Sick Man Research Articles

Die Innovationsfähigkeit Deutschlands

Abstract Current assessments of the German economy and its innovation potential are reminiscent of the early 2000s when Germany was considered the sick man of Europe. Germany is facing enormous challenges of overlapping crises in connection with demographic change and the green transformation that will require a wide range of innovations to overcome. The responsibility must first and foremost be borne by the companies themselves. However, public (infrastructure) investment is often followed by private investment. Streamlining the bureaucracy for targeted immigration is a high priority in order to counteract the shortage of skilled labour.

The Law of Fratricide Eradicated the Ottoman Dynasty but the Last Sick Man of Europe is Still Alive

The Law of Fratricide Eradicated the Ottoman Dynasty but the Last Sick Man of Europe is Still Alive

Mineviku kogemust uurides. Rüiteki näide / Studying past experience. The case of rüi blanket

This article examines the unique type of blanket used in Hiiumaa, the rüi. Presumably the rüi blanket is related to the Swedish and West Finnish fringed rugs woven with the ryijy technique on looms. In contrast to the ryijy technique, the Hiiumaa rüi does not have yarn piles sown into it, but the hairy top layer is made of rug rags (nukud) sown onto the base blanket. According to archival records, the rüi imitated fur, which made the blanket exceptionally warm and could be worn at night in cold conditions (e.g. on a sea voyage, sleeping in a meadow). In Hiiumaa, rüis were still made until the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries, when the continuity of blanket making ceased. The aim of this article is to present the historical background of the rüi blanket, to describe the process of making of a rüi blanket reconstruction, and to compile stories of experiences from people who slept under the rüi reconstruction. Although this type of blanket was still very common in Hiiumaa in the 19th century, only two exemplary blankets are known to have survived to the present day. A rüi of rather poor condition is preserved in the Estonian National Museum (ERM A 332: 4). During a collection expedition to Hiiumaa in 1901, the Finnish ethnologist Axel Olai Heikel (1851–1924) brought one of the rüis also to the Finnish National Museum (SU 4002: 269). In addition to the few specimens, many written records have fortunately survived from the beginning of the 20th century of how the rüi was made and used. Most of the written records are preserved in the Ethnographic Archive (EA) and Correspondents’ Reply (KV) of the Estonian National Museum. Rüi blankets have been used in different places in Hiiumaa, but they had one purpose – to protect against cold. The blanket was taken to the meadows (it was used to sleep under a hayloft), and it was also used as a boat blanket, although the rüi was mainly used to sleep under at home during the cold season, as just a blanket was rarely warm (ERMA EA 20: 1, 193). In addition to its very practical properties, the rüi also had a wider social significance, as it was part of the dowry of a Hiiumaa bride. Communal work bees were organised to make the blanket and even in the 19th century, the gifts brought to the bride still included clothes suitable for making shreds (nukud). A recurring theme throughout the period of reconstruction was the weight of the rüi blanket. It has been noted that the blanket was so heavy that a sick man could not even carry it and that children grew tired under it. It is recorded from Pühalepa that the blanket could have weighed up to one pood (16,381 kg). In addition, I wanted to add value to the reconstructed blanket through stories of experience. Very many ethnographic descriptions leave the impression that the rüi was very heavy and unusually warm. My desire was to find out how people in the 21st century reflect the experience of sleeping under a blanket that was common in the 19th century. Does it get cold, does the blanket prickle, is it too heavy, etc.? In its finished form, the rüi reconstruction weighs 8,1 kg, half the target weight. The rüi blanket deposited in Finland weighs 7 kg (+/– 1 kg), which calls into question the veracity of the archival record rather than the physical shortcomings of the reconstruction. Three men slept under the rüi reconstruction between 7–13 September 2021, when the night-time temperature was around +10ºC. The participants of the experiment pointed out that the blanket absorbed moisture very well and they didn’t get wet even when sleeping on the ground. The people sleeping under the rüi did not mention that the blanket was too heavy or too warm. Through the process of studying and making a rüi, a significant number of people took part in the intangible heritage of the Hiiumaa people – their skills, knowledge, and experience. The finished blanket is part of the collections of Hiiumaa Museums (HKM 6648:1 Tst 8:22), thus providing an opportunity to familiarise oneself with the item and use the information also for future generations. Keywords: sea blanket, rüi, handicraft techniques, reconstruction, practice-based research, user experience

How the German Economy Went from Being the Sick Man of Europe to Being a European Leader

Germanys economy has been stagnant since the 21st century, and was once called the sick man of Europe. However, in just a few years, Germanys economy has soared to become the leader of the European economy. This economic miracle is inseparable from Germanys economic reforms. Germany solved the problems of its own indebtedness and the solidification of the labor market by reducing welfare support. Secondly, Germany has also shown a solid performance to the world economic crisis, through its usual low consumer demand, good trade performance before the crisis, and short-term labor to reduce the financial burden for the enterprise, to ensure the employment rate during the economic crisis, so that it can quickly come out from the crisis. Not only that, Germany has also fully utilized its own advantages, Germany through the investment in education to ensure that the manufacturing industry continues to innovate, to maintain the competitiveness of the manufacturing industry in the international market, to ensure its export surplus and the advantages of the manufacturing industry.

The Rising China is Not a ‘Sick Man’ Anymore: Cultural Nationalism in the Xi Jinping Era

ABSTRACT This study explