from seed kernels of Melia azedarach L. from which three other compounds, vanillin (2), 4-hydroxy-3-methoxycinnamaldehyde (3), and (+/-) pinoresinol (4), have also been isolated. Guided fractionation through autobiography on TLC using Fusarium verticillioides (Saccardo) Nirenberg as test organism led to the isolation of 1, which exhibited a minimum inhibitory concentration (MIC) of 1.50 mg/mL in the microbroth dilution method. Despite its own weak activity, when the coumarin was combined with the above-mentioned compounds, a strong enhancement of the antifungal effect was observed, even showing a complete inhibition in the growth of the pathogen when 1 was added at a concentration of up to 5% of its MIC value. The same level of effectiveness was observed when the synthetic antifungal agents Mancozeb and Carboxin were each combined with compounds 1-4, in which cases it became possible to decrease the effective concentrations of these commercial compounds by up to 2.5 and 3%, respectively.
A total of 104 patients with hemispheric arteriovenous malformations (AVM; in the frontal, parietal, and temporal lobes), along with 21 patients with craniopharyngiomas and 21 patients with aresorptive hydrocephalus, were studied. Impairments of the recall of knowledge acquired before disease onset were found in 12 patients with hemispheric AVM. All had suffered severe intraventricular hemorrhage. Similar memory defects were noted in three patients with craniopharyngiomas and 12 with hydrocephalus. These patients had lesions of the mediobasal (periventricular) parts of the brain (frontal and parietal lobes), predominantly of the right hemisphere, as well as the diencephalic regions. The syndrome of selective retrograde amnesia in lesions of these structures was characterized by impairment of the recall of dates and, less frequently, details of event content and autobiography. It is emphasized that processes of recall of the sequence and selectivity of traces during actualization of "old" knowledge played the greater role in the mechanism of development of these impairments. The possible roles of the right and left hemispheres, as well as the diencephalic area, in the information encoding and decoding are discussed.
Would you consider looking at two paintings instead of reading a more ritualized abstract? In the first painting, the poet W. B. Yeats shows passages from his autobiography to his friend, the poet and painter George Russell. Russell is appalled to read that there is hardly a single fact accurate: "If you show me the manuscript," he tells Yeats, "I will correct the facts." Yeats airily dismisses the offer: "Oh, I do not want accuracy. I only want a picturesque sentence" (Kiberd, 2003). The second painting is an image I cherish in my mind for years: a photo of the Teatro del Mondo (the theater of the world) created by Aldo Rossi, the late Italian architect, for the 1979 Venice Biennale. Built in the Venice tradition of floating theaters, Rossi created a theater on water, a raft tugged by a boat. Within the panoramic view of Venice, there is a "huge piece of carpentry," which looks like a stageset of a child's dream memory: some big connected play-cubes made of light brown wood on a metal grid of scaffolding, and a blue pointed tower. For Rossi, this theater goes beyond the context of Venice. It is like "the Marine buildings in Maine, the wonderful tall light houses--'the houses of the light'--that observe and are observed...[in a] Venetian method of construction...that seeks fantasy only in the real" (Rossi, 1979).
According to autobiographical memory theorists, past event conversations provide children with a framework for evaluating and connecting past events into a coherent autobiography (R. Fivush, 1994; K. Nelson, 1993; M. K. Welch-Ross, 1995). Two studies were conducted to empirically examine the association between past event conversation style and an independent measure of children's self-concept consistency. In Study 1, 50 New Zealand mothers discussed everyday past events with their children at 51 and 65 months of age. In Study 2, 51 New Zealand parents discussed 1 positive and 3 negative past events with their 5- and 6-year-old children. The consistency of children's self-views was assessed in both studies using the Children's Self-View Questionnaire (R. Eder, 1990). Children's self-concept consistency was moderately associated with greater explanation of the causes and consequences of children's negative emotions, resolution through social contact, and evaluation of positive events but not with simple attributions of emotion. These findings implicate parent-child conversations as a medium through which children can begin to understand the personal meaning of past experiences.
The radical behaviorist Zing-Yang Kuo's other career reveals a figure who moved in the circles of senior university administrators and significant political figures. When he left China for Hong Kong after World War II (WWII), he did no more scientific research but embarked on an autobiography and a study of Chinese national character. A chance renewal of his acquaintance with Leonard Carmichael led to the simultaneous publication of several articles based on work done in the 1930s, and thereby to the revival of Kuo's scientific reputation. However, Kuo preferred to pursue his national character studies--his only post-WWII funded work. The author argues that it was the failure of Kuo's ambitions in China that led to both his interest in national character and to the revival of his scientific reputation, which might otherwise have lain dormant.
BACKGROUND: This paper presents research that was framed by our early understandings about the ways that people incorporate the consequences of illness into their lives. The word 'transition' has been used to describe this process. We believed self-management to be central to the transition process but this assertion required further research, hence this paper. AIM: The research aimed at understanding the way in which people who lived with chronic illness constructed the notion of self-management. While the participants of this study were living with arthritis, the focus was on understanding the meaning of self-management rather than the experience of living with the symptoms of arthritis. APPROACH: Data were generated when nine people living with arthritis were invited to write an autobiography about their life and experiences of living with illness. Two telephone interviews were recorded with each participant and then the research group (researchers and participants) convened for a discussion meeting. FINDINGS: In contrast to health professionals who identify self-management as structured education, participants identified self-management as a process initiated to bring about order in their lives. Creating a sense of order, or self-management, had four key themes (i) Recognizing and monitoring the boundaries, (ii) Mobilizing the resources, (iii) Managing the shift in self-identity, (iv) Balancing, pacing, planning and prioritizing CONCLUSIONS: People learned about their responses to illness through daily life experiences and as a result of trial and error. They reconfigured their daily lives and reconstructed their self-identity by exploring their personal limitations or boundaries. Self-management of chronic illness has been considered as both structure and process, however it is the process of self-management that we contend is central to the experience of transition. RELEVANCE TO CLINICAL PRACTICE: Clinical nursing intervention for people with a long term illness may be enhanced when self-management is approached from a broad, contextual perspective and self-management processes are integrated into clinical practice. The challenge is for nurses to embrace processes in nursing practice that will facilitate interactions with clients without obstructing the diversity of perspectives, create an environment conducive to learning and engage individuals in identifying self-management strategies that have meaning in their lives.
