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At least 1,423 records · Page 79Linked to original sources
PubMed1982

A modification of the Blom-Singer valve for restoration of voice after laryngectomy.

The authors have been involved in developing a modification of the Blom-Singer valved prosthesis for restoration of voice after laryngectomy. This is a case report on the first patient who underwent this procedure in Britain. It was found essential that a different design of valved prosthesis be invented and this is described. Aspects for consideration when selecting a potential candidate for this procedure are outlined, and guidelines given for choosing suitable patients.

Aged↗
PubMed1992

Draffin and his rods.

Draffin's rods or bipods are now a well-known, internationally accepted ENT instrument. Before their invention in 1951, the attendant anaesthetist or nurse was obliged to support the mouthgag during tonsillectomy. Research into the life of their originator, David Alexander Draffin, reveals that in addition to his evident design skills, he was a surgeon of courage, wit and great charm.

Anesthesiology↗
PubMed1989

Intelligence and musical improvisation.

We investigated whether somebody with a severe mental impairment could not only remember and reproduce music, but was also able to generate it. Musical improvisation requires the ability to recognize constraints and also demands inventiveness. Musical improvisations on a traditional, tonal and also on a whole tone scale composition were produced by a mentally handicapped and by a normal control musician. It was found that not only the control but also the handicapped subject could improvise appropriately within structural constraints, although with the tonal music the idiot-savant showed some stylistic latitude. It is concluded that cognitive processes such as musical input analysis, decision making, and output monitoring are independent of general intellectual status.

Adult↗
PubMed1979

Psychophysiologic disorders: a critical appraisal of concept and theory illustrated with reference to the irritable bowel syndrome (IBS).

The concept of psychophysiologic disorders and the major theories invented to account for such disorders are critically reviewed. The Irritable Bowel Syndrome (IBS) serves to illustrate the application of each theory and provides a vehicle for their appraisal. The tendency to think of 'physical' and 'psychological' as separate entities rather than separate languages has led to attempts to make a categorical distinction between disorders caused by 'psychological' factors and those caused by 'physical' factors. Some of the theories developed to account for psychophysiologic disorders are unscientific and none can adequately account for all the features of IBS. It is concluded that the concept of psychophysiologic or psychosomatic disorder is outmoded.

Abdomen↗
PubMed1983

Changing images of the brain.

Our concept of the structure and function of the normal and diseased brain has developed throughout the centuries. The first stage in the discovery of the brain stretched over three millennia, from the earliest descriptions by the Egyptians in the sixteenth century B.C. to the comprehensive anatomical treatise of Vesalius. The invention of the light microscope brought to the eye a previously invisible world, and heralded the beginnings of the systematic histological investigation of the immensely complex cellular networks of the brain. With the advent of electron microscopy, the organelles and connections of brain cells have been revealed, and the new era of molecular biology has begun. Neuropathology, which concerns itself with diseases of the brain, spinal cord, nerve and muscle, has enormously benefited from these developments to establish the morphological basis of diseases of the nervous system.

Anatomy↗
PubMed2002

Elderly people's accounts of home care rationing: missing voices in long-term care policy debates.

Fundamental shifts in state intervention in recent years have resulted in steady curtailment in public provision of community and social care. A longitudinal study of elderly women receiving home care in Ontario explored the reverberations of these shifts in the texture of frail elderly people's lives. Three distinct accounts of negotiating unstable and rationed home care were discernible. "Taking charge" was an active account of women successfully impressing their particular needs and identities on home care provision. "Pushed over the edge" was a vulnerable account of insufficient and depersonalized care in which participants felt themselves practically and emotionally out of control. In "Restraining expectations", women adjusted silently to the shortcomings of home care, stoically making themselves smaller as they found their previous orbits and identities unsupported. Home care's front line emerged as a complex site of struggle for identity and agency--a struggle in which elderly people engage with inventiveness and determination but also with dwindling support, few witnesses and in mounting isolation.

Aged↗
PubMed2001

Our traumatic neurosis and its brain.

