Great Commandment Research Articles

"Great Command O'Ersways the Order": Purgatory, Revenge, and Maimed Rites in Hamlet

AbstractCertain elements in Hamlet, together with historical and biographical events, suggest that Shakespeare's play can be better understood from a Catholic perspective. The representation of the Ghost from Purgatory contains obviously Catholic imagery and allusions. The notion of revenge or vengeance, understood in terms of a proper intention in appropriate circumstances, is considered a virtue in Thomistic theology rather than a vice, a notion applicable to the play particularly when the opposing vices of being excessive and being remiss in punishing (cruelty and negligence) are taken into account. And, finally, the Erastian measures taken by Claudius, whose "great command o'ersways the order" of Ophelia's funeral, deforms a traditional Catholic liturgy in producing "maimed rites."

THE FRENCH ARMY, 1624–1914: FROM THE KING'S TO THE PEOPLE'S

Richelieu's army: war government and society in France, 1624–1642. By David Parrott. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Pp. xxiv+599. ISBN 0-521-79209-6. £65.00.The dynastic state and the army under Louis XIV: royal service and private interest, 1661–1701. By Guy Rowlands. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Pp. xxiv+404. ISBN 0-521-64124-1. £55.00.The French army, 1750–1820: careers, talent, merit. By Rafe Blaufarb. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002. Pp. xii+227. ISBN 0-7190-6262-4. £45.00.The people in arms: military myth and national mobilization since the French Revolution. Edited by Daniel Moran and Arthur Waldron. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Pp. xi+268. ISBN 0-521-81432. £50.00.From revolutionaries to citizens: antimilitarism in France, 1870–1914. By Paul B. Miller. Durham, NC, and London: Duke University Press, 2002. Pp. xiii+277. ISBN 0-8223-2766-X. £13.95.Although all the books under review are military histories, international conflict is not their central concern. They are not primarily campaign histories, nor studies of strategic or tactical innovations, nor biographies of great commanders. If they help to answer the military historian's traditional question – how is military might created and used on the battlefield – then they do so indirectly, through an exploration of how the state marshalled its resources for war, particularly in terms of manpower. This is not just a question of emphasis, or of filling in gaps in the historiography; these books mount a sustained critique on the explanatory models favoured by military historians. Military history, David Parrott suggests, too readily falls into a ‘whiggish trap’: a series of clear-sighted war leaders grasp the potential of technology in achieving the state's foreign policy objectives; technological shifts drive changes in the size and organization of armies, and consequently in the development of the state. And thus was the modern world of large, complex, disciplined organizations made. In contrast, we are offered here a selection of error-prone war leaders, constrained at every turn by the social, political, and financial realities of their day, who were intent not on ‘progress’ but on manipulating the system of which they themselves were a part, and as much for their own ends as for those of the state they served.

Napoleon and Wellington: The Battle of Waterloo and the Great Commanders Who Fought It (review)

Napoleon and Wellington: The Battle of Waterloo and the Great Commanders Who Fought It (review)

Theologies of Reconciliation in Thirteenth-Century England

One of [the Pharisees], a lawyer, asked [Jesus] a question, to test Him. ‘Teacher, what is the great commandment in the Law?’ And [Jesus] said to him, ‘You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind. This is the first and greatest commandment. And a second is like it, You shall love your neighbour as yourself. On these two commandments depend all the Law and the Prophets.’Reconciliation of the relationships broken by sin, or the fall, is one of the central themes of Christianity, as this collection, of studies duly highlights. The themes of reconciliation to God and reconciliation to neighbour run throughout both the New Testament, with special emphasis in Paul’s letters to the Corinthians, and the Hebrew Scriptures, for in this passage from the Gospel of Matthew Jesus was quoting from Deuteronomy and Leviticus. This text would have been well-known to Christian authors on the subject of reconciliation in Western Europe in the thirteenth century; and the passage, or at least its message, should have been familiar to most clergy and many of their people. As an item of catechesis, one of its virtues is that it is short, and thus easy to teach and to remember.