The purpose of this study was to describe the life control of members of the Kainuu Martha Organization (the Marthas), based on their written autobiographic material. The study material consisted of written thematized autobiographies of members of the organization (n = 41). The material was analysed using qualitative content analysis with concepts of the health portrait. The Marthas were classified into three groups (member, participating and leading) on the basis of their participation in Martha activities. According to the generational categorization of Roos, the member Marthas represented the Finnish generations of well-being, structural change and shortage. They did not participate actively in the Martha activities. Their feeling of life control was based on the sense life made to them. The member Marthas emphasized the meaning of family in their lives. The participating Marthas represented the generations of structural change and shortage. They participated in the Martha activities as observers or by attending the functions of their local organizations. Their feeling of life control was related to a favourable attitude towards life and concern for their human relations. The leading Marthas represented the generation of shortage and participated actively in the Martha activities. They believed in the continuity of the Martha Organization in Kainuu. They had a strong feeling of life control. This manifested as an enterprising spirit in everyday life, which included a skill to live life as it occurred. The lives of the leading Marthas were characterized by a favourable attitude, a feeling of responsibility and initiative.
Herbert Moran enlisted in the Royal Army Medical Corps early in World War I. His autobiography captures the impact of contemporary experience of wartime gunshot wounds, seen in vast numbers and with little understanding of the requirements of wartime surgery. Wounds of the face and brain were numerous, especially in trench fighting. In France, Germany, Britain and elsewhere, surgeons and dentists collaborated to repair mutilated faces and special centres were set up to facilitate this. The innovative New Zealand surgeon Harold Gillies developed his famous reconstructive techniques in the Queen's Hospital at Sidcup, with the help of dental surgeons, anaesthetists and medical artists. The treatment of brain wounds was controversial. Many surgeons, especially on the German side, advocated minimal primary operative surgery and delayed closure. Others advocated early exploration and immediate closure; among the first to do so was the Austro-Hungarian otologist Robert Bárány. In 1918, the pioneer American neurosurgeon Harvey Cushing published well-documented proof of the desirability of definitive operative management done as soon as possible. Few World War I surgeons developed their knowledge of plastic surgery, neurosurgery and oral surgery in post-war practice. An exception was Henry Newland, who went on to pioneer the development of these specialties in Australasia. After World War II, the French plastic surgeon Paul Tessier created the multidisciplinary subspecialty of craniomaxillofacial surgery, with the help of his neurosurgical colleague Gérard Guiot, and applied this approach to the correction of facial deformities. It has become evident that the new subspecialty requires appropriate training programs.
This essay surveys the present state of biographical writing in the history of neurology and neuroscience. Individual lives play a significant role in practitioner-historians' narratives, whereas academic historians tend to be more nonindividualistic and a-biographical. Autobiographies by neurologists and neuroscientists, and particularly autobiographical collections, are problematic as an historical genre. Neurobiographies proper are published with several aims in mind: some are written as literary entertainment, others as contributions to a cultural and social history of the neurosciences. Eulogy, panegyrics and commemoration play a great role in neurobiographical writing. Some biographies, finally, are written to provide role-models for young neuroscientists, thus reviving the classical, Plutarchian biographical tradition. Finally, a recent cooperative biography of Charcot is mentioned as an example of how the biographical genre can help overcome the alleged dichotomy between the historiographies of practitioner-historians and academic historians.
As a part of the Nun Study, a longitudinal investigation of aging and Alzheimer's disease, oral and written autobiographies from 118 older women were analyzed to examine the relationship between spoken and written language. The written language samples were more complex than the oral samples, both conceptually and grammatically. The relationship between the linguistic measures and participant characteristics was also examined. The results suggest that the grammatical and conceptual characteristics of oral and written language are affected by participant differences in education, cognitive status, and physical function and that written language samples have greater power than oral language samples to differentiate between high- and low-ability older adults.
The role of current personal experience in understanding of word meaning was investigated in a patient, WM, who suffers from semantic dementia. The study was prompted by the observation that WM, despite being severely impaired on formal tests of word comprehension and naming, retained a range of vocabulary pertaining to her daily life. If autobiographical experience has a general facilitatory effect, then this should affect which concepts are retained and which lost, but not influence the quality of that conceptual knowledge. Conversely, if personal autobiography has a direct role in investing concepts with meaning, then WM's understanding of nominal terms that she uses spontaneously in conversation ought not to be normal, but should be constrained by the autobiographical context in which she uses those terms. WM could define nouns and noun phrases drawn from her conversational vocabulary, but her definitions had a markedly autobiographical quality. Moreover, WM was extremely impaired in her ability to define new noun phrases, constructed by combining words from her conversational vocabulary (e.g. "dog licence", constructed from "driving licence" and "dog"; "oil field" constructed from "oil" and "field"). It was concluded that WM does not have normal conceptual understanding of nouns and noun phrases that she uses appropriately in conversation. Her understanding is narrow and autobiographically constrained. The findings, which suggest an interactive relationship between autobiographical and semantic memory, have implications for understanding of the progressive breakdown of semantic knowledge.