Ante Litteram Research Articles

Lessons from a geriatric clinical case from the 19th century: abridge to modern geriatric medicine.

Count Neipperg (1775-1829), the morganatic husband of Maria Luigia of Habsburg, Napoleon's former wife, presented with typical heart failure symptoms and died of bilateral bronchopneumonia. Neipperg's case is an example of the conflict in the medical field, which led to the birth of modern evidence-based medicine (EBM), and although Neipperg died almost 200 years ago, his case presents the same critical issues that more complex geriatric patients face today. First, the attending physicians provided divergent opinions without reaching an agreement. For example, Francesco Rossi correctly diagnosed heart disease by evaluating the patient's signs and symptoms, a clinical approach that is an early example of modern EBM. By contrast, Giacomo Tommasini made a misdiagnosis based on the philosophical principles of John Brown's vitalist theory, as reworded by Giovanni Rasori. Second, Tommasini's medical report also includes evidence of the Geriatric 5Ms for older patient care, such as multi-complexity, multimorbidity, medication, mobility, and the mind. Moreover, both physicians considered "what matters most" for the patient and his family. Third, the Count's status and political role were identified as the social and structural determinants of health (SSDoH) and used to justify the exceptional intensity of the health care provided. Subsequently, the ante litteram application of EBM and a clinical evaluation based on Geriatrics 5Ms principles anticipate current multidisciplinary management focused on the patient rather than a single disease. The systematic revision of past clinical cases not examined before could open new windows in the dissemination of the geriatric methodology and discipline.

School autonomy before autonomy. The R.p.d. 419/74 and the ordering and structure high school experiments between the Seventies and Eighties

Decree 419/74, which regulated school experimentation, is perhaps the least known of the delegated decrees on schools. Yet, for twenty years it was the only measure with which to try to renew high school in the absence of a reform, until the advent of school autonomy. The decree reflected the international debate on the comprehensive school and the regionalization process then underway in Italy, but also the need for the Ministry of public education and its administrative apparatus to govern a “periphery” in disorder. It therefore represents a governance tool with which teachers, local and regional agencies and the ministry itself have attempted to find a new balance in the relationship between school and territory. The protagonists of this sort of ante litteram school autonomy were the “minisperimentazioni” and “maxisperimentazioni” launched through article 3 of the decree. Heirs of the “bienni unitari” of the Seventies, they tried to change the school structure to try to respond to the social transformations of the country first during the Seventies, and then in the Eighties, at a time marked by the progressive loss of the centrality of the school in the within an increasingly broad and crowded formal and informal educational landscape.

A Not Merely Charitable Alliance: Anti‐Poverty Workers Within and Against the State

AbstractThis essay explores the insurgent practices of members of the Volunteers in Service to America (VISTA) program from 1965–1973. VISTA is situated historically in relation to New Left community organizing projects and the War on Poverty. Testimonials of VISTA workers demonstrate that many developed political perspectives critical of the “war” in which they had enlisted. Records of collective mobilization chart how VISTA workers attempted to form a labor union and bring the program under community control. Their largest organization, the National VISTA Alliance, represented a form of social justice unionism ante litteram within and against the U.S. state.

Re-discovering Aurelio Peccei\u2019s contribution to Futures Studies

This work aims to enhance the contribution of Aurelio Peccei to Futures Studies and its unaltered relevance in the light of the world’s current scientific issues. Peccei’s contribution in Futures Studies is often identified with his propulsive role in the birth of the Club of Rome (1968) and in the promotion of the report “The Limits to Growth” (1972). Although this would be enough to make him a central figure in the history of Futures Studies, his whole intellectual journey is worth emphasizing. This work focuses on the “epistemic impact” of Peccei in the field research on possible futures. Peccei not only argued the fundamental need to translate complexity into a forecasting model: as an ante litteram anticipator, he dedicated his life to seek a development model respecting both the human tendency towards constant evolution and biosphere. A theoretical impact that allowed many fundamental UN initiatives—from the 1987 Report of the World Commission on Environment and Development to the 2015 Report on Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)—and also helped the development of a forward-looking social research.

LE API DI VIRGILIO, SOMMO POETA ED ETOLOGO <em>ANTE LITTERAM</em>

The poet Virgil is linked to honey bees both for his biography and for his literary works. Some verses of Virgil’s main works, the Bucolics, the Georgics and the Aeneid, are analyzed and interpreted, demonstrating a clear familiarity of the poet with these insects. In the Bucolics, honey bees play a symbolic role as well as in the Aeneid, where however their role is anything but marginal. As for the fourth book of the Georgics, what Virgil writes on the phenomena inherent to swarming is reinterpreted in a bio-ethological key, demonstrating how he had the opportunity to directly observe some phenomena of the life of the beehive still today poorly investigated from a scientific point of view. The poet Virgil can therefore be considered an ethologist ante litteram. A comparison is then made between some images on honey bees present in Virgil literary works and what, in relation to these insects, is found in Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy.

Armeno-Aethiopica in the Middle Ages: Geography, Tales of Christianization, Calendars, and Anti-Dyophysite Polemics in the First Millennium

Research for this article had the purpose of exploring medieval Armenian–Ethiopian connections. The investigations revealed three main contexts where Ethiopia and Ethiopians feature in the Armenian sources of the first millennium, without necessarily implying real-life encounters. Firstly, the earliest Armenian texts locate Ethiopia and discuss the genealogy of its people in line with the biblical account of the Diamerismos, as well as notions based on Eusebius of Caesarea’s Chronicle translated into Armenian from Syriac in the fifth century. Each author, then, interpreted this information according to his narrative needs or the purpose of a given composition. The discussion of these sources reveals the circulation of classical and Hellenistic notions on Ethiopia and the Ethiopians in Armenian, too, such as the confusion between Ethiopia, Arabia, and India, as well as anthropological or spiritual features attributed to Ethiopians already by classical authors. Secondly, the article analyses a series of calendrical treatises, starting with one authored by the seventh-century polymath Anania Širakac‘i, that passed on a short tale about a sixth-century gathering of scholars in Alexandria in order to determine the date of the Easter and establish tables for its calculation in the future. An Ethiopian wise man Abdiē was part of this international endeavour too, according to this tradition, and his presence marked Ethiopia as part of the eastern Mediterranean learned world, with its own cultural traditions. Armenian language hemerologia also preserved month names in Gǝʿǝz, reproduced in the Appendix. Thirdly, the article draws attention to a completely new way of viewing Ethiopia in ninth- to eleventh-century Armenian anti-dyophysite (antiByzantine) treatises where the Armenian Church and its doctrines or ritual practices were imagined as part of a vast, non-dyophysite orthodox world that included the Ethiopian Church. Intriguingly, this argumentative technique, formulated in terms that one may callanti-colonial ante litteram, may be traced among Coptic and Syriac polemicists as well, a subject of research that would benefit from further analysis.

Abitare il deserto. La geologia trascendentale di Merleau-Ponty alla prova dell’Antropocene

Drawing on Merleau-Ponty’s hypothesis about transcendental geology in the final phase of his work, this article examines the debate about the Anthropocene from the perspective of philosophy of history. Firstly, we follow the author through the preliminary materials for The Visible and The Invisible by situating transcendental geology within the book’s complex theoretical architecture, and by foregrounding the necessity of rethinking the notion of Earth through the reading that the French philosopher offers of Husserl’s phenomenology. We will thus focus on the theme of the overturning of the Copernican doctrine in an ethico-practical perspective, showing that Merleau-Ponty’s ecology can be considered a philosophical ecology ante litteram. Finally, drawing on the hypothesis proposed by historians Bonneuil and Fressoz, the essay will attempt to highlight the relevance of Merleau-Ponty’s practical thought for the debate about the Anthropocene.