Napoleon and Wellington: the Battle of Waterloo--and the great commanders who fought it

An award-winning historian offers an eye-opening view of the relationship between Bonaparte and the Duke of Wellington, whose lives moved inexorably to their meeting at Waterloo, one of the most famous battles of all time. At breakfast on the morning of the battle of Waterloo, the Emperor declared that the Duke of was a bad general, the British were bad soldiers and that France could not fail to win an easy victory. Forever afterwards, historians have accused him of gross overconfidence and massively underestimating the caliber of the British commander opposite him. Now Andrew Roberts presents an original, highly revisionist view of the relationship between the two greatest captains of their age and of the great battle that determined European history in the nineteenth century. Napoleon, who was born in the same year as -- 1769 -- fought by proxy years earlier in the Peninsular War, praising his ruthlessness in private while publicly deriding him as a mere general of sepoys. In contrast, publicly lauded Napoleon, saying that his presence on a battlefield was worth forty thousand men, but privately he wrote long memoranda lambasting Napoleon's campaigning techniques. Although saved from execution after Waterloo, the emperor left money in his will to the man who had tried to assassinate the duke. in turn amassed a series of Napoleonic trophies of his great victory, even sleeping with two of the emperor's mistresses. The fascinating, constantly changing relationship between these two historical giants forms the basis of Andrew Roberts's compelling study in pride, rivalry, propaganda, nostalgia and posthumous revenge. It is at once a brilliant work of military history and a triumphant biography. Featuring a cast of fascinating supporting characters -- including the empress Josephine, the Prince Regent and Talleyrand -- Napoleon and Wellington provides the definitive account of the most decisive battle of the nineteenth century.

Good News after Auschwitz? Christian Faith in a Post-Holocaust World (review)

Reviewed by: “Good News” after Auschwitz? Christian Faith in a Post-Holocaust World Martin Rumscheidt “Good News” after Auschwitz? Christian Faith in a Post-Holocaust World, edited and introduced by Carol Rittner and John K. Roth. Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 2001. 215 pp. $39.95. Do an institution and a faith that have been infested almost from their beginning and for centuries since with a sense of their superiority over the Synagogue and a hostility towards the faith of Jews have anything left to speak that can be called “good news?” What options do people have whom the Holocaust has so radically alerted to that infestation but who refuse simply to abandon the Christian faith and leave the Church, knowing that doing so, or merely lamenting the sin of Christianity, preserves the status quo of Christian anti-Judaism? What commandment comes to them out of the horrors of Auschwitz which, if left unheeded, turns what the “faith of our fathers” has to proclaim into renewed assaults on Jews and Judaism? The fourteen contributors to this book, all claiming to be Christian, know that questions like these irrevocably challenge Christian faith as well as their own personal witness as followers of Jesus of Nazareth. They are convinced that the Holocaust is not an adiaphoron, a matter of no direct significance to the substance of Christian theology and faith. All are steeped in the history of the Church’s anti-Judaism, of the Western world’s antisemitism, and of how both have aided and abetted the Shoah. And however aware they are of the challenge of Auschwitz also to the faith of Jews, they are even more aware of how utterly deeply the Holocaust and all that prepared for it has compromised, if not irreparably distorted, Christianity itself and the Church as such. Six overarching foci direct the explorations and proposals of this book. First, Christians need to be honest about and remorseful for the anti-Jewish history of Christianity and the Church. Second, the Jewish origins of the Christian faith and the [End Page 168] Jewish identity of Jesus need to be clearly acknowledged, studied with much greater care, and willingly affirmed. Images or understandings of Jesus need to be presented that are free of anti-Judaism. All this in a context that upholds the unbroken vitality of the Jewish people and their traditions. Third, liturgies and scriptural interpretations that promote the infestations named earlier need to be identified and replaced. Fourth, the conviction that is at the heart of Christian faith and practice needs to be prominently upheld, namely the great commandment to love the neighbor inclusively and hospitably because, as Martin Buber renders the Hebrew: he/she is like you. Fifth, the awareness that faithfulness to God entails human responsibility needs to be intensified. And, finally, a determined commitment is required that the darkness of injustice, evil, and death will not overcome the light of justice, goodness, and life itself (pp. 190–191). The authors confess, some explicitly, others more implicitly, their own complicity in Christian anti-Judaism by acknowledging that they had learned and subsequently made use of the methods and conclusions of dominant biblical exegesis. But they also acknowledge that, as a result of long, arduous, painful but finally very fruitful work with Jewish thinkers, they have learned to be self-critical and to develop new methods and new theologies. To this reviewer, such confession and the concomitant mourning for both the actual presence of Christian anti-Judaism in the Church and one’s own personal, perhaps even unconscious, transmission of it, is a hope-filled sign, a portent of possible “good news” after Auschwitz. And the determination to unlearn and relearn but, above all, to learn new things and methods, to draw new conclusions, strikes one as truly heartening. Here, the presence of Jewish colleagues is simply irreplaceable, as all the authors confirm. As a result of such togetherness, this book urges the recognition and unreserved embrace of the fact that between Jews and Christians there is a humanly irreconcilable difference. This enjoins the deepening of fully mutual respect. Since such respect is made present and real by and in significant events and the people...

