Miserable Condition Research Articles

F. Bacon's Philanthropy and Renovation of Learning for the Benefit of Mankind

Philanthropy, a rather unfamiliar term in Japan, was derived from a Greek word φιλανθρωπια that meant love to mankind. When the English word 'philanthropy' was coined in the early seventeenth century, it acquired a specific meaning in connection with the Christian view of mankind and it was Francis Bacon who used this word in this connotation.Man is a specially privileged kind of creature above all others but is put in a miserable condition because he has been banished from Paradise owing to his disobedience to God. So the first thing man has to do is to recover Paradise. This is, however, entirely unattainable by man's effort, but is made attainable by the coming and the secondcoming of Christ the Saviour.Then, has man simply to wait for the second coming of Christ while only staying in deep sympathy with one another for man's common misery? Bacon fully recognized this misery for which he had deep sympathy. This was the first part of his philanthropy. Further and more positively he thought he had discoverd a new method of learning according to which one could promote human welfare and decrease the amount of human misery. This would partly recover Paradise. So Bacon proposed this method and invited people to co-operate with him in his project. Such was the essence of Bacon's philanthropy.The response was immediate in the Western countries, as they started to organize scientific societies, the Royal Society of London to begin with, and to publish encyclopaedias, “for the benefit of mankind” by “promoting useful knowledge among people.” Creation of various philanthropic institutions followed.It was just at this time when John Milton in London was composing his Paradise Lost and then Paradise Regained that Robert Hooke of the Royal Society of London wrote the following remark, which exactly, echoed Bacon's desideratum, in the Preface to his scientific work Micrographia (1665) : And as at first, mankind fell by tasting of the forbidden Tree of knowledge, so we, their Posterity, may be in part restor'd by the same way, not only by beholding and contemplating, but by tasting too those fruits of Natural knowledge, that were never yet forbidden.This was no mere coincidence but convincing evidence to indicate that the Western people were most keenly concerned about the loss and regaining of Paradise and that Milton's great literary work and Bacon's philanthropy both came out of this same rudimentary concern for the human destiny.

Chrétien de Troyes et la « matière byzantine » ; les demoiselles du Château de Pesme Aventure

The Château de Pesme Aventure in Chrétien de Troyes' Yvain has been interpreted in various ways. The author suggests a connection with the Byzantine world. The poor girls weaving and embroidering silks in the castle are possibly a reminiscence of the Greek silk weavers carried off as hostages by Roger II of Sicily when Louis VII of France and his wife Eleonore were entertained in Constantinople. Roger was keen on imitating the Byzantine emperors. By getting hold of the technology of silk weaving he broke a Greek monopoly. The events of 1147 are reported by Western sources. Eleonore who visited Sicily on the way home may have passed on details of the miserable condition of the silk weavers to her literary entourage.

The Problem of Slave Community in the Eighteenth-Century Chesapeake

I N the spring of I774, a young Englishman named Nicholas Cresswell crossed the Atlantic, entered Chesapeake Bay, and came to safe anchorage on the Rappahannock River. From there, three black oarsmen rowed him north on the bay as far as the broad mouth of the Potomac River, then upriver along the shores of St. Mary's and Charles counties, Maryland. On the afternoon of May 2I, Cresswell reached his destination, the tiny village of Nanjemoy in southwestern Charles County.1 A week later, as he was becoming acquainted with the sights and sounds of the Tobacco Coast, Cresswell attended what he called a Negro Ball near Nanjemoy. Sundays being the only days these poor creatures have to themselves, he wrote, generally meet together and amuse themselves with Dancing to the Banjo, a four-stringed gourd something in the imitation of a Guitar. Some of the slaves also sang droll music indeed, songs in which generally relate the usage they have received from their Masters or Mistresses in a very satirical stile and manner. The newcomer pronounced the music and verse Rude and uncultivated, the dancing most violent exercise ... irregular and grotesque. With a hint of disbelief he concluded that the slaves all appear to be exceedingly happy at these merry-makings and seem as if they had forgot or were not sensible of their miserable condition.2 Cresswell's account is the kind of infrequent literary evidence that historians of the black experience in early America cherish for its clues to