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.

Brain↗
PubMed2006

Lost objects: from the laboratories of hypnosis to the psychoanalytic setting.

The psychoanalytic setting counts today as one of the familiar therapeutic rituals of the Western world. Taking up some of the insights of the anthropology of science will allow us to account for both the social and the material arrangements from which Freud's invention emerged at the end of the nineteenth century out of the clinical laboratories and private consulting rooms of practitioners of hypnosis. The peculiar way of neglecting or forgetting the object world and the institution of the psychoanalyst as a "transference object" will be traced back to multiple reconfigurations in the history of hypnotism in France and in Germany. In this process, different practitioners tried to achieve a synthesis of clinical work and experimental psychology, with the aim of objectifying knowledge about human subjectivity. While Freud retained the claim of psychoanalysis performing an experimental situation, he set apart his own setting from the objectifying practices which were characteristic of this experimental psychology located in the clinic and the private consulting room.

Austria↗
PubMed1995

Child English pre-sentential negation as metalinguistic exclamatory sentence negation.

This paper presents a study of the spontaneous pre-sentential negations of ten English-speaking children between the ages of 1;6 and 3;4 which supports the hypothesis that child English nonanaphoric pre-sentential negation is a form of metalinguistic exclamatory sentence negation. A detailed discourse analysis reveals that children's pre-sentential negatives like No Nathaniel a king (i) are characteristically echoic, and (ii) typically express objection and rectification, two characteristic functions of exclamatory negation in adult discourse, e.g. Don't say 'Nathaniel's a king'! A comparison of children's pre-sentential negations with their internal predicate negations using not and don't reveals that the two negative constructions are formally and functionally distinct. I argue that children's nonanaphoric pre-sentential negatives constitute an independent, well-formed class of discourse negation. They are not 'primitive' constructions derived from the miscategorization of emphatic no in adult speech or children's 'inventions'. Nor are they an early derivational variant of internal sentence negation. Rather, these negatives reflect young children's competence in using grammatical negative constructions appropriately in discourse.

Child Language↗
PubMed2002

The acquisition of compound vs. phrasal stress: the role of prosodic constituents.

This paper investigates the acquisition of compound vs. phrasal stress (hót dog vs. hot dóg) in English. This has previously been shown to be acquired quite late, in contrast to recent research showing that infants both perceive and prefer rhythmic patterns in their own language. Subjects (40 children in four groups the averages ages of which are 5;4, 7;2, 9;3 and 11;6 and 10 adults) were shown pairs of pictures representing a compound word and the corresponding phrase. They heard a prerecorded tape with the names of the items, and were asked to indicate which one they heard. In addition to 9 real compounds and corresponding phrases, 9 novel compounds were presented (rédcup = invented type of flower vs. red cúp). A gradual increase in overall correct scores until age twelve was found along with a significant effect of real vs. novel compounds (p < 0.001), and an overwhelming tendency for the younger children to prefer compounds regardless of stress. We conclude that the results are due to the slow development of the ability to use prosodic information to override a strong lexical bias.

Child↗
PubMed2003

The sources of young children's name innovations for novel artifacts.

Two studies investigated whether four-year-old children (12 in Experiment 1 with a mean age of 4;8 and 36 in Experiment 2 with a mean age of 4;7) invent names for new artifacts based on the objects' functions as opposed to their perceptual properties. Children informed about the intended functions of novel objects provided more name innovations that were clearly function-based than perception-based. This tendency was observed when children were shown the objects' functions, even if they were also given verbal descriptions of the objects' perceptual properties and parts. Only when ignorant of the objects' intended functions did children tend to use perceptual features to create substantial numbers of names. Accordingly, results from this name-innovation methodology converge with findings from some recent studies of lexical categorization suggesting that functional information is critical to how preschoolers extend artifact names. Children appear to appreciate an intimate relation between the functions of artifacts and how they are named.

Analysis of Variance↗
PubMed2005

Duchenne De Boulogne: a pioneer in neurology and medical photography.

