Landmark Descriptions Research Articles

Psychosocial Reactions to Plagues in the Cultural History of Medicine: A Medical Humanities Approach.

The aim of this work is to elucidate psychosocial reactions to plagues by analyzing three landmark descriptions from different eras: Thucydides' description of the plague of Athens (430 BC) in The History of the Peloponnesian War, Giovanni Boccaccio's description of the plague in Florence (1348) in The Decameron, and Albert Camus' description in The Plague (1947). Using a narrative inquiry, we found psychosocial reactions to be complex and ambivalent and could discern several coping strategies. We propose that this knowledge can help psychiatrists and other healthcare professionals during the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic.

Improving Public Transit Accessibility for Blind Riders by Crowdsourcing Bus Stop Landmark Locations with Google Street View: An Extended Analysis

Low-vision and blind bus riders often rely on known physical landmarks to help locate and verify bus stop locations (e.g., by searching for an expected shelter, bench, or newspaper bin). However, there are currently few, if any, methods to determine this information a priori via computational tools or services. In this article, we introduce and evaluate a new scalable method for collecting bus stop location and landmark descriptions by combining online crowdsourcing and Google Street View (GSV). We conduct and report on three studies: (i) a formative interview study of 18 people with visual impairments to inform the design of our crowdsourcing tool, (ii) a comparative study examining differences between physical bus stop audit data and audits conducted virtually with GSV, and (iii) an online study of 153 crowd workers on Amazon Mechanical Turk to examine the feasibility of crowdsourcing bus stop audits using our custom tool with GSV. Our findings reemphasize the importance of landmarks in nonvisual navigation, demonstrate that GSV is a viable bus stop audit dataset, and show that minimally trained crowd workers can find and identify bus stop landmarks with 82.5% accuracy across 150 bus stop locations (87.3% with simple quality control).

Changes in note order stereotypy during learning in two species of songbird, measured with automatic note classification

In addition to mastering the task of performing the individual notes of a song, many songbirds must also learn to produce each note in a stereotyped order. As a bird practices its new song, it may perform thousands of bouts, providing a rich source of information about how note phonology and note type order change during learning. A combination of acoustic landmark descriptions, neural network and hierarchical clustering classifiers, and Markov models of note order made it possible to measure note order stereotypy in two species of songbird. Captive swamp sparrows (Melospiza melodia, 11 birds, 92063 notes/bird), and wild tree swallows (Tachycineta bicolor, 18 birds, 448 syllables/bird) were recorded song development. The predictability of swamp sparrow note order showed significant increase during the month-long recording period (F1,162 = 9977, p < 0.001). Note order stereotypy in tree swallows also increased by a significant amount over a month-long field season (Mann-Whitney V = 12, p-value < 0.001). Understanding changes in song stereotypy can improve our knowledge of vocal learning, performance, and cultural transmission.

Chronic thromboembolic pulmonary hypertension: advances from bench to patient management

Our understanding of chronic thromboembolic pulmonary hypertension (CTEPH), in terms of its natural history, pathophysiology and management of patients, has greatly improved since the landmark descriptions given by Kenneth Moser and Nina Braunwald [1] more than 40 yrs ago. At that time, small case series were available depicting the clinical features of patients suffering from “long-standing thromboembolic pulmonary hypertension”, “chronic massive thromboembolic obstruction” or “chronic obstruction of large pulmonary arteries”. The success of a surgical procedure, namely pulmonary endarterectomy (PEA), has transformed this lethal disorder into a potentially curable form of pulmonary hypertension. As a consequence, the referral of cases suitable for surgery has gradually increased with time. At the University of San Diego (San Diego, CA, USA), more than 2,700 PEA procedures have been performed since 1970, the majority over the past 20 yrs [2–4]. European centres have subsequently contributed to broaden the knowledge on the disease [5–7]. 30 yrs ago, the frequency of CTEPH as a late complication of acute pulmonary embolism was believed to be very low (0.1–0.5%) [8]. Based on recent prospective studies, it is likely that CTEPH is much more common than initially thought (in 1–3.8% of patients who …