The War within a War: Women Nurses in the Union Army

THE WAR WITHIN A WAR: Women Nurses in the Union Army Ann Douglas Wood Dr. A. Curtis, president of the Botánico-Medical College of Ohio and author of Lectures on Midwifery published in 1836, lamented the passing of women midwives, and the take-over of their occupation by men. "The destruction of scores of modern women and infants, and the miserable condition of multitudes that escape immediate death" testified all too clearly, he believed, that the change was "not made for the better ."1 For better or worse, the change was very real. In 1646, as Gerda Lerner tells us, a man had been prosecuted in Maine for practicing as a midwife. One hundred and thirty years later, Dr. William Shippen started to lecture on midwifery in Philadelphia. In the next half century , medical schools proliferated, and state after state legislated that a physician had to be licensed to practice. Professionalization served to drive women from medicine as it automatically excluded them from formal training, licenses, and hence practice.2 As Victor Robinson, the historian of nursing in America, sums it up, "in the change from colonial to national medicine, the casualty was woman: woman was not ignored , she was expelled."3 This expulsion was hardly an unforeseen result of professionalization; rather, it was a desired and sought-after end. One Boston doctor boasted in 1820: It was one of the first and happiest fruits of improved medical education in America that females were excluded from practice, and this has only been effected by the united and persevering efforts of some of the most distinguished individuals of the profession.4 Women continued to play a role in the healing process, but it was a totally unprofessional one. Any sister, daughter or mother was expected to be able to nurse the sick of her household: indeed, she was idealized and glorified as a bedside watcher. Catharine Beecher's comparison of woman's role as healer to that of Jesus Christ was a com1 A. Curtis, Lectures on Midwifery and the Forms of Disease Peculiar to Women and Children (Columbus, 1841), p. 9. 2 Gerda Lerner, "The Lady and the Mill Girl: Changes in the Status of Women in the Age of Jackson," Midcontinent American Studies Journal, X (Spring, 1969), 7-8. 3 Victor Robinson, White Caps: The Stonj of Nursing ( Philadelphia and New York, 1946), p. 139. * Ibid. 197 198CIVIL WAR HISTORY monplace.5 Woman's silent, long-suffering ministry was the subject of countless poems and tales, but it was to hold sway principally in the home, usually her own, and never in any circumstance to come into competition with the professional doctor's role. William A. Alcott, a Boston physician and author of many books on women's health, proposed that all women should be trained to care for the sick at home. Women needed a little occupation to save them from "ennui," "disgust," and even "suicide," and they were by nature better qualified as nurses than men: self-sacrificing and self-forgetful, "they are formed for days and nights and months and years of watchfulness." Not only capable of such marathons of selflessness, women also "more readily anticipate our wants." Naturally, given such altruistic natures, the women nurses who are to be employed officially outside of their homes, "can be employed much cheaper" than men.6 The essence of professionalism in nineteenth-century America was competition, and competition should clearly be anathema to the womanly watcher Alcott paints. A rough bargain was being struck here as in so many other occupational fields at the turn of the nineteenth century. Women were exchanging some kind of professional expertise and official recognition for a domesticated version of the occupation in question, a version fed by official veneration but sapped by its distance from technological, scientific advance and its closeness to the hearth.7 In other words, women, told that they had been third-rate professional doctors, were promised that they could be first-rate amateur nurses. They could no longer be midwives, but they could be madonnas. One can even speculate that the sentimental adulation granted the mother watching at the sickbed was a kind of guilty, if unconscious...