Cristianizzare Abramo. Il caso di Ireneo di Lione interprete della «prova di Abramo» (Gen. 22,1-19)

Irenaeus of Lyon uses the tale of Abraham as biblical proof for his thesis on the unity of God and of the history of salvation. In order to do this, however, he must first refute the Gnostic and Marcionite interpretations of Abraham, and so the episode of Isaac’s sacrifice (Gn 22:1–19). In Irenaeus’s exegesis of Gn 22:1–19, Abraham becomes the progenitor of the apostles and gentiles who are welcomed into the Church and an ante litteram disciple of Mt 4:22 and 16:24; he, who prophetically foresees the day of Jesus’s passion (Jn 8:56), offers his son Isaac as a sacrifice, just as God would offer his son, the incarnate Logos, as a sacrifice for the salvation of his descendants.

Contextualization and Semantics of Landscape in the Late Bronze Paintings of Qatna

Plants and animals, water and mountains have always been one of the focal parts of iconography and liter¬ary texts in the ancient Near East. The landscape and the climate, which have greatly changed since the 2nd millennium BC, have been one of the major sources of inspiration for the generation of iconographic myths and leitmotifs. Starting from the Sumerian and Akkadian disputations, in which the fauna and botanical landscape play a predominant part, it is possible to note how nature, climate and sea¬sons are a rather relevant aspect within the imagination of Syria and Mesopotamia. In particular, the excavations in Syria have brought to light valuable pictorial decorations dated to the Late Bronze Age. The scientific debate, very heated right from the start, regarding the production of the iconog¬raphies, has numerous hypotheses about their style and origin. M.H. Feldman, reflecting on the Late Bronze Age paintings of Qatna, spoke of an ante litteram globalisation, advancing the hypothesis that the mixture of workers from different regions of the Near East and the Eastern Mediterranean, had favoured the development of internationalisms. However, in addition to the productions and styles, in this case the part inherent to the semantics coherent with the iconographies will also be addressed, comparing them with the sacred and cosmogonic texts of the time.

Did Elitists Really Believe in Social Laws? Some Epistemological Challenges in the Work of Gaetano Mosca and Vilfredo Pareto

The epistemological standards of contemporary social sciences refute ‘functional’ and ‘law-like’ explanations, whereas mechanism-based causal explanations have become widely accepted in various fields of inquiry. The paper supports the hypothesis that authors Vilfredo Pareto and Gaetano Mosca, despite their deference to positivist epistemology, significantly anticipated these developments. Indeed, with their emphasis on history, contexts and agents, elitists ushered into the debate of their time some arguments that realist epistemology fully developed, emphasising the role of context-specific and, often, not directly observable explanatory features. To illustrate the ante litteram epistemological realism of elitist thinkers, the paper reconstructs the positions of Mosca and Pareto concerning two major themes of that time, in which elitists challenged the mainstream ideas and values of most of their peers with epistemological arguments that refuse a linear notion of causality.