Early primate evolution in Afro‐Arabia

The peculiar mammalian fauna that inhabited Afro-Arabia during the Paleogene first came to the attention of the scientific community in the early part of the twentieth century, when Andrews1 and Schlosser2 published their landmark descriptions of fossil mammals from the Fayum Depression in northern Egypt. Their studies revealed a highly endemic assemblage of land mammals that included the first known Paleogene records of hyraxes, proboscideans, and anthropoid primates, but which lacked ancestors of many iconic mammalian lineages that are found in Africa today, such as rhinos, zebras, bovids, giraffes, and cats. Over the course of the last century, the Afro-Arabian Paleogene has yielded fossil remains of several other endemic mammalian lineages,3 as well as a diversity of prosimian primates,4 but we are only just beginning to understand how the continent's faunal composition came to be, through ancient processes such as the movement of tectonic plates, changes in climate and sea level, and early phylogenetic splits among the major groups of placental mammals. These processes, in turn, made possible chance dispersal events that were critical in determining the competitive landscape--and, indeed, the survival--of our earliest anthropoid ancestors. Newly discovered fossils indicate that the persistence and later diversification of Anthropoidea was not an inevitable result of the clade's competitive isolation or adaptive superiority, as has often been assumed, but rather was as much due to the combined influences of serendipitous geographic conditions, global cooling, and competition with a group of distantly related extinct strepsirrhines with anthropoid-like adaptations known as adapiforms. Many of the important details of this story would not be known, and could never have been predicted, without the fossil evidence that has recently been unearthed by field paleontologists.

The impact of culture and recipient perspective on direction giving in the service of wayfinding

We examined how culture and recipient perspective affect direction giving during wayfinding. Participants from the United States and the Netherlands provided directions from starting locations to destinations for fictional recipients driving through a town (route perspective) or looking at a map of the town (survey perspective). US participants provided street names more frequently than did Dutch participants, whereas Dutch participants provided landmarks more frequently than did US participants. Moreover, US participants provided more cardinal descriptors when addressing listeners adopting a survey perspective relative to a route perspective but more landmarks and left-right descriptors when addressing listeners adopting a route perspective relative to a survey perspective. Participants from the Netherlands evinced a similar pattern with the important distinction that they mostly ignored cardinal terms, unless explicitly primed to do so and in a survey condition. In addition, this very low usage of cardinal terms seemed to be replaced by using more landmark descriptions. This study revealed remarkable flexibility in people's spatial descriptions but also stressed major differences in the use of spatial terms between US and Dutch participants.

Chronic thromboembolic pulmonary hypertension: a tribute to pulmonary endarterectomy

Our understanding of chronic thromboembolic pulmonary hypertension (CTEPH), in terms of both its natural history and pathophysiology, has greatly improved since the landmark descriptions given by Moser and Braunwald 1 more than 40 yrs ago. At that time, small case series were available, depicting the clinical features of patients suffering from “long-standing thromboembolic pulmonary hypertension”, “chronic massive thromboembolic obstruction” or “chronic obstruction of large pulmonary arteries”. These patients shared a history of long-term dyspnoea on exertion with normal spirometry values, evidence of pulmonary hypertension, and right ventricular dysfunction in association with the presence of marked defects at the ventilation/perfusion scan; the occurrence of a single or multiple venous thromboembolism episodes, usually several years previously, was constantly mentioned in the diagnostic work-up 2–5. The success of a surgical procedure, namely pulmonary endarterectomy, has transformed this lethal disorder into a potentially curable form of pulmonary hypertension 1. As a consequence, the referral of cases suitable for surgery has gradually increased with time: at the University of San Diego (San Diego, CA, USA) there were 41 operated cases in 1980, rising to 323 cases in 1992 6, 7. This has enabled us to broaden our knowledge, with the help of further involvement from European centres 8–11]. Forty years ago, the frequency of CTEPH was estimated to be 0.1% of patients who survived an episode of pulmonary embolism 12 …

Combined methylmalonic aciduria and homocystinuria ( cblC): Phenotype–genotype correlations and ethnic-specific observations