Cytotaxonomic Notes on Some Neotropical Gentianaceae

Chromosome numbers for 13 species in four genera of neotropical Gentianaceae are reported for the first time. The chromosome numbers suggest a relationship between Symbolanthus, Macrocarpaea, and Chelonanthus and support the separation of Lisianthius and Chelonanthus. The Gentianaceae is a moderate-sized family, comprising approximately 800 species (Engler & Diels, 1936). Their distribution is essentially worldwide. In many cases generic limits within the family are poorly defined, and intergeneric relationships are poorly understood. Particularly troublesome are those approximately 100 neotropical members of the family which are supposedly related to Lisianthius P. Browne. In accordance with the genera accepted by Gilg (1895) this would include the following: Macrocarpaea Gilg, Pagaea Griseb., Helia Mart., Irlbachia Mart., Lehmaniella Gilg, Adenolisianthus Gilg, Calolisianthus Gilg, Chelonanthus Gilg, Purdieanthus Gilg, Lagenanthus Gilg, Rusbyanthus Gilg, Symbolanthus Don, and Lisianthius P. Browne. Taxonomic studies of this group of genera have been hampered not only by the paucity of specimens, but also by their miserable condition. Macrocarpaea is the only genus of moderate size for which a reasonably complete monograph (Ewan, 1948) is available. With the exception of Gentiana and its segregates, little is known about the cytology of the family. There are apparently no published chromosome counts for any of the lisianthioid genera. Counts are reported here for the first time for thirteen species in four of the genera. The standard squash technique was used: Flower buds were fixed in modified Carnoy's solution, stored in 70% ethanol, and the pollen mother cells were subsequently squashed in acetocarmine. The results are listed in Table 1. According to the most comprehensive treatment of the Gentianaceae (Gilg, 1895), Lisianthius and Macrocarpaea belong to the tribe Gentianeae, subtribe Tachiinae, while Chelonanthus and Symbolanthus belong to the tribe Helieae. In Gilg's treatment the Gentianeae and the Helieae, as well as most other major groupings within the family, were delimited on the basis of pollen grain morphology. Those genera whose pollen grains are united into tetrads were referred to the Helieae; all other genera supposedly are characterized by having separate pollen grains. The findings of more recent authors suggest that Gilg's system is probably inadequate. Ewan (1948) argued that the genera most closely related to Macro'Most of the field work involved in this study was supported by National Science Foundation Grant GB-6393. I thank Dr. Robert L. Wilbur and Dr. Donald E. Stone for assistance in the preparation of this manuscript. Cytological vouchers are in DUKE. 2Department of Botany, Duke University, Durham, North Carolina 27706. ANN. MISSOURI BOT. GARD. 56: 439-443. 1969. This content downloaded from 157.55.39.243 on Wed, 05 Oct 2016 04:40:20 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms

Admissions to Scottish Mental Hospitals in the Last Hundred Years

The increase in admissions to mental hospitals in Scotland since 1941 shows no sign of abating, and it seems proper to examine the phenomenon historically with the hope that information relevant to the present situation will emerge. Before 1857 mental hospital statistics in Scotland were quite unreliable. There were in force three Acts of Parliament which were intended to regulate the confinement and treatment of the mentally ill and to make provision for the keeping of accurate records. Unfortunately, these Acts were so loosely worded and so ambiguous that they were almost impossible to administer. Outside the seven new Scottish Royal Asylums the plight of the insane was indeed pitiable. An American woman, Miss Dorothea Lynde Dix, who had retired from school teaching and assumed as her mission in life the amelioration of conditions in prisons and lunatic asylums, with considerable success in her own country, visited Scotland in 1855 and inspected a number of asylums near Edinburgh. Finding their inmates badly treated and in a most miserable condition, she at once went to London and laid this information with much circumstantial detail before the Secretary of State for the Home Department, who decided that the evidence justified the appointment of a Royal Commission. The Commission was appointed in the same year: To inquire into the state of lunatic asylums in Scotland and the existing law in reference to lunatics and lunatic asylums in that part of the United Kingdom. The report was presented in 1857, and on its recommendations was based the Lunacy (Scotland) Act of 1857, which remains today the backbone of the Scottish lunacy code. Possibly the most important result of this Act, which took effect on January 1, 1858, was the setting up of the General Board of Commissioners in Lunacy for Scotland and with it the machinery for recording accurate statistics of mental hospital admissions.

