Introduction to the special issue: The Near Human in life science, biomedicine, and care

In Colombia–South America, there is an urgent need to address educational processes in culturally diverse contexts that permeate the understanding and contribution to the training of teachers in situated processes, because this is a multi-ethnic and multicultural country. From this perspective, we present the results of an investigation that analyzed the biology degree projects of Indigenous students from La Chorrera (Amazonas) at the National Pedagogical University of Colombia, in order to characterize the different epistemological and ontological aspects that underlie them and as a way of guiding the initial training of teachers. The methodological perspective of this research is critical hermeneutics, using documentary analysis as a strategy. As for the theoretical foundation, it is oriented from the approaches of critical inter-culturality and epistemological pluralism. In a nutshell, it is necessary to think about the teaching of biology as a cultural practice, which places in the debate the place of biology as a science of life and the living, its relationship with the contexts of students and the possibilities of empowering knowledge for the defense of territories and life itself. This implies the idea that as human beings we are constructed in relation to other organisms; hence, the importance of understanding the living from life, allowing respect for all forms of life and forging a world where there is room for biological, cultural, epistemic, and ontological diversity.

Currently, the media is creating an illusion of youthful wellbeing: ‘healthism’. But is life merely about physical health? What is meant by spiritual healing in pastoral caregiving? By means of the ontology of life and an existential analysis of the structure of being, a grid is developed in order to make a pastoral diagnosis regarding the interplay between different aspects and dimensions of the category life. It is argued that, seeing the bigger picture in a pastoral hermeneutics of life, contributes to spiritual healing (cura vitae). The basic assumption is that cura animarum should be designed in theory formation in pastoral caregiving as follows: faith care as life care. It is, in this respect, that the Christian spiritual categories of anastrephō, peripateō and hodos can be used in practical theological reflection to describe praxis in practical theology as fides quaerens vivendi [faith seeking lifestyles]. A spirituality of lifestyles points to habitus [human soulfulness] as new modes of ‘walking with God’ and ‘living with God’ (pneumatological praxis of God). Fides quaerens viviendi should be exemplified by a taxonomy of virtues.

Reviewed by: Populating the Novel: Literary Form and the Politics of Surplus Life by Emily Steinlight Sophia Hsu STEINLIGHT, EMILY. Populating the Novel: Literary Form and the Politics of Surplus Life. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2018. 278 pp. $55.00 cloth; $26.99 e-book. Emily Steinlight's compelling first monograph, Populating the Novel: Literary Form and the Politics of Surplus Life, begins with what she concedes is a "fairly obvious premise: that the social worlds assembled in nineteenth-century literature are phenomenally crowded" (3). But from this commonplace statement comes her original and important argument: that this literary overcrowding "gave form to what can now be called the biopolitical imagination" (3). In shifting the focus of novel criticism away from questions of the individual to questions of population, Steinlight reorients what critics, for a long time, have claimed novels do. Rather than serving as an instrument of social control that disciplines modern subjects through methods of surveillance, the teeming nineteenth-century novel "creates a problem discipline cannot solve" (14). While England's population more than tripled during the century, the congested narratives of this era's fiction do not simply reflect demographic change. Instead, as Steinlight powerfully contends, they turn that reality into a pressing political problem that exposes the limits of social and political institutions to contain, manage, and care for the biological life of the populace. By making a case for the importance of the population in the history of the novel, Steinlight's book joins recent scholarship that has identified the social mass as the central subject of Romantic and Victorian literature. Like Alex Woloch, John Plotz, Nicholas Daly, and Audrey Jaffe, Steinlight explores how fiction makes sense [End Page 107] of the large social aggregates that modern individuals come into contact with every day. Previous studies, however, tend to analyze how literature opposes the one and the many, that the relationship between the individual and the mass is an antagonistic one in which the individual becomes a distinct figure because he stands in sharp relief against the undifferentiated throngs. Populating the Novel, by contrast, destabilizes the concept of the individual by showing how writers developed literary techniques that blur the line between individual and mass. As Steinlight demonstrates, the surplus bodies of Romantic and Victorian novels are just as likely to be the seemingly individuated protagonists as the unnamed, innumerable multitudes that haunt the edges of these texts. The introduction to Populating the Novel lays out the historical, political, and formal stakes of Steinlight's methodology. Here, she carefully explains how the idea of the population became significant in the nineteenth century because of intertwined developments in industrial capitalism, the life sciences, and popular politics after the French Revolution. This historical foundation grounds Steinlight's theoretical exploration of major twentieth-century biopolitical thinkers, such as Michel Foucault, Giorgio Agamben, and Roberto Esposito. It also sets the stage for her later readings that deftly weave together concepts from political economy, demography, public health, hereditary biology, sociology, and psychology, among other disciplines. Yet even with this impressive range, literature remains the focus of Steinlight's book, as she "takes seriously the particularity of literature and its divergence from other types of discourse" (17). As Steinlight shows, the paradigmatic shift from the individual as a purely political subject to the population as an embodied collective that has political agency because of its creaturely qualities corresponds with a shift in the reception and purpose of literature. Viewed as both "mass media and serious art" (10), the nineteenth-century novel acquires significance as the genre of mass appeal and the genre that represents and comments on social life. This duality affords the novel the capacity to give the population new narrative and political meaning. For Steinlight, then, Romantic and Victorian fiction gained importance by making the burgeoning population feel excessive, a feeling of excess that made literature aesthetically and politically exceptional as the only genre that could uncover the inadequacy of existing social structures. Populating the Novel devotes its first, second, and third chapters to illustrating how nineteenth-century novels take as their subject a demographic surplus they both engender and try to control. Mary Shelley's Gothic...