Methylmalonic aciduria and homocystinuria, cblC type (MIM 277400), is the most frequent inborn error of vitamin B 12 (cobalamin, Cbl) metabolism, caused by an inability of the cell to convert Cbl to both of its active forms (MeCbl, AdoCbl). Although considered a disease of infancy, some patients develop symptoms in childhood, adolescence, or adulthood. The gene responsible for cblC, MMACHC, was recently identified. We studied phenotype–genotype correlations in 37 patients from published case-reports, representing most of the landmark descriptions of this disease. 25/37 had early-onset disease, presenting in the first 6 months of life: 17/25 were found to be either homozygous for the c.271dupA mutation ( n = 9) or for the c.331C > T mutation ( n = 3), or compound heterozygotes for these 2 mutations ( n = 5). 9/12 late-onset cases presented with acute neurological symptoms: 4/9 were homozygous for the c.394C > T mutation, 2/9 were compound heterozygotes for the c.271dupA and c.394C > T mutations, and 3/9, for the c.271dupA mutation and a missense mutation. Several observations on ethnic origins were noted: the c.331C > T mutation is seen in Cajun and French-Canadian patients and the c.394C > T mutation is common in the Asiatic-Indian/Pakistani/Middle Eastern populations. The recognition of phenotype–genotype correlations and the association of mutations with specific ethnicities will be useful for identification of disease-causing mutations in cblC patients, for carrier detection and prenatal diagnosis in families where mutations are known, and in setting up initial screening programs in molecular diagnostic laboratories. Further study into disease mechanism of specific mutations will help to understand phenotypic presentations and the overall pathogenesis in cblC patients.

Interplay Between Visual and Spatial: The Effect of Landmark Descriptions on Comprehension of Route/Survey Spatial Descriptions

Successful wayfinding requires accurate encoding of two types of information: landmarks and the spatial relations between them (e.g., landmark X is left/north of Y). Although both types of information are crucial to wayfinding, behavioral and neurological evidence suggest that they have different substrates. In this paper, we consider the nature of the difference by examining comprehension times of spatial information (i.e., route and survey descriptions) and landmark descriptions. In two studies, participants learned simple environments by reading descriptions from route or survey perspectives, half with a single perspective switch. On half of the switch trials, a landmark description was introduced just prior to the perspective switch. In the first study, landmarks were embellished with descriptions of visual details, while in the second study, landmarks were embellished with descriptions of historic or other factual information. The presence of landmark descriptions did not increase the comprehension time of either route or survey descriptions, suggesting that landmark descriptions are perspective-neutral. Furthermore, visual landmark descriptions speeded comprehension time when the perspective was switched, whereas factual landmark descriptions had no effect on perspective switching costs. Taken together, the findings support separate processes for landmark and spatial information in construction of spatial mental models, and point to the importance of visual details of landmarks in facilitating mental model construction.

Treatment of neuropathic pain: historical aspects.

Since the earliest descriptions of pain related to injury of the nervous system, it has been recognized that the characteristics of this type of pain differ markedly from those of pain due to nonneural tissue damage. Later, as new analgesics were developed, it became clear that neurogenic pain was very often refractory to these drugs. This brief article considers some historical aspects of the development of treatments for neuropathic pain. All pain clinicians would accept that the current armamentarium of therapies for neuropathic pain is limited, a fact that reflects our poor understanding of the pathophysiology of neuropathic pain and inability to target treatments specifically and selectively. Closely related to this is the continuing debate over exactly what we mean when we use the term neuropathic pain. Fothergill is credited with the earliest description of trigeminal neuralgia, though he did not use the term neuralgia, which came into use some years later [1–3]. There followed descriptions of pain arising as a result of both central and peripheral nervous system damage. Important landmark descriptions of central nervous system pathology causing pain included those of vascular lesions [4,5]. Dejerine and Roussy described the thalamic syndrome in 1906 [6] and, in a masterpiece of clinicopathologic correlation, Head and Holmes [7] detailed the sensory consequences (including pain) of cerebral lesions at different sites. Holmes later recognized that similar pain could be caused by spinal cord lesions [8]. Behan [9] coined the term “central pain” (CP), and Riddoch [10] provided a definition of CP that has stood the test of time. Pain resulting from peripheral nerve and root lesions was well recognized and recorded during the earlier part of the 19th century. Silas Weir Mitchell's descriptions of pain following peripheral nerve trauma and, particularly, his detailed accounts of causalgia [11] in casualties …