MO1030THE FIRST CASE OF ATYPICAL HEMOLYTIC UREMIC SYNDROME (AHUS) FEATURES IN AN EXPERIMENTAL MODEL

Abstract Background and Aims Thrombotic Microangiopathies (TM) are three distinct clinical syndromes presenting the same histological renal pattern: typical and atypical Hemolytic Uremic Syndrome (SEU- aSEU) and Thrombotic Thrombocytopenic Purpura (TTP). So far, the first report of a TM has been generally attributed to Eli Moschowitz. In 1922 he described the case of a 16 years old girl who died after acute onset of fever with petechial lesions and autoptic findings of hyaline thrombosis of terminal arterioles and capillaries, thus profiling the first case of TTP. Only in the 1955, Conrad Gasser described the first medical record of HUS, describing the case of a patient with a manifestation of bilateral necrosis of the renal cortex. We describe the first reported case of a Thrombotic Microangiopathy, in particular an experimentally induced aHUS by Richard M. Pearce in 1909. In this case, the trigger leading to aHUS was represented by snake venom injection in an experimental rabbit model. Method Pearce described acute glomerular lesions produced in the rabbit using dried venom of rattlesnake Crotalus Adamanteus. It was dissolved in salt solution in the proportion of 0.25 of a milligram to one cubic centimeter, rising gradually to two milligrams, and then followed by doses of 0.5 of a milligram of fresh venom at various intervals. The intervals between injections depended on the general condition of the animal and the amount of albuminuria. Results Rabbit kidneys showed well marked hemorrhagic and exudative lesions in the glomeruli; hyaline, granular, blood, and hemoglobin casts in both convoluted and collecting tubules; and granular degeneration of the epithelium of the convoluted tubules and loops of Henle. Pearce also described a “penetration of the cells of the compressed glomerular tuft into the mass of hemorrhage lying either in the tuft itself or in the capsular space” (Figure 1). In animals surviving 20-30 days after the first injection of the venom, the acute lesions were demonstrated to subside at the microscopic examination and their earlier presence was marked by “occasional casts and compressed masses of red cells in the glomerular spaces and tufts”. At the same time other models also showed “extensive granular degeneration of the convoluted tubules and many casts”. The renal autoptic findings presented the features of a vascular nephritis with severe endothelial changes. Conclusion Glomerular and tubular lesions of rabbits’ kidneys induced by crotalus’s venom showed typical features of what is today defined as aHUS. In this first experiment, the author described a glomerular tuft as “more analogous to the organization of a red thrombus than it is to any form of glomerular lesion known in man”, so we can affirm that Pearce described, ante litteram TMA histological features many years before other scientists.

Carlo Antonio Broggia, a money doctor "in adverse circumstances"

The debate on monetary reform in the Italian Enlightenment Age was initiated by Carlo Antonio Broggia, a ‘self-taught' Neapolitan merchant, who in 1743 pub-lished the Treatise on taxes, money, and the policy of public health, the main trea-tise on the subject published in Italy before Galiani's Della Moneta and the Nea-politan abbot himself recognized its importance, considering Broggia the first to promote om Italy the study of a very useful and noble science. Broggia proposed a complex monetary stabilization program, basing it on a detailed theoretical analysis, breaking with the tradition of the monetary writers, who throughout the seventeenth century, prompted by the serious disorders besetting the Viceroyalty, had dealt with technical issues, without the will or the ability to produce an organic analytical contribution. In his Treatise, the Neapolitan merchant tackles the prob-lem of the stability of a bimetallic monetary system, troubled by the continuous modification of the commercial relationship between gold and silver, resorting pre-cisely to the maneuver of tariffs (i.e. of imaginary money), in order to sterilize the fluctuations of the bimetallic ratio. Despite the high level of Broggia's contribution, his advice was not accepted and in the Kingdom of Naples the monetary stabiliza-tion policy failed completely. As a money doctor ante litteram Broggia acted in adverse circumstances openly opposing the policy of some ministers. Remaining unheard, he addressed the prince and public opinion directly, suffering the most drastic consequences. However, his ideas spread widely and were also welcomed by intellectuals such as Muratori who played a decisive role in the renewal of Ital-ian culture in the mid-eighteenth century.

TRADUCCIÓN AL ESPAÑOL DE "SULLA CONDIZIONE DELLA DONNA BORGHESE IN SICILIA. APPUNTI E RIFLESSIONI" DE ELVIRA MANCUSO

Elvira Mancuso (1867–1958) forma parte de ese grupo de interesantes escritoras sicilianas hasta hoy escasamente estu-diadas. No obstante, fue una intelectual comprometida fundamen-talmente con el tema de la educación femenina, único medio para lograr la verdadera emancipación profesional y sentimental como lo demuestra el ensayo que presentamos, en el que, apoyándose en su propia experiencia vital, viene a apuntalar el ideario expuesto en su novela Vecchia storia… inverosimile (1906), acogida con tibieza por la crítica. Este texto polémico, junto a sus propias decisiones personales, la convierten en una feminista ante litteram por su defensa de la paridad de sexos y por su valiente crítica del panorama desolador en que se encontraba la mujer en la Sicilia de la época.