Designing for the Task: Sometimes 2-D is Just Plane Better

There is a great military command and control need for better depiction of 3-D environments. Standard 2-D depictions can lead to inattention to altitude, especially for relative novices, and are generally inadequate. In a series of experiments we found that tasks requiring understanding the shapes of objects or terrain layout are much better performed using 3-D views, however tasks requiring precise judgments about the relative positions of objects or terrain locations were much better performed using 2-D views. We propose an interface concept called “Orient and Operate” for designing command and control displays. Users orient to the layout of a scene using a 3-D view, but then switch to 2-D views to interact or operate on it. In related work, we have found that 3-D icons are a mixed blessing: they are poor for identification, yet they code other attributes clearly (e.g. attitude), but this benefit is unrelated to 3-D depiction, per se.

Bringing military tactics to the business battlefield

Can the art of military warfare really contribute a lot to winning on the business battlefield? Are there lessons to be learnt from great military commanders and campaigns which can make a difference to strategic and tactical options in modern market warfare? Given the right strategy, often borrowed from military warfare the author argues, any business can compete with the giants and thrive in competitive markets. The author discusses the concept of know your enemy-know yourself, three routes to success, defensive strategies, conquest of markets, and numerical superiority,.

CHAPTER 3. CRETE AND ITALY 1900–1910

Abstract Evans had secured the services as assistant of Duncan Mackenzie … a Scot with an inaudible Highland voice, a brush of red hair, an uncertain temper, a great command of languages, and a great experience in keeping the records of an excavation. Arthur Evans recognized his gifts and endured his suspicious temper and his valetudinarian ways with exemplary patience. His own tasks, apart from general direction, were to decide where to dig, and to examine everything that was found: tasks in which his curious intuition of antiquity amply justified itself. It is interesting, in the light of forty years of later research, to go through his note books and to see how incredibly quickly he recognized things for what they were. Joan Evans, Time and Chance, 329–30

Self-Speaking in Medieval and Early Modern English Drama: Subjectivity, Discourse, and the Stage by Richard Hillman