Guillaume-Benjamin-Amand Duchenne was born 200 years ago in Boulogne-sur-Mer (Pas-de-Calais, France). He studied medicine in Paris and became a physician in 1831. He practiced general medicine in his native town for about 11 years and then returned to Paris to initiate pioneering studies on electrical stimulation of muscles. Duchenne used electricity not only as a therapeutic agent, as it was commonly the case earlier in the 19th century, but chiefly as a physiological investigation tool to study the anatomy of the living body. Without formal appointment he visited hospital wards across Paris searching for rare cases of neuromuscular disorders. He built a portable electrical device that he used to functionally map all bodily muscles and to study their coordinating action in health and disease. He gave accurate descriptions of many neuromuscular disorders, including pseudohypertrophic muscular dystrophy to which his name is still attached (Duchenne muscular dystrophy). He also invented a needle system (Duchenne's histological harpoon) for percutaneous sampling of muscular tissue without anesthesia, a forerunner of today's biopsy. Duchenne summarized his work in two major treatises entitled De l'électrisation localisée (1855) and Physiologie des mouvements (1867). Duchenne's iconographic work stands at the crossroads of three major discoveries of the 19th century: electricity, physiology and photography. This is best exemplified by his investigation of the mechanisms of human physiognomy in which he used localized faradic stimulation to reproduce various forms of human facial expression. The album that complements his book on this issue is considered a true incunabulum of photography. Duchenne de Boulogne, a shy but hard-working, acute and ingenious observer, became one of most original clinicians of the 19th century. He died in Paris in 1875.

Electrophysiology↗
PubMed2003

Pavlov and associationism.

Pavlov's contribution to experimental psychology was to invent a technique that allowed him to undertake a prolonged and systematic series of well-controlled experiments that, astonishingly enough, uncovered many if not most of the phenomena of what is rightly called pavlovian conditioning. It was not for another 30 years or more that English-speaking psychologists began to match that achievement. Of course there have been new developments and discoveries since his time. Two examples are discussed: the important role of variable associability or attention even in simple conditioning, and the rigorous application of associative learning theory to the behavior of adult humans.

Adult↗
PubMed2000

New technologies in scanning probe microscopy for studying molecular interactions in cells.

Atomic force microscopy (AFM) is a specialised form of scanning probe microscopy, which was invented by Binnig and colleagues in 1986. Since then, AFM has been increasingly used to study biomedical problems. Because of its high resolution, AFM has been used to examine the topography or shape of surfaces, such as during the molecular imaging of proteins. This, combined with the ability to operate under known force regimes, makes AFM technology particularly useful for measuring intermolecular bond forces and assessing the mechanical properties of biological materials. Many of the constraints (e.g. complex instrumentation, slow acquisition speeds and poor vertical range) that previously limited the use of AFM in cell biology are now beginning to be resolved. Technological advances will enable AFM to challenge both confocal laser scanning microscopy and scanning electron microscopy as a method for carrying out three-dimensional imaging. Its use as both a precise micro-manipulator and a measurement tool will probably result in many novel and exciting applications in the future. In this article, we have reviewed some of the current biological applications of AFM, and illustrated these applications using studies of the cell biology of bone and integrin-mediated adhesion.

Journal Article↗
PubMed1991

Analysis of genetic markers in forensic DNA samples using the polymerase chain reaction.

