Large Arena Research Articles

Kinematic and behavioral evidence for a distinction between trotting and ambling gaits in the cockroachBlaberus discoidalis

Earlier observations had suggested that cockroaches might show multiple patterns of leg coordination, or gaits, but these were not followed by detailed behavioral or kinematic measurements that would allow a definite conclusion. We measured the walking speeds of cockroaches exploring a large arena and found that the body movements tended to cluster at one of two preferred speeds, either very slow (<10 cm s(-1)) or fairly fast (∼30 cm s(-1)). To highlight the neural control of walking leg movements, we experimentally reduced the mechanical coupling among the various legs by tethering the animals and allowing them to walk in place on a lightly oiled glass plate. Under these conditions, the rate of stepping was bimodal, clustering at fast and slow speeds. We next used high-speed videos to extract three-dimensional limb and joint kinematics for each segment of all six legs. The angular excursions and three-dimensional motions of the leg joints over the course of a stride were variable, but had different distributions in each gait. The change in gait occurs at a Froude number of ∼0.4, a speed scale at which a wide variety of animals show a transition between walking and trotting. We conclude that cockroaches do have multiple gaits, with corresponding implications for the collection and interpretation of data on the neural control of locomotion.

Trap and corral: a two-step approach for constructing and constraining dynamic cell contact events in differentiating progenitor cell populations

Cells are constantly subjected to a host of external signals which can influence their state, phenotype and behavior. Mammalian cells are dependent on signals from surrounding cells to maintain viability, proliferate and coordinate their actions. During developmental and regenerative processes, these lateral signals between cells provide instructive cues informing stem cells how, when and where to differentiate. Moreover, differentiating cells often experience cell–cell contact events interspersed with bouts of motility, process extension and multi-cell agglomeration (Gage 2000 Science 287 1433–8) processes which are not easily recapitulated in existing cell capture devices. Here, we present a two-step process involving microwells to trap cells with high efficiency followed by the alignment of a PDMS mesh around the cells to corral them after the trapping. The microwells trap single cells and paired cells with up to 90% and 80% efficiencies, respectively. After seeding, the PDMS mesh is aligned with the seeded wells to create a 150 µm × 150 µm corral around each trap, allowing cells to interact in a larger arena. The corralling must be done in liquid after seeding because the seeding requires high cell densities to achieve near-full occupancy in the wells. Low-density seeding of the PDMS corrals alone can result in two cells being trapped in each well, but in those conditions, the two cells often engage in very little contact or none at all (and seeding obeys a non-desirable Poisson distribution). Interestingly, trapping cells in proximity and then corralling them elicits much higher contact times than simply seeding into corrals.

Rich Microbial Community Associated with the Nest Material ofReticulitermes flavipes(Isoptera: Rhinotermitidae)

ment that can contain a rich community of micro organisms and the nest material can be a site of enhanced microbial activity (Holt & Lepage 2000). By using feces and saliva as building mate rials for nest construction and gallery systems, termites can alter the qualitative and quantita tive composition of the resident soil microorgan ism community from adjacent soils (Jouquet et al. 2005). Keya et al. (1982) suggested that a signifi cant part of the altered microorganism commu nity was mostly composed of cellulose decompos ers, but function and origin of the microbial com munity associated with termite nests remains un clear. In this report we evaluate whether subterranean termites have the ability to import various microorganisms from distant soils or from their own gut microbial community into a microorganism-free soil environment. In Chouvenc et al. (2008), we investigated the survivorship of groups of 960 Reticulitermes flavi pes (Kollar) from large two-dimensional arenas filled with sterile sand (washed with 70% ethanol, rinsed with sterile deionized water and oven dried at 60°C for 24 h). At the end of the 90-d ex periment, 4 arenas from 2 different termite colo nies were dismantled to obtain 2 types of nest ma terial: (1) gallery material including sand mixed with termite fecal material from termites galler ies, and (2) non-gallery material including undis turbed sand (not tunneled by the termite) at least 3 cm away from any termite gallery (Fig. 1). A to tal of 12 soil samples per arena (10 g per sample) including 6 samples for each type of nest material were collected. In order to estimate the microbial

Leaky Registers and Eight-Hundred-Pound Gorillas

Everywhere, there are topics and words that local conventions brand as "unmentionable" yet people manage to communicate about the unmentionable nevertheless. What are their strategies for doing so, and how well can those strategies work? This paper considers communicative means for mentioning or implicating the unmentionable, without actually breaching the norms that made the material noxious. Also considered are the larger cultural issues and social dramas that may be at stake. Register shifts and footing shifts are common strategies for containing noxious material in a linguistic cordon sanitaire . So is conspicuous avoidance (of the gorilla in the room). But the public game of containment is only the most overt manifestation of the issues potentially concerned. Much mischief and many unforeseen entailments lurk in the shadows of these communicative efforts. The moral life of language resides in much larger arenas than the existing literature on "verbal taboo" and politeness generally envisions. Words not spoken, discourse contexts and histories, interlocutors' responses, genre conventions, local regimes of language, truth, and knowledge—all these combine with the actual utterances, to multiple, often unforeseeable, effects.

Laboratory measurement of sound absorption of occupied pews and standing audiences

Places of worship, as well as other performing spaces or large arenas are characterized by lightweight pews or seats, with moderate or negligible upholstery, leading to very low absorption coefficients. Consequently, the audience becomes the most important sound absorbing element, capable of playing a fundamental role in determining the acoustic characteristics of the space. Consequently accurate knowledge of its acoustic properties is required for any design purpose. Several studies have been carried out with reference to audiences seated on upholstered theatre seats but there is a considerable lack of information about occupied pews. The well known difficulty of taking into account edge effects during such measurements poses further questions as well as the effect of the density of occupation, and the seasonal variations due to clothing. This paper presents the results of a series of laboratory measurements aimed at clarifying such aspects. The measurements showed that the edge effects are negligible and that total absorption is better related to the number of persons present than to the area they cover. Nonetheless, as the density grows, or when the audience is seated, there is a reduction in absorption which may be explained by the reduction in exposed body surface. Lightweight clothes show a considerable reduction in sound absorption over all the frequency bands, suggesting that significant seasonal fluctuations in reverberation time should be expected in places where the audience is the only sound absorbing surface.

Effects of different forms of exercise on post-inhibitory rebound and unwanted behavior in stabled horses

Reasons for performing study: It is unknown if different locomotor activities are equally effective at meeting the stabled horse's need for exercise and if they attenuate unwanted behaviour. Hypothesis: Alternative forms of exercise influence the intensity of locomotor activities during a period of turn-out (the so-called rebound effect) and the occurrence of unwanted or undesirable activities during standard handling situations. Method: Twenty-four horses kept in stables were randomly assigned to one of 4 exercise regimes (walker, treadmill, turn-out and riding) for 4 consecutive days. Because these forms of exercise provide additional environmental stimulation, beyond that provided by exercise, each horse served as its own control in 4 corresponding (no exercise) control treatments presented in a balanced order. Unwanted behaviour was tested by taking horses to weighing scales and loading and unloading them onto a 4-horse float by an experienced handler and the rebound effect was tested by releasing them into a large arena for a period of 15 min at the end of the exercise and control treatments. Results: Locomotor activities made up a large part of behaviour in the large arena following control treatments and all exercise regimes were sufficient to reduce the intensity of walking (P<0.05), trotting (P<0.01) and cantering (P<0.001) on release into a large arena. Exercise regime reduced the number of bucks (P<0.01) and rolling (P<0.05) during rebound tests suggesting that turn-out was having a stronger effect than the other 3 exercise regimes. Exercise regimes significantly reduced the amount of unwanted behaviour and the number of commands given by the handler during weighing (P<0.05) but had no effect on these behaviours during loading onto a float. Conclusion: Providing stabled horses with one hour/day of exercise on a walker, treadmill, turn-out or by being ridden are all effective at allowing expression of locomotor activities in stabled horses. Potential relevance: Providing stabled horses with regular exercise is likely to provide positive effects on horse welfare, training ability and handler safety.

Object preference by walking fruit flies, Drosophila melanogaster, is mediated by vision and graviperception

Walking fruit flies, Drosophila melanogaster, use visual information to orient towards salient objects in their environment, presumably as a search strategy for finding food, shelter or other resources. Less is known, however, about the role of vision or other sensory modalities such as mechanoreception in the evaluation of objects once they have been reached. To study the role of vision and mechanoreception in exploration behavior, we developed a large arena in which we could track individual fruit flies as they walked through either simple or more topologically complex landscapes. When exploring a simple, flat environment lacking three-dimensional objects, flies used visual cues from the distant background to stabilize their walking trajectories. When exploring an arena containing an array of cones, differing in geometry, flies actively oriented towards, climbed onto, and explored the objects, spending most of their time on the tallest, steepest object. A fly's behavioral response to the geometry of an object depended upon the intrinsic properties of each object and not a relative assessment to other nearby objects. Furthermore, the preference was not due to a greater attraction towards tall, steep objects, but rather a change in locomotor behavior once a fly reached and explored the surface. Specifically, flies are much more likely to stop walking for long periods when they are perched on tall, steep objects. Both the vision system and the antennal chordotonal organs (Johnston's organs) provide sufficient information about the geometry of an object to elicit the observed change in locomotor behavior. Only when both these sensory systems were impaired did flies not show the behavioral preference for the tall, steep objects.

Technical note: Use of accelerometers to describe gait patterns in dairy calves

Developments in accelerometer technology offer new opportunities for automatic monitoring of animal behavior. Until now, commercially available accelerometers have been used to measure walking in adult cows but have failed to identify walking in calves. We described the pattern of acceleration associated with various gaits in calves and tested whether measures of acceleration could be used to count steps and distinguish among gait types. A triaxial accelerometer (sampling at 33 readings/s with maximum measurement at ±3.2 g) was attached to 1 hind leg of 7 dairy calves, and each calf was walked to a familiar large arena (29.1 × 4.8m) and encouraged to walk and run for 8 to 10min while being video recorded. The video recordings were watched in slow motion and a total of 54 recordings of 3 to 6s duration of either galloping (n=21), trotting (n=13), or walking (n=21) were identified and the number of steps were counted. Accelerometer data was then analyzed for each gait. Steps could be clearly identified by changes in the acceleration in the forward and vertical axes and vector sum, but less clearly in the lateral axis. The number of steps counted using the forward axis was highly correlated with the number observed from the video recordings. Galloping, trotting, and walking differed significantly in the median interpeak intervals in acceleration in the forward axis and in the vector sum of the acceleration in the 2 axes. Interpeak intervals could be used to discriminate among the 3 gaits, although walking was most clearly distinguished from galloping. Automated measures of acceleration of the leg in the forward and vertical dimensions can be used to count steps and classify gaits of calves.

English Law, Brahmo Marriage, and the Problem of Religious Difference: Civil Marriage Laws in Britain and India

On the face of it, civil marriage represents both the most typical and most anodyne aspect of modern law. One might say that by instituting civil marriage, a bureaucratic, enumerative, and secularized state permits its subjects absolute individual choice of marital partners, and concurrently, by refusing to take into account the religious affiliation of any party, grants total freedom of religious faith. As such, it may be seen as a quintessentially modern phenomenon, connected through the adjective “civil” with other distinctively modern concepts such as civil society, all of which point to a notion of individual liberty, predicated upon a modern state guaranteeing the autonomy of large arenas of social life.

Traffic Management for Planned Special Events Using Traffic Microsimulation Modeling and Tabletop Exercises

This article describes the use of microsimulation for traffic management of special events, including evacuations and traffic incidents. Specifically, the research employed tabletop exercises using the microsimulation software TransModeler to present traffic management alternatives for special events to stakeholders. The exercises involved analysis of evacuation or egress conditions with current traffic management plans, review of possible high-impact incident scenarios, and testing and formulation of improvements to current traffic management procedures, including incident response. Two case studies were developed for the tabletop exercises; one the evacuation of a minor-league baseball stadium and another concerned with vehicular egress plans for a large urban indoor arena. Both venues were in New York State's Capital District region. The results demonstrated that the real-time use of microsimulation during a tabletop exercise elicited many new traffic management strategies. Also, a cost–benefit analysis of using microsimulation models in conjunction with tabletop exercises for these types of events was explored. The project was made possible by funding from the New York State Department of Transportation and the Federal Highway Administration.

Macro impacts on caseworker decision-making in child welfare: a cross-national comparison

This paper focuses on the factors impacting on decision-making in child and family social work through a cross-national comparison. In doing so, the larger arena of the political and social contexts of both the United States and Northern Ireland are examined. For each of the countries we describe the historical and political context of child welfare, particularly the tension between child safety and family support, and how children's rights are attended to and interpreted in each country. This discussion also examines the extent to which decision-making in each jurisdiction is influenced by constitutional imperatives, with particular reference to the US Constitution and the European Convention on Human Rights. From this general comparison we conclude with observations about child welfare decision-making within the national context and offer suggestions for further theoretical development in this area whilst also examining where the practices in each jurisdiction may benefit from review.

Knots: Attractive Places with High Path Tortuosity in Mouse Open Field Exploration

When introduced into a novel environment, mammals establish in it a preferred place marked by the highest number of visits and highest cumulative time spent in it. Examination of exploratory behavior in reference to this “home base” highlights important features of its organization. It might therefore be fruitful to search for other types of marked places in mouse exploratory behavior and examine their influence on overall behavior.Examination of path curvatures of mice exploring a large empty arena revealed the presence of circumscribed locales marked by the performance of tortuous paths full of twists and turns. We term these places knots, and the behavior performed in them—knot-scribbling. There is typically no more than one knot per session; it has distinct boundaries and it is maintained both within and across sessions. Knots are mostly situated in the place of introduction into the arena, here away from walls. Knots are not characterized by the features of a home base, except for a high speed during inbound and a low speed during outbound paths. The establishment of knots is enhanced by injecting the mouse with saline and placing it in an exposed portion of the arena, suggesting that stress and the arousal associated with it consolidate a long-term contingency between a particular locale and knot-scribbling.In an environment devoid of proximal cues mice mark a locale associated with arousal by twisting and turning in it. This creates a self-generated, often centrally located landmark. The tortuosity of the path traced during the behavior implies almost concurrent multiple views of the environment. Knot-scribbling could therefore function as a way to obtain an overview of the entire environment, allowing re-calibration of the mouse's locale map and compass directions. The rich vestibular input generated by scribbling could improve the interpretation of the visual scene.

Patterns of Aggression and Operational Sex Ratio Within Alternative Male Phenotypes in Atlantic Salmon

AbstractThe intensity of male–male aggression during mating is predicted to increase with the operational sex ratio (OSR) (the ratio of sexually active males to females). We observed aggressive behaviour in relation to OSR within alternative phenotypes (large anadromous males and small ‘sneaker’ mature male parr) of Atlantic salmon, Salmo salar, as they competed for access to anadromous females in large outdoor arenas immediately prior to spawning events as well as throughout the spawning season. Anadromous males were primarily aggressive outside of spawning events, and their aggression increased with OSR over a narrow range of 0.08–4. By contrast, mature male parr were aggressive just prior to spawning, with a decrease in aggression over a broad range of OSRs from 1 to 7.4. Similarly, literature data for three other salmonid species indicated a decrease in aggression with increasing OSRs over a range of 1–6.33. These observations suggest that there is considerable variability in competitive behaviour, even within alternative phenotypes. Because our data are derived from repeated observations on the same individuals of different genetic origin, further confirmation of these findings is desirable. Nevertheless, our study underscores the importance of measuring competitive behaviour and OSR at ecologically relevant spatial and temporal scales, both of which may differ between alternative maturation phenotypes.

Internet interventions: Moving from efficacy to effectiveness

In this paper we consider the issues involved when transporting the promising results of internet interventions in efficacy trials to clinically representative settings (effectiveness). In addition, dissemination and the use of internet treatments in stepped care models will be discussed. While there have been numerous efficacy trials there are only a few effectiveness studies, and it is not clear if the distinction between efficacy and effectiveness can be applied, as internet interventions can take place both within a clinical setting and in a more large scale public health arena. A limitation of the existing efficacy trials is that participants are often recruited via mass media and that educational level and motivation are likely to differ from ordinary clinical settings. However, with respect to internet interventions aimed at clinical target groups, evidence from efficacy trials now support the further implementation of internet interventions in effectiveness trials.

Odor trail tracking by rats in surface and air borne conditions

Event Abstract Back to Event Odor trail tracking by rats in surface and air borne conditions Adil Khan1*, Urvashi Raheja1 and Upinder Bhalla1 1 National Centre for Biological Sciences, India Rats, being nocturnal, rely heavily on their sense of smell. They have long been known to be proficient at odor-based tasks in the lab. Precise measurements by ours and other groups have revealed abilities to both identify and localize odors within the timescale of a single sniff (~150ms). They have also been known to be capable of locating food in large arenas such as households and fields. These feats presumably use air-borne and surface borne odor trails. We have attempted to study the nature of this trail tracking in both these conditions. In this process we have tried to establish behavioral methods which study odor guided navigation in more natural behavioral tasks yet with well controlled stimulus conditions. To study surface borne odor tracking, we constructed a treadmill which had a sheet of paper as the running surface. The paper had an odor trail in the form of a chocolate piece rubbed in a meandering line on the paper. Rats learned to track this trail while running on the treadmill. Video analysis which tracked their nose movement revealed their tracking strategies. Since this primary task provides visual and tactile cues also, the task was compared to a condition with purely odor cues also. To study air borne plume tracking, we built an arena where rats were trained to locate the source of an air borne odor emerging from one of multiple compartments. Rats learnt this task and showed a range of different localization strategies. We further characterized the nature and degree of laminarity of the odor plume, and correlated different plume characteristics with different strategies used by the rats. Conference: Computational and Systems Neuroscience 2010, Salt Lake City, UT, United States, 25 Feb - 2 Mar, 2010. Presentation Type: Poster Presentation Topic: Poster session III Citation: Khan A, Raheja U and Bhalla U (2010). Odor trail tracking by rats in surface and air borne conditions. Front. Neurosci. Conference Abstract: Computational and Systems Neuroscience 2010. doi: 10.3389/conf.fnins.2010.03.00275 Copyright: The abstracts in this collection have not been subject to any Frontiers peer review or checks, and are not endorsed by Frontiers. They are made available through the Frontiers publishing platform as a service to conference organizers and presenters. The copyright in the individual abstracts is owned by the author of each abstract or his/her employer unless otherwise stated. Each abstract, as well as the collection of abstracts, are published under a Creative Commons CC-BY 4.0 (attribution) licence (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) and may thus be reproduced, translated, adapted and be the subject of derivative works provided the authors and Frontiers are attributed. For Frontiers’ terms and conditions please see https://www.frontiersin.org/legal/terms-and-conditions. Received: 05 Mar 2010; Published Online: 05 Mar 2010. * Correspondence: Adil Khan, National Centre for Biological Sciences, Banglore, India, adil@ncbs.res.in Login Required This action requires you to be registered with Frontiers and logged in. To register or login click here. Abstract Info Abstract The Authors in Frontiers Adil Khan Urvashi Raheja Upinder Bhalla Google Adil Khan Urvashi Raheja Upinder Bhalla Google Scholar Adil Khan Urvashi Raheja Upinder Bhalla PubMed Adil Khan Urvashi Raheja Upinder Bhalla Related Article in Frontiers Google Scholar PubMed Abstract Close Back to top Javascript is disabled. Please enable Javascript in your browser settings in order to see all the content on this page.

Navigation in human crowds; testing the many-wrongs principle

The ‘many-wrongs principle’ predicts that animal group cohesion can cause groups to navigate more accurately than singletons. Recent theoretical work using individual-based simulations and several empirical studies of bird flock behaviour support this principle. However, for real animal groups it remains unclear what key factors are involved and whether group cohesion alone can act to produce the effect. We tested model predictions using human participants in a large circular arena. They were tested alone and in groups of two, three, six and 10, in three trials. For each trial, individuals were instructed to stay together and approach a preset but unmarked target on the arena perimeter. The target instruction included a degree of directional uncertainty of 22.5°, 67.5° or 112.5°. Individual directional uncertainty was equal for each group member within a trial, but differed between trials. As expected, we found that groups comprising individuals with lower directional uncertainty navigated more accurately. Group navigational accuracy increased with group size but only between singletons and groups of 10 and only when individuals had a high directional uncertainty of 112.5°. This study provides evidence in human groups that group cohesion can increase navigational accuracy but that this effect is restricted to larger group sizes and when individual directional uncertainty is high.

Effects of different forms of exercise on post inhibitory rebound and unwanted behaviour in stabled horses

It is unknown if different locomotor activities are equally effective at meeting the stabled horse's need for exercise and if they attenuate unwanted behaviour. Alternative forms of exercise influence the intensity of locomotor activities during a period of turn-out (the so-called rebound effect) and the occurrence of unwanted or undesirable activities during standard handling situations. Twenty-four horses kept in stables were randomly assigned to one of 4 exercise regimes (walker, treadmill, turn-out and riding) for 4 consecutive days. Because these forms of exercise provide additional environmental stimulation, beyond that provided by exercise, each horse served as its own control in 4 corresponding (no exercise) control treatments presented in a balanced order. Unwanted behaviour was tested by taking horses to weighing scales and loading and unloading them onto a 4-horse float by an experienced handler and the rebound effect was tested by releasing them into a large arena for a period of 15 min at the end of the exercise and control treatments. Locomotor activities made up a large part of behaviour in the large arena following control treatments and all exercise regimes were sufficient to reduce the intensity of walking (P < 0.05), trotting (P < 0.01) and cantering (P < 0.001) on release into a large arena. Exercise regime reduced the number of bucks (P < 0.01) and rolling (P < 0.05) during rebound tests suggesting that turn-out was having a stronger effect than the other 3 exercise regimes. Exercise regimes significantly reduced the amount of unwanted behaviour and the number of commands given by the handler during weighing (P < 0.05) but had no effect on these behaviours during loading onto a float. Providing stabled horses with one hour/day of exercise on a walker, treadmill, turn-out or by being ridden are all effective at allowing expression of locomotor activities in stabled horses. Providing stabled horses with regular exercise is likely to provide positive effects on horse welfare, training ability and handler safety.

Incidental (unreinforced) and reinforced spatial learning in rats with ventral and dorsal lesions of the hippocampus

We investigated whether the ventral and dorsal hippocampus were differentially involved in incidental spatial learning. Rats with ventral and dorsal hippocampal lesions were tested on an unreinforced test of spatial memory that takes advantage of their natural propensity to explore novelty. Rats were presented with two copies of an identical object in a large circular open field arena. Subsequently, the rats were placed back into the open field with one of the objects displaced to an adjacent quadrant of the arena. Sham-operated rats and rats with ventral hippocampal lesions spent more time in the quadrant that contained the displaced object than in the quadrant that contained the non-displaced object, and more time investigating the displaced object than the non-displaced object. Rats with dorsal hippocampal lesions were impaired on both measures. Both sham and ventral hippocampal lesioned rats subsequently learned to retrieve a food pellet in the ends of each arm of a radial maze. Rats with lesions to the dorsal hippocampus showed no significant improvement in the number of errors made across training sessions and made significantly more errors, overall, than rats with ventral hippocampal or sham lesions. The findings suggest that an intact dorsal but not ventral hippocampus is necessary for spatial learning in rats.

The definition of fire resistance requirements for stadium and arena developments based on risk

In the United Kingdom, as in most other countries, the required fire resistance period of a building is traditionally given by the recommendations of prescriptive documents, such as the Approved Document B, depending on the usage and the height of the building. However, for large developments like stadia and arenas, which involve different usages such as assembly, office and retail facilities in combination with a very large number of people and the significance of this type of structure to the communities, these simple rules given in the prescriptive guidance to fire safety are not applicable. Furthermore, structural fire protection forms a significant part of the cost of a structure and also plays a significant part in the environmental impact and the embodied energy. Therefore, a risk based approach to the fire resistance requirements of large stadia and arenas has been developed and validated in this paper to ensure that the appropriate standard of safety is achieved in the most appropriate and economic manner. The approach allows a detailed assessment of the risk of failure of individual elements of structure and structural systems in a stadium rather than specifying a single fire resistance period for the whole building, which might be overly conservative for some members, but potentially unsafe for critical elements. The approach also allows for investigating the influence of individual parameters such as management, and the fire load. The method ensures that all three risk parameters i.e. frequency, probability, consequence will be assessed for the different structural elements based on available data from similar buildings, calculations and experiences. It could be shown that the proposed method gives consistent and comparable results for office, retail and assembly buildings, if compared with the recommendations given in the British Standard BS9999. It should be noted that the approach is based on the principles of risk; however it is semi-quantitative, and as a result contains some subjectivity. Therefore, it is important that the results are assessed for consistency and that they are logical and explainable.