On the traces of the biosocial: Historicizing "plasticity" in contemporary epigenetics.

This paper builds upon historico-epistemological analyses of plasticity across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries to distinguish among uses of this notion in contemporary epigenetics. By digging into this diachronic phase of plasticity thinking, we highlight a series of historically situated understandings and pragmatic dimensions of this notion. Specifically, our analysis describes four distinct phases in plasticity thinking across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries: (1) plasticity as chemical modification of the body by its milieu; (2) plasticity as explanandum for the modifications of life's ontogenetic and phylogenetic substrates; (3) plasticity as mechanistic process in need of distinct explanations in ontogeny and phylogeny; and (4) plasticity as responsive potential to perturbations of a complex genetic system of development. These four versions of plasticity provide, in turn, the opportunity to discern synchronically the uses of this notion in epigenetic biosciences. Fleshing out these historical ramifications animating the present, we argue, highlights a fundamental epistemological disagreement at the basis of the controversies around the definition, scope, and epistemic priorities of epigenetics: how to reconcile the contemporary epistemologies of plasticity that hold epigenetic marks capable of bearing the material impression of the environment with those grounded on a strong view of (epigenetic) plasticity as operating under genetic control? Parallel to this analysis of the epistemic space of plasticity from the nineteenth century onward, we show how these distinct modes of understanding body-environment relationships also constituted conceptual, representational, and experimental resources for understanding the entanglement between life as a biological and socially situated phenomenon. These different traces of biosocial thinking ante litteram, we conclude, provide a blueprint to interrogate today's assumptions, values, (social) ontologies, and political leanings behind similar attempts to interpret the biosocial nexus that links our biology with its material, social, and cultural environments.

“Ante litteram” hyper-drawings. Marginal notes on the application of proleptic abstraction in the history of art and architecture

“Ante litteram” hyper-drawings. Marginal notes on the application of proleptic abstraction in the history of art and architecture

Max Weber’s concept of ‘modern politics’

In a critical approach to Mommsen’s classical thesis, which states the dependence of Weber’s sociology on his political position, the article reconstructs the foundation of Weber’s ‘The Profession and Vocation of Politics’ on his sociological analyses of the political domain in the manuscripts for the posthumous publication of Economy and Society. The first two pages of his 1919 lecture particularly show that Weber can fall back on the definitions of State and politics that he had already developed for his political sociology. Yet, to appreciate the full extent of this theoretical contribution, it is necessary to present Weber’s entire ideal-typical analysis of the political. The article then shows that Weber provides an unlabelled definition of ‘modern politics’ that negates ante litteram Carl Schmitt’s foundation of politics on the idea of enmity. In this context, Weber’s sound plea for parliamentarism and against the fascination of civil war comes to the fore that he wanted to deliver to his audience of young revolutionaries in January 1919.

The 18th-Century Baraccato of L’Aquila

ABSTRACTThis article attempts to describe a particular form of baraccata house, found in L’Aquila, Italy. The differences between this form of baraccato and the Italian traditional timber-framed (T-F) structures, the baraccato borbonico and the baraccato alla beneventana, are shown. In the upper valley of the Aterno river (Abruzzo, Italy), a few kilometers far from L’Aquila, wonderful 18th-century examples of T-F masonry structures are present. The use of wood pervades both the poor and noble buildings. In this article, the documentary and functional features of this peculiar anti-seismic timber-based building technique, which is widespread in L’Aquila and the neighboring areas, is described. After a comparative analysis of the technique’s features, the case of three T-F buildings, belonging to three different social classes is reported, the first is the Ricci palace in Mopolino di Montereale, the second is a middle-class building, and the third is a rural one. The 1703 earthquake, which affected the upper valley of the Aterno river and the nearby city of L’Aquila, gave rise to an ante litteram anti-seismic culture. Timber was not seen as an obstacle to durability but a material to be exploited to protect buildings from earthquakes.