The ability to extract and type DNA from forensic evidentiary samples has revolutionized the field of forensic serology. Previously, genetic marker typing was limited to the analysis of blood group markers and soluble polymorphic protein markers. Because the number of suitable markers expressed in particular fluids and tissues is relatively small, and because mixtures of fluids cannot be separated for conventional genetic marker typing, a suspect frequently cannot be included or excluded as a fluid donor in a case. However, the development of methods to extract DNA from virtually all biological specimens has greatly expanded the potential for individual identification. Of particular importance was the ability to extract mixtures of sperm cells and epithelial cells found in sexual assault cases such that the DNA from the sperm cells could be typed independently of the DNA from the victim's epithelial cells. Restriction fragment length polymorphism (RFLP) analysis was the first DNA-based method applied to problems of individual identification. This method, while powerful in its ability to differentiate individuals, is limited by the quantity and quality of DNA required for an unambiguous result and by the amount of time it takes to obtain a result. Despite these limitations, several laboratories are using RFLP analysis successfully for the detection of polymorphisms in forensic DNA case samples. While the field of forensic serology was being revolutionized by the prospect of DNA analysis, the field of molecular biology was being revolutionized by the invention of the polymerase chain reaction (PCR), which ultimately has had an impact on every area of biological science. The PCR DNA amplification technology is ideally suited for the analysis of forensic DNA samples in that it is sensitive and rapid and not as limited by the quality of DNA as the RFLP method. The focus of this article is the use of the PCR for typing genetic markers, and we will address specifically the special considerations that arise from applying DNA amplification and typing technology to forensic materials.

DNA↗
PubMed2006

A 96-well screen filter plate for high-throughput biological sample preparation and LC-MS/MS analysis.

A novel 96-well screen filter plate (patent pending) has been invented to eliminate a time-consuming and labor-intensive step in preparation of in vivo study samples--to remove blood or plasma clots. These clots plug the pipet tips during a manual or automated sample-transfer step causing inaccurate pipetting or total pipetting failure. Traditionally, these blood and plasma clots are removed by picking them out manually one by one from each sample tube before any sample transfer can be made. This has significantly slowed the sample preparation process and has become a bottleneck for automated high-throughput sample preparation using robotic liquid handlers. Our novel screen filter plate was developed to solve this problem. The 96-well screen filter plate consists of 96 stainless steel wire-mesh screen tubes connected to the 96 openings of a top plate so that the screen filter plate can be readily inserted into a 96-well sample storage plate. Upon insertion, the blood and plasma clots are excluded from entering the screen tube while clear sample solutions flow freely into it. In this way, sample transfer can be easily completed by either manual or automated pipetting methods. In this report, three structurally diverse compounds were selected to evaluate and validate the use of the screen filter plate. The plasma samples of these compounds were transferred and processed in the presence and absence of the screen filter plate and then analyzed by LC-MS/MS methods. Our results showed a good agreement between the samples prepared with and without the screen filter plate, demonstrating the utility and efficiency of this novel device for preparation of blood and plasma samples. The device is simple, easy to use, and reusable. It can be employed for sample preparation of other biological fluids that contain floating particulates or aggregates.

Automation↗
PubMed2006

Synthesis and properties of cyclopropane-derived peptidomimetics.

Small peptides exhibit a wide range of biological activities, but although there are some notable exceptions, they are not generally useful as drugs. This has spurred widespread interest in designing peptidomimetics and introducing them as replacements of portions of native peptides to enhance their biological properties. Special attention has been focused upon rigid replacements because of their potential to preorganize the resulting pseudopeptide in a conformation corresponding to its bound structure. Toward this goal, we invented trisubstituted cyclopropanes as novel peptidomimetics, anticipating that the cyclopropane ring would locally orient the backbone and the corresponding amino acid side chain in the biologically active conformation. Selected aspects of the syntheses and applications of these cyclopropane-derived peptidomimetics are presented in this Account.

Cyclopropanes↗
PubMed2000

Asymmetric catalysis of aldol reactions with chiral lewis bases.

In an extension of studies both on the stereochemical course of the aldol addition and on Lewis-base-catalyzed allylation reactions, we have invented a new Lewis-base-catalyzed asymmetric aldol addition. This Account outlines the conceptual development, the identification of design criteria, and the underlying principles for such a process. The reduction of these elements to practice in the demonstration of enantioselective aldol additions of trichlorosilyl enolates catalyzed by chiral phosphoramides is also presented. From a combination of stereochemical, kinetic, and structural studies, an intruiging mechanistic hypothesis is forwarded that explains the origin of catalysis and diastereoselectivity.

Aldehydes↗