Current Opinion in Supportive and Palliative Care was launched in 2007. It is one of a successful series of review journals whose unique format is designed to provide a systematic and critical assessment of the literature as presented in the many primary journals. The fields of supportive and palliative care are divided into 12 sections that are reviewed once a year. Each section is assigned a Section Editor, a leading authority in the area, who identifies the most important topics at that time. Here we are pleased to introduce the Journal's Section Editors for this issue. SECTION EDITORS Aminah JatoiAminah JatoiDr Aminah Jatoi is Professor of Oncology at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, USA. A practicing medical oncologist, she has been interested in symptom control research in cancer patients for over 20 years. She holds a special interest in cancer-associated weight loss, having completed a three-year fellowship in clinical nutrition. She is the author of more than 300 publications. Dr. Jatoi has received research funding from multiple sources, including the United States’ National Cancer Institute. Barry J.A. LairdBarry J.A. LairdBarry J.A. Laird graduated in medicine from the University of Glasgow, UK, in 1997 and completed higher specialist training in palliative medicine in 2009. During his training in palliative medicine he was awarded a National Cancer Research Institute Fellowship and joined the academic palliative medicine department at the University of Edinburgh, UK, with Professor Marie Fallon. He completed his MD in cancer induced bone pain and neuropathic cancer pain in 2009 and was then awarded a fellowship from the European Palliative Care Research Centre (PRC) working with Professor Stein Kaasa. His interest in cachexia was nurtured by the late Professor Kenneth Fearon. He currently holds positions as a Senior Lecturer in Palliative Medicine at the University of Edinburgh and a consultant in palliative medicine in St Columba's Hospice, UK. His research interests are focussed around symptoms in life-limiting illness and the role of palliative care in optimising the care of malignant (lung and pancreatic cancer) and non-malignant disease. He leads a research programme examining the systemic inflammatory response in cachexia, symptom genesis and prognosis in cancer. He has published over 70 papers and is the CI and PI of clinical trials in symptomatology and treatment. Gustavo De SimoneGustavo De SimoneGustavo De Simone was born in Argentina in 1955 and graduated as a physician in 1979, completing his specialty in medical oncology. He was appointed Medical Director of the Palliative Care Program at Mainetti Comprehensive Cancer Centre in La Plata, Argentina, in 1991. Since then he has contributed to the development of specialist palliative care services in Buenos Aires and other cities in Argentina. He has led development of palliative care education mainly at postgraduate level within the University of La Plata, Argentina, from 1992 to 1997 and Universidad del Salvador, Argentina, from 1998 to present, and has been involved in the development of the research and development programs. He is Medical Director of Pallium Latinoamerica Study Centre (NGO), which has had academic links with Oxford International Centre for Palliative Care since 1993. In June 2005, Dr De Simone was made Coordinator of Postgraduate Training in Palliative Care (Residence Program) within the Ministry of Health, Buenos Aires Government. He is currently Chief of Education and Research Department at the Bonorino Udaondo Public Hospital in Buenos Aires, Argentina. In 1998 he became Honorary Professor of Palliative Medicine at the Universidad del Salvador, Buenos Aires, and Director of the Career of Medical Oncology. This is the first Chair in Palliative Medicine in Argentina and provides a focal point for educational developments in South America. Based on his commitments to education, he received the 2003 International Association for Hospice and Palliative Care (IAHPC) Annual Vittorio Ventafridda Award. In 2009 he was made Director of the working group on End of Life Decisions at the Medical Ethics Committee of the National Academy of Medicine, and from 2008 to 2011 he was Argentina's country leader for the EU project ‘OPCARE9’. Since 2011 he has been the Director of MSc in Palliative Care at the Universidad del Salvador and has been re-elected President of the Argentinean Association for Palliative Care from 2012 to 2014. Bridget JohnstonBridget JohnstonProfessor Bridget Johnston holds the post of Florence Nightingale Foundation Chair in Clinical Nursing h in the School of Medicine, Dentistry and Nursing, College of Medical, Veterinary and Life Sciences, University of Glasgow, UK. This a joint post between the University of Glasgow and NHS Greater Glasgow and Clyde in Scotland, UK. Bridget is a registered nurse and has a clinical, educational and research background in palliative care. She graduated with her PhD from the University of Glasgow in 2002. Bridget was a Professor of Palliative and Supportive Care and co-lead of the Sue Ryder Care Centre for the Study of Supportive, Palliative and End of Life Care at University of Nottingham, UK, from 2013–2016. Bridget's research has centred on self-care and advanced cancer, telehealth and palliative care symptom management in palliative care and laterally developing and testing interventions related to dignity and end of life care. Bridget supports a number of PhD students from across the world doing palliative care studies. Bridget was appointed as a Patron of Macmillan Cancer Support Alumni in 2015. Bridget is chair of the Scottish palliative care research forum. Bridget is Section editor BMC Nursing and Section Editor (end of life care) for Current Opinion in Supportive and Palliative Care. Bridget tweets as @BridgetJohnst and co-hosts a palliative/end of life twitter group @Weeolc. Christopher DalleyChristopher DalleyDr Dalley is a Consultant Haematologist at Southampton General, UK. He has specialty interest in the Myelodysplastic syndromes, acute myeloid leukaemia, bone marrow transplantation as well as the diagnosis of haematological cancers. Having graduated from St Thomas's Hospital Medical School, University of London, UK, he underwent postgraduate training in haematology at St Bartholomew's Hospital, UK. Whilst there, he developed a research interest in the cytogenetics of acute myeloid leukaemia, and the clinical management of AML in older adult patients. After completing his specialist training in haematology, he worked at Vancouver General Hospital, Canada, as a British Columbia Cancer Agency Leukaemia and Bone Marrow Transplant Fellow. Having completed his fellowship, he returned to the United Kingdom and has been a substantive consultant haematologist for fourteen years. He developed ambulatory care programmes for patients with haematological cancer, developed and led a specialised integrated haematological malignancy diagnostic service at Sheffield Teaching Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust, UK, where he worked for seven years as a Consultant Haematologist. He has co-written national clinical guidelines for the management of the myelodysplastic syndromes and the National Institute for Clinical Excellence (NICE) Improving Outcomes Guidance for Haematological Malignancy. Dr Dalley is currently a member of the National External Quality Assurance Scheme (NEQAS) Leukaemia Immunophenotyping Executive Committee, NEQAS Molecular Scientific Advisory Group and the UK MDS Executive Committee. He is also a Joint Accreditation Committee ISCT-Europe (JACIE) Clinical Inspector for BMT programmes. His current clinical practice is focused on the management of aggressive myeloid malignancies. His department is recognised as a Center of Excellence by The MDS Foundation.