Shaping Cantonese Grammar – Early Western Contribution

The first Westerners to learn and describe Cantonese were Protestant missionaries who arrived in China in the 19th century. Given the almost total lack of local linguistic tools, they began to present Cantonese in grammars, dictionaries, primers and phrasebooks, also devising Romanization systems to transcribe its sounds. The first attempt at describing Cantonese grammar was made by Robert Morrison in a section of his Grammar of the Chinese Language (1815). Many other works followed, compiled also by Catholic missionaries or lay scholars, and dedicated to the analysis and pedagogy of Cantonese. This paper will firstly offer an overview of the very early impressions of the language carried out by Westerners; it will then show how their analyses evolved, becoming more refined and detailed, and eventually − with to the work of T. O’Melia − grew more conscious and independent from the analyses of Mandarin, contributing ante litteram at debunking the myth of “one universal Chinese grammar”.

Sardegna tra leggenda e realtà: ‘Sa femmina accabadora’, colei che dà la buona morte, nelle immagini e nelle parole di alcuni autori sardi

The term accabadora refers to a woman entrusted with the task of facilitating the passing of the dying people. She killed for pity, called by the families of the patients to relieve their sufferings on their own deathbed. Basically, she practiced a sort of ante litteram euthanasia. But that carried out by the woman was also a necessary action for the survival of relatives who, most of the time, did not have the necessary resources to alleviate the sufferings of the kinsmen. Furthermore, in small towns, the doctor was often several days away on horseback. While the accabadora took life away, on the other hand, she gave it back, helping the women of her community to give birth. Everyone in the village knew the activity of these women but all of them were silent. They were convinced that the work of the accabadora was a meritorious work because it took the burden of putting an end to the sufferings of the patient. They implicitly recognized in it a social utility. After outlining the figure of 'sa fèmmina practica', this report analyses some works by Sardinian authors who are interested in it. Above all, we will mention the novel by Michela Murgia, Accabadora (Campiello prize 2010); the film by Enrico Pau, L'accabadora; the novels L’ultima agabbadòra by Sebastiano Depperu and L'agabbadora. La morte invocata by Giovanni Murineddu; the short film Deu ci sia by Gianluca Tarditi, winner of the 2011 Golden Globe at 48th New York Film Festival; Ho visto agire s’accabadora by Dolores Turchi; Eutanasia ante litteram in Sardegna. Sa femmina accabadora by Alessandro Bucarelli and Carlo Lubrano and S’accabadora e la sacralità del femminino of Maria Antonella Arras.

Unconventional monetary policy ante litteram: Richard Kahn and the monetary policy debate during the works of the Radcliffe Committee

The appointment of a Committee on the Working of the Monetary System in 1957 (Radcliffe Committee) in the UK gave the occasion to debate innovative ideas in the field of monetary policy. Many prominent economists participated in the Committee’s works, which ended with the publication of the Radcliffe Report in 1959. Making an exception to the rule of not mentioning individual contributions, the Radcliffe Report claims to ‘follow Professor Kahn … in insisting upon the structure of interest rates rather than some notion of the “supply of money” as the centrepiece of monetary action’. As we reconstruct in the paper, Kahn based his proposals on a conceptual framework, emphasising the link between inflation, wages and aggregate demand and the importance of combining incomes policy and term-structure control in view of achieving external equilibrium, full employment and price stability. One finding of our research is that Kahn’s recommendations regarding term-structure control—with their relevance to the present day—are best understood in connection with his theory of liquidity preference as presented in Kahn (1954). We also find that the Radcliffe Committee, while espousing Kahn’s policy recommendations, surrounded them with so many caveats as to render them de facto inoperative. As we suggest in our reconstruction, this depends partly on institutional considerations and partly on differences of opinion between Kahn and the Radcliffe Committee regarding monetary policy transmission and the causes of inflation.