REVIEWS Richard Hillman, Self-Speaking in Medieval and Early Modern English Drama: Subjectivity, Discourse, and the Stage (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1997). x, 309. $55 (U.S.) cloth. If the first great commandment of Western civilization is “Know Thyself,” the second, like unto it, is “Report Back.” “I know that I nothing know,” “I have that within which passes show,” and “I think, therefore I am” are among the more notable dispatches from the front. The two selves, the one to be known and the one to be identified in speech, are not, of course, exactly the same. The first is private, the second public; the first, the object of introspective study, the second, the subject of communal discourse. Sidney glosses the phenomenon, albeit in a very different context, with admirable succinctness: “I am not I: pity the tale of me.” Richard Hillman’s most recent book takes for its subject precisely this: the speaker’s tale of him/herself, together with the gaps between the “I” and the “not I” that the tale necessarily exposes. He terms the phenomenon “self-speaking,” and here examines it throughout the range of early modern drama, from the cycle plays to late Jacobean tragicomedy, in all the forms of self-representation that the drama allows, soliloquies, asides, monologues, and even silences being among the most notable. The result is challenging, original, and exceedingly dense. In it Hillman brings together a wide range of matters of contemporary literary and critical interest: speech-act theory, psychoanalysis, poststructuralism, early modern subject-formation, and intertextuality are among the varieties of knowledge that constitute his province. He is nothing if not ambitious; the book sets out to define its subject as a distinctive discursive category, rather than as a form of dramatic technique or convention, and in the process to challenge what he takes to be dominant New Historicist/Cultural Materialist assumptions about the formation of the early modern subject. Indeed, Hillman’s departure from New Historicist/Cultural Materialist orthodoxy is made early in the Introduction, where he announces his in­ tention to “appropriate the freedom to focus on texts independent of their socio-historical connections and to allow those texts to make sense freely in relation to each other and to broader signifying patterns” (2). He is con­ cerned, that is, not with the socio-historical subject per se (about which, he argues persuasively, we know too little to generalize after the fashion of Jonathan Dollimore or Catherine Belsey), but with its dramatic representa­ tion considered as a semiotic construct. He is also concerned to challenge the New Historicist/Cultural Materialist tendency to deny the emergence of the “subject,” appropriately equipped with the requisite sense of inferiority or selfhood, until early in the seventeenth century. Hillman, by contrast, discovers persuasive continuities in the representation of subjectivity from Everyman on. 473 ESC 24, 1998 As the self-speaking with which Hillman is concerned covers virtually the entire range of English drama (and beyond) to 1642, his canvas is necessarily broad and the detail variable. The book is organized into a broadly chrono­ logical and generic pattern as it progresses from medieval drama to “Tudor Transitions,” Elizabethan revenge drama, Jacobean tragedy, and Jacobean comedy and tragicomedy. The only notable break from the pattern is pro­ vided by the concluding chapter, “(Off)Staging the Female Subject,” which on examination turns out to be primarily concerned with female masturba­ tion in Love’s Labour’s Lost. With the exception of the last chapter, Hillman’s procedure is consis­ tent throughout: to scrutinize a wide variety of texts for examples of those representations of subjectivity that exhibit a slippage between, in Emile Benveniste’s terms, le sujet de l’énoncé, the subject of speech, and le sujet de l’énonciation, the speaking subject (43). The implications of such slip­ page he then expands upon and develops in a variety of different contexts. The conceptual framework that informs the work as a whole is the subjectformation theory of Jacques Lacan, and the tool he uses most consistently is the Lacanian concept of aphanisis; to explain it, he quotes Lacan himself: The subject appears first in the Other, in so far as...

On John Hollander's "Owl"