Adult Mortality in Children Exposed to State Care: Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis of Prospective Cohort Studies

Innovation in critical care nursing education: a reply

Plants have been the essential source of food and medicine in all cultures and traditions since antiquity. Ayurveda, the ancient science of life and health care, developed the plant medicine and green pharmacy to its zenith and provided it a scientific and conceptual foundation. Ashtanga Ayurveda prominently included Rasayana Tantra among its eight specialty branches. Ayurvedic Rasayana Tantra is a unique science of micro-medicinal nutrients which rejuvenate, regenerate, and promote the quality of body tissues. A special class of Rasayanas called Medhya Rasayana are claimed to be neuronutrients. Some of such neuronutrient plants are Brahmi, Mandukaparni, Ashwagandha, Vacha, Jatamansi, and Jyotishmati. This article has discussed the ancient concepts, principles, and practices of Rasayana Tantra and has reviewed the recent advances in this important field of Indian traditional medicine.

This unit describes the common types of volumetric apparatus used in the life science laboratory, their use, and care. When an experimenter needs to prepare solutions of accurate concentrations and to transfer quantitatively samples of liquid from one container to others, an array of glassware and plasticware is available for these operations ranging from a microliter to a liter in volume. Considerations of temperature, solvent compatibility, and safety also need to be taken into account.

This unit describes the common types of volumetric apparatus used in the life science laboratory, their use, and care. When an experimenter needs to prepare solutions at accurate concentrations and quantitatively transfer samples of liquid from one container to another, an array of glassware and plasticware is available for these operations ranging from a microliter to more than a liter in volume. Considerations of temperature, solvent compatibility, and safety also need to be taken into account. © 2015 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

Application of the five stages of life model to support health impact assessments: a case study of the Llanelli Wellness and Life Science Village