Trilogies of Histone Lysine Methylation as Epigenetic Landmarks of the Eukaryotic Genome

landmark descriptions of the genomes of several model organisms. The significance of these findings becomes even greater following the nearly full sequence assembly of the human genome. Together, these “genome projects” have shown that more complex eukaryotic model organisms have a much bigger genome than unicellular eukaryotes, although the increased “biocomplexity” is not reflected by an equivalent expansion in the number of protein-coding genes (e.g., ~40,000 in humans vs. ~6,000 in Saccharomyces cerevisiae). These results strongly suggest that biocomplexity is only in part regulated by overall gene number, but largely depends on combinatorial control triggering a vast number of gene expression patterns. In addition, mechanisms other than DNA sequence information have been used during evolution to better index and regulate the complex developmental programs and key regulatory processes, such as chromosome segregation and cell division of eukaryotic genomes. In the nuclei of almost all eukaryotic cells, genomic DNA is highly folded and compacted with histone and nonhistone proteins in a dynamic polymer called chromatin. The discoveries that DNA methylation, nucleosome remodeling, histone modification, and noncoding RNAs can organize chromatin into accessible (“euchromatic”) and inaccessible (“heterochromatic”) subdomains reveal epigenetic mechanisms that considerably extend the information potential of the genetic code. Thus, one genome can generate many “epigenomes” (Fig. 1), as the fertilized egg progresses through development and translates its information into a multitude of cell fates. These epigenetic mechanisms are crucial for the function of most, if not all, chromatin-templated processes and link alterations in chromatin structure to allele-specific expression differences, developmental programming of cell lineages, chromosome segregation, DNA repair, and genome stability. The implications of epigenetic research for human biology and disease, including cancer and aging, are far reaching. The basic repeating unit of chromatin is the nucleosome, consisting of 147 bp of DNA wrapped around an octamer of the core histones H2A, H2B, H3, and H4 (Luger et al. 1997). Posttranslational modifications of the protruding histone amino-termini (histone “tails”) were proposed 40 years ago to affect gene expression (Allfrey et al. 1964) and have since been demonstrated as important modulators of chromatin structure, culminating in the “histone code” hypothesis (Strahl and Allis 2000; Turner 2000; Jenuwein and Allis 2001). Histone modifications include acetylation, phosphorylation, methylation (arginine and lysine), ubiquitination, and ADP ribosylation (van Holde 1988). In the last 4 years, histone lysine methylation has emerged as a central epigenetic modification (Jenuwein 2001; Zhang and Trilogies of Histone Lysine Methylation as Epigenetic Landmarks of the Eukaryotic Genome

Friedrich August von Ammon (1799-1861).

As this year marks the 200th anniversary of the birth of Friedrich August von Ammon (1799-1861), it presents an opportunity to recall and celebrate Ammon's life and his many contributions that helped shape both ophthalmology and plastic surgery into independent specialties. Some 250 years after Georg Bartisch, Ammon reestablished Dresden as a major center of ophthalmology, through the creation of a teaching institute, the publication of influential periodicals, and his personal publication of important monographs and journal articles. Ammon's Zeitschrift für die Ophthalmologie (founded 1830) was only the third journal in history that had been entirely devoted to ophthalmology. His prize-winning treatise, De Iritide (1835), correctly categorized iritis and gave a detailed description of sympathetic ophthalmia. His beautiful color-plate atlas, Klinische Darstellungen (1838-1841), contains landmark descriptions of congenital eye anomalies and has been described by Norman as 'the best summary of the knowledge of diseases of the eye prior to the introduction of the ophthalmoscope.' Ammon made most of his literary contributions in ophthalmology but he also contributed to another emerging field, plastic surgery. His monograph, Die plastische Chirurgie (1842), critically and comprehensively surveyed the entire history and current practice of plastic surgery, one of the very first textbooks to achieve this goal. In his last monograph (1858) Ammon returned to the subject of embryology of the human eye and drew upon his 30 years of study. Before his death, two of his last papers reported ophthalmoscopic observations, demonstrating his exploration of the frontiers of ophthalmology that characterized his entire career.

Colles-Stokes Contributions to the Concept of Heart Failure

“Colles fracture,” “Colles law,” “Stokes-Adams syndrome,” “Cheyne-Stokes respiration,” and “Corrigan pulse” are some of the contributions of the Irish school that are utilized for teaching purposes in medical schools and training programs, as well as in daily practice of medicine. We wish to add an important description by Drs. Colles and Stokes that personifies the considerable personal contributions of these 2 physicians in our understanding of the pathophysiologic expression of the syndrome of heart failure. The clinical–pathologic correlation of the disease that affected Dr. Colles is well described by Dr. Stokes in his treatise Diseases of the Heart and the Aorta. He recognized the cyclical nature of frequent decompensations in heart failure, the relation of clinical worsening in conjunction with reduced urine output, as well as the importance of reestablishing urinary flow to achieve a decrease in dyspnea. Dr. Colles also demonstrated a profound clinical insight when he noticed, first, that his affliction was “eventually a fatal disease and that remedies that work may lose effect over time,” illustrating an observation that has stood the test of time and, secondly, when he told Dr. Smith “… I would direct particular attention to the heart and the lungs … and the swelling in the right hypochondrium … I suspect that there is some connexion between this swelling of the hypochondrium and the diseased state of the heart.” We believe that the Colles-Stokes contributions, both in the clinical as well as the clinical–pathologic arenas, are one of the landmark descriptions that helped to evolve the concept of the syndrome of heart failure.

International system for cytogenetic nomenclature of the domestic horse. Report of the Third International Committee for the Standardization of the domestic horse karyotype, Davis, CA, USA, 1996.

The history of domestic horse (Equus caballus) cytogenetics dates from 1912 when Kirillow reported the diploid chromosome number to be between 20 and 34 in male horses (see Power 1990). Later, Krallinger (1931) and Makino (1942) reported the number to be 64. Although this provided the correct chromosome number, the prevailing uncertainty was ®nally cleared in 1959 by Rothfels and co-workers who con®rmed the correct chormosome number as 2n ˆ 64 (Rothfels et al. 1959). The horse has 13 pairs of metacentric/submetacentric and 18 pairs of acrocentric autosomes. The X chromosome is the second largest submetacentric, while the Y chromosome is one of the smallest acrocentrics. During the 1970s, G-, Q-, C-, Rand NOR banding techniques were applied to horse chromosomes, and several arrangements of the chromosomes into a karyotype were presented (see Power 1990). The First International Conference for the Standardization of Banded Karyotypes of Domestic Animals held at Reading, UK, 1976, proposed a G-banded horse karyotype (the Reading Standard) with eight rows of chromosomes (Ford et al. 1980). Biarmed autosomes were arranged by decreasing length in the ®rst four rows. Acrocentrics were similarly arranged in the next three rows. The last row had only the sex chromosomes. This standard karyotype was used for several years. The lack of complete consensus among horse cytogeneticists led to a new standard (the Paris Standard) de®ned in 1989 (Richer et al. 1990). The chromosomes were arranged into two groups ± nonacrocentrics and acrocentrics. Within each group the chromosomes were ordered by length. The sex chromosomes were placed in the middle of the karyotype, along with the smallest biarmed chromosomes. C-, Rand NOR banded karyotypes were also presented. The Paris standard karyotype was more compact, with relatively better band resolution than the Reading Standard. Despite acceptance of the Paris Standard, the quality of the published banded images was a matter of concern. Furthermore, idiograms, band numbers and landmark descriptions were not provided, limiting the use of the standard to chromosome identi®cation only. The need for schematic drawings and band designations became particularly obvious in 1988 with the ®rst reports of physical gene mapping in horses (MHC: Ansari et al. 1988, MaEkinen et al. 1989; CRC: Harbitz et al. 1990; GPI: Chowdhary et al. 1992; PGD: Gu et al. 1992). Even though G-band idiograms and band descriptions (Maciulus et al. 1984) were available before these mapping efforts, dif®culties were encountered in the precise de®nition of the band locations primarily because of the lack of consensus on landmarks and band numbers. Development of the physical and genetic Chromosome Research 1997, 5, 433±443