On John Hollander’s “Owl” Eleanor Cook Suppose we start with grammar, assuming we’ve glanced at the look of “Owl” on the page, as if through the eyes of May Swenson. Here is the way she began to read a poem: “I like to see the poem first as a shut box or package to be opened, within which is an invention whose particular working I hope to discover. Something can be felt about it even before beginning to read: its profile on the page, its regular or irregular pattern of stanzas, length of lines, their symmetry, its wide or thin shape, its look of bulk or lightness.” 1 So here, we observe a one-word title: a noun, no article, and so more like Bishop’s “Sandpiper” than Frost’s “The Oven Bird.” Then quatrains, twenty-four of them, each shorter in its third and more in its fourth line; the pulse iambic and 5 5 4 3 (pentameter twice, tetrameter, trimeter), the rhyme a b a b. Each stanza, in little, looks and listens like an owl, narrowing down to its fourth line, listening to the sounds and silences both—the sounds of the full end-rhymes, assonance, midline rhyming, schematic echoes, and so on; and the silences resonating in the vacant space left by one fewer foot in the third line, then two in the fourth, an effect especially noticeable in the end-stopped lines. This stanza form is (I believe) John Hollander’s own, 2 and it teaches us how to listen better. Owls hunt with their ears as well as their eyes, and with only their ears if necessary. In starting with grammar, I am simply choosing one partner in the dance of grammar, rhetoric, and dialectic that constitutes all writing. I shall touch on lexical questions and two senses of voice, before turning to the heart of the matter, the poem’s figuration and fable, then end [End Page 167] with some remarks on “Owl” as part of all Hollander’s work and also as a poem of our moment. The grammar, then, and first the syntactic variety of the sentences. T. S. Eliot wrote in 1918 that technique is not simply “what may be learned from a manual of prosody. This is making technique easy. . . . Technique is more volatile; it can only be learned, the more difficult part of it, by absorption. Try to put into a sequence of simple quatrains the continuous syntactic variety of Gautier or Blake . . . .” 3 Something of Hollander’s distinctive voice in both poetry and prose lies in his great command of grammatical structures, including his syntactic variety. “Owl” is strongly predicative in style (note the complex syntax, and the remarkably high use of participles, past and present). The sentences give the effect of generating themselves, especially through their parallel grammatical constructions, where the last term in a double or triple set is likely to be modified by a clause or phrase—the whole sentence ramifying and exfoliating, as if we were watching a zoological or genealogical tree grow under our eyes. [See, for example, the parallel participles in the last line of stanza 4 and stanza 5: “Taking heed . . . you more than see.” Or consider how one participle leads to another in stanzas 15 through 17, beginning with “Trembling . . . .”] Such syntactic energy gives a quick, vital rhythm to the sentence—a fast pace, given the richness of thought, hints, implications. A pace sometimes slightly nervous, curbing and steadying its own energies, partly through the regular beat of the simple rhyme scheme and quatrain. It seems to me that the forward propulsion of both the grammar and dialectic is steadied, directed, by the rhetorical schemes—that rhetoric here offers what I want to call something like a discipline of simplicity. This is a function we may not associate with rhetorical schemes, those “surface patterns of words” that “carry no meanings per se.” 4 In Roman Jakobson’s terms—and his discussion of parallelism was really the only thing that helped with what I was hearing—what I am hearing is the pull between a regular, simple parallelism of stanza form and a much-varied, complex parallelism of...

William Tyndale: A Biography by David Daniell

William Tyndale: A Biography. By David Daniell. (New Haven: Yale University Press. 1994. Pp. x, 429. $30.00.) When David Daniell's biography appeared as part of William Tyndale Quincentenary celebrations (1494-1536), I wondered what else could be said about first translator of New Testament and Pentateuch from Greek and Hebrew into English. I had been disappointed by C. H. Williams' 1969 biography, and then wished that publishers had simply reprinted J. F. Mozley's 1937 biography, which they did in 1971. Although Daniell is not a professional historian, he is a Shakespeare scholar and editor of modern-spelling versions of Tyndale's New Testament (1989) and Old Testament (1992). He thus brings a broad and deep knowledge of Renaissance English to bear on Tyndale's clear and vivid prose. In my opinion, best parts of this biography are chapters which analyze Tyndale's biblical translations. Studying table of contents and prologue to aborted Cologne edition of 1525, Daniell notes their resemblance to Luther's New Testament of 1522 (p. 110). His chapter on Tyndale's Pentateuch explains general principle of three-consonant form of most Hebrew words (pp. 300 ff.) but also examines specific passages as translated in Vulgate, Wyclif A and B, Tyndale, and King James Version (pp. 285-286). In Gen. 3:4, Then said serpent unto woman: tush ye shall not die, Daniell tries to gage exact tone of colloquial Tush by measuring it against Tush in Hamlet, The Taming of Shrew, and Much Ado About Nothing (pp. 407-408, n. 3). Daniell praises directness of Tyndale's translation of 2 Samuel 22, the aliens...shall tremble for fear by contrasting it with a modern version, 'foreigners will be disheartened' as if they can't find luggage trolleys at Heathrow (p. 342). Although Daniell gives a chapter each to Tyndale's first theological book, Wicked Mammon, and his major political treatise, Obedience of a Christian Man, he skims over other exegetical and polemical writings. Critical editions of all of these will be published by Catholic University of America Press as Independent Works of William Tyndale. Daniell is well aware of work of revisionist historians J. J. Scarisbrick, Christopher Haigh, and Eamon Duffy, who defend character of medieval church and claim that Reformation was forced upon English people from above (p. 398, n. 29). Daniell answers Duffy at some length (pp. 398-399, n. 36), opposing biblical Protestantism to folk Catholicism. Unlike Duffy, I would mourn loss to English Christianity, not so much of saints and sacramentals, but of centrality of Mass and unity of Christendom. In other passages Daniell takes a militant Protestant position, Repentance and belief come from reading, which brings salvation. This is sound New Testament doctrine: boil that book down, and this is what you get (p. 148). Unlike Daniell, I would assert primacy of Two Great Commandments for Gospels and, for Paul, union of believers in Christ. While student of Bible and church history will find much to learn and enjoy in Daniell's biography of Tyndale, Catholic reader will be pained by his chapter on Sir Thomas More, first on More's account, then on Daniell's. …

Impartiality and the Great Commandment

L'A. distingue l'interpretation par Saint Thomas d'Aquin du plus important commandement chretien defendant l'amour de son prochain, de la these de l'impartialite denoncee par J. Cottingham pour son impossible application, son incompatibilite avec les valeurs d'amitie et de famille, et le danger qu'elle represente pour le sens que nous donnons a notre vie, afin de defendre la tradition morale chretienne contre le criticisme de J. Cottingham

Deuteronomy 1-11: A New Translation with Introduction and Commentary

Deuteronomy 1-11 is here presented in a groundbreaking new translation, with a comprehensive introduction and thorough commentary by world-renowned Israeli biblical scholar Moshe Weinfeld. The second law, Deuteronomy portrays Moses as the founder and great lawgiver of Israel. In a series of addresses, Moses reviews his life and the life of God's people. He reminds them of the guiding hand of God, which has brought them thus far along the way, and will bring their Exodus and Wanderings to a triumphal conclusion in the Holy Land. Through a beautiful translation and insightful comments in this first of two volumes on Deuteronomy, Weinfeld reinvigorates the basic laws of society with their life-giving power: the Shema (Hear O Israel, the Lord is our God, the Lord is One) and the Great Commandment (You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your might). These laws govern Israelite religious and communal life under God's guidance

Socially and environmentally appropriate urban futures for the motor car

In its relatively short life, the automobile has provided a level of mobility unlikely to have been feasible with a reliance on conventional forms of land based public transport. It has contributed in both a positive and negative way to the quality of life, transforming our cities, our way of life, and giving us a greater command over time and space. Concern over the undesirable social and environmental impacts has increased over time, with calls for governments to take action to reduce the automobile's dominant role. New investment in fixed-track public transport and bus priority systems together with strategies to discourage travel have been proposed to improve accessibility and to aid in cleaning up the physical environment. This paper reviews some of the issues facing society as it works to identify policies to achieve an economically and environmentally sustainabie future. There is a need for a broader set of policies to facilitate alternative land use-transport lifestyles while facing appropriate pricing signals. Some of the key issues are adjustments in the relative prices of location and transport, spatial incentives to make public transport economically viable (i.e. changing urban densities, zoning/incentive changes to allow more infill), road pricing (i.e. charging cars the economic cost of using the roads), new information technology systems (e.g. IVHS) to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of transport infrastructure, major improvements in the fuel efficiency of fossil fuelled vehicles, and alternative-fuelled vehicles (“clean-air vehicles”).

BRITAIN'S MILITARY USE OF HORSES 1914–1918

Between 1914 and 1918 the success of the British war effort was heavily dependent on the horse. Warfare in the early twentieth century employed horses at least as intensively as did the economy in peacetime. As war became more capital-intensive, an increasing burden was placed on the military transport services. Motorized transport was somewhat more reliable than it had been at the start of the century, but there was still an urgent demand for large numbers of draught- and pack-animals. Vast sums were spent buying and shipping animals from far-flung corners of the globe to the battlefields. Britain, with its great empire and command of the oceans, was at a distinct advantage in this branch of logistics. The war created an international equine economy.

L'espace politique de la renommée d'Érasme à Juste Lipse (1530-1570)

The Political Framework of Fame from Erasmus to Lipsius (1530-1570). - The Respublica literaria is considered in the 16th century as an ideal form of political organisation, similar to that of an ancient city. Thus a scholar's fame is linked to an idea of justice and a view to the common interest (utilitas publica). As is shown in Erasmus's correspondence, the great renown of the scholar depends on his degree of involvement in the common interest and the concordia in the Respublica literaria : this is what gives him the good reputation which might turn into glory, that of being called Princeps in optimis litteris. In Justus Lipsiu's works, this hierarchical representation from good reputation to glory does not apply only to the Respublica literaria but to the contemporary political society as well : the idea of concordia, which refers to Cicero, is used to assert the moral and political superiority of the prominent citizen's reputation over that of the great commander.

From Nora Helmer to Wendy Darling: If You Believe in Heroines, Clap Your Hands

A middle-class girl coming of age in the nineteenth century might quite legitimately complain of a number of things, but she could hardly say that she lacked direction. She was provided with explicit instructions, in manuals, homilies and sermons as well as the entertainment media, which made very clear just what she was to do and what at all costs she had better avoid. However emphatic, though, the image projected of her had a schizoid quality: at one moment women would be collectively portrayed as embodiments of various virtues, on this earth largely to provide encouraging models for men; at the next they were the perilous daughters of Eve, disastrously vulnerable to all sorts of temptations, dangers to men and children as well as to themselves. This might lead to confusion — but then no–one had suggested that a woman's lot would be easy. An 1849 American tract asserted that "God increased the cares and sorrows of woman that she might be sooner constrained to accept the terms of salvation," while Godey's Lady's Book, in 1831, had proclaimed that "To suffer and to be silent under suffering seems the great command she has to obey."

Staffing intelligence services: a survivor's guide.

Work at the Department of Health on the information needs of District Health Authorities as purchasers demonstrates the need for co-ordinated information services that handle both numeric and text data--termed intelligence. The DHA Project has built information implications into its health needs assessment protocol and has shown, through pilots, the steps involved in developing co-ordinated provision. These developments contrast sharply with the long-established NHS dichotomy between the roles of librarians--often narrowly perceived, and those of information officers--equally narrowly defined but with a greater command of resources. Consideration of how intelligence services are to be staffed raises issues which involve appreciating wider changes in information education. Most current courses no longer perpetuate the skills divide between those who will be at ease handling text information (librarians) and those who are able to create and use database management systems holding numeric data (information officers). Skills needed for the intelligence function cross the boundary. Some librarians are already able to encompass the required range of skills, but without retraining many will face unequal competition with the new generations of graduates from information management and information science courses. Local training opportunities are essential, but there is also a growing number of higher degree courses which can be used for career enhancement and some of them are available on a distance learning basis. The NHS Training Directorate has begun the process of assisting courses it deems relevant to NHS information management training, but the Department of Health should specify the staff competencies required as part of quality assurance standards for intelligence services.

The First Geneva Convention

In ancient times some of the great commanders were accompanied on their campaigns by their personal doctors. The Romans had at least one doctor for each cohort (about 500 to 600 men), and a legion, which consisted of ten cohorts, had a medicus legionis, probably a sort of chief medical officer. At the time of the Crusades, the Sultan Saladin gave an example of humanity by authorizing the doctors of the adverse party to care for the Christian prisoners and then to return through the lines. Arab doctors treated Saint Louis. But it was not until the sixteenth century that an organized medical service was started in European armies. It was still, however, sadly inadequate.