The Lord for the Body: Religion, Medicine, and Protestant Faith Healing in Canada, 1880-1930 (review)

Reviewed by: The Lord for the Body: Religion, Medicine, and Protestant Faith Healing in Canada, 1880-1930 David Wright The Lord for the Body: Religion, Medicine, and Protestant Faith Healing in Canada, 1880–1930. James Opp. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2005. Pp. 278. $75.00 cloth, $29.95 paper In 1988, a San Francisco cardiologist, Randolph Byrd, published the results of an experiment in which he asked born-again Christians to pray for people hospitalized in a coronary care unit, comparing them with patients not targeted for prayer. He concluded that those who were prayed for needed fewer drugs and less help breathing. His research on the medical effects of 'intercessory prayer' provoked a firestorm of scientific debate and international media attention, striking, as it did, at the heart of scientific evidence and the nature of healing. This controversial episode in medical science comes to mind when reading James Opp's The Lord for the Body. Throughout the nineteenth century, as medicine began to rise in prominence and marginalize divine explanations for ill-health, disease, and death, devout Christians attempted to show the practical importance of prayer in an increasingly secularized world. One of the attempts to bridge the medical and miraculous was the faith healing movement. [End Page 170] Opp details how faith healing appeared to take off in the 1880s and 1890s in Protestant, anglophone Canada. Adherents varied in their background and religious affiliation, but there were fascinating, if ephemeral, connections to the Salvation Army, Christian Science, and medical sects such as homeopathy and hydropathy. As the author demonstrates, the early practice of faith healing was highly gendered and spatially circumscribed. In the latter decades of the nineteenth century, women ministered to other women in private domestic spaces, recounting and framing their spiritual and bodily transformations in healing narratives. The publication of such faith-healing tracts facilitated the development of informal networks in the northeastern United States, networks that ultimately cascaded into Ontario and the Maritimes. The coalescing of groups into the Christian Alliance formalized faith healing as a movement, even if the expressions and practices were diverse and often obscured from public attention. At this time, many 'respectable' members of society were drawn to this apparent attempt to reconcile contemporary scientific advances with traditional beliefs in the power of prayer. By the 1920s, however, the social geography and culture of faith healing had changed dramatically. Prominent evangelists took faith healing on the road, engaging in huge public spectacles of divine invocation, replete with raucous music and mass audience participation. This very public rendering of faith healing in large indoor arenas across North America elicited greater criticism from mainstream clergy than the more private and restrained practices extant a generation earlier. Moreover, the insistence of the later generation of faith healers to forego most types of conventional medical intervention – including vaccination and drugs – would lead, in tragic circumstances, to court cases of negligence for failing to provide the 'necessaries of life.' The new medical surveillance of the state, the author argues, dared not condone the flagrant non-participation of its citizens in the new public health agenda of the twentieth century. The Lord for the Body contributes as much, if not more, to our understanding of the history of health and medicine as it does to our knowledge of ecclesiastical debates about atonement theology and the rise of Protestant denominations such as Pentecostalism. Opp's examination of 'healing narratives' and 'narrative networks' provides a rare, if fleeting, glimpse into domestic health care in the late nineteenth century. He argues that faith healing stood increasingly marginalized as the germ theory of disease moved the cultural understanding of illness from the bedroom into the laboratory, just as medical technologies were shifting birth, death, and surgery into the [End Page 171] formal hospital. New ways of seeing illness and the body introduced new medical truths that could not easily be reconciled with the often mystical tropes of healing narratives or the onstage theatre of divine healers. It is not surprising, then, that the author insists that the ultimate goal of his book is to 'analyse the cultural practice of divine healing within the context of a broader...