ON SOME RESULTS OF ANTHROPOLOGICAL MEASUREMENT OF JAVANESE ABORIGINES

1. It was established by physical measurement that the Djawanese, the Soendanese, the Madoeranese and the Bataviyans, representing the major portion of the Indonesian aboriginal population, belong to the same stock notwithstanding the acknowledged difference in their language and cultural history. The author attributed the minor differences found among them to environmental and cultural factors.2. Tenggers and Baduys are dolichocephalic, distinct from the other tribes.3. Standard of stature for Indonesians is difficult to establish. But the author regardedt he average in the recruits of the volunteer army as the standard, namely 1'60.2 cm, which occupies a medium position among various races known to anthropology.4. Development in breadth dimension is observed in fair degree in inhabitants of hilly regions and army recruits, but is much unsatisfactory in inhabitants of towns and farmers in plain regions, particularly among coolies. This was attributed largely to their miserable condition of living, especially their unreasonably low nutritive condition.5. Characteristic of somatic constitution of Indonesians was found, compared to Japanese as well as to other asiatic races, in their relatively short trunk and long limbs. These features are regarded by the author as fit to the tropical life, allowing stronger dissipation of heat from the body, which is probably the resu t of acclimatization acquired in generations by woy of natura selection.6. Head circumference varies slightly according to the status of living, namely, largest in intellectuals aud smallest in coolies. Greate rvalue found for Tenggers is probably a feature characteristic of the tribe.7. As for' cranial types, the three principal tribes uniformly showed lengthbreadth index about 85, while Tenggers and Badujs had about 80, a relatevely dolichocephalic type)8. Since the data for women wass not supported by sufficiently numerous measurements, definite conclusion was reserved, though it so far tended to conform with the author's results and conclusions for male inhabitants.

BRONCHIAL ASTHMA

It is with considerable temerity that I bring up this subject, probably the most difficult and disheartening in the whole domain of allergy. Still, it is one that all workers in this field occasionally have to face. I am referring to the ill, disabled person with chronic asthma—the chronic daily user of epinephrine, often in heavy dosages and often over a period of several years, with occasional exacerbations requiring the hypodermic administration of morphine, often for several days at a time. Nasopharyngeal operations have been performed, vaccines, pollen extracts and nonspecific therapy of all sorts have been employed, and various changes of residence and dietary measures tried, all to only temporary, partial or no avail. The patients are usually over 20 years of age, ordinarily poorly nourished and in miserable general condition. Loss of weight is considerable, and hypotension is the rule. Physical examination usually shows no pathologic process other

Irrigation in Egypt

The Esneh Dam. THE construction of the dam on the Nile near Esneh, which has recently been completed, the last stone being laid by the Khedive, marks another step in the progress of that country since it has been under British control. Less than thirty years ago Egypt was on the verge of financial ruin, the annual expenses exceeding the income, and there not being sufficient revenue to pay the interest on the national debt. The peasantry were in a miserable and poverty-stricken condition, and constantly harassed by the continuous calls under the labour conscription, or corvée, for the repairs of the banks or the cleansing of the irrigation canals. This system has now been entirely done away with; the small farmers are no longer at the mercy of the money-lender, and are in a prosperous and contented condition. The revenue shows a surplus, and the yield of the crops has been enormously increased.

EPISPADIC EXSTROPHY OF THE BLADDER COMPLETE.

Dr. Rudolph Matas, 1 at the last meeting of the Association , gave such a complete resume of the subject that it would be simply repetition to now enter into a general discussion of the topic—and in his conclusions favored Maydl's operation, holding that the autoplastic operations could be little more than palliative, and never satisfactory. His paper decided me to report a case and exhibit the patient, showing the result of autoplastic work. I do not know how original the procedure to be described may be, though I have been unable to find a report of such a one. Mr. J. McE., aged 17 years, was referred to me by Dr. J. M. Mathews. on Oct. 26, 1897. He had come to Louisville to obtain a urinal and, if possible, get relief from the miserable condition of complete bladder exstrophy. Fig. 1 shows the condition before operation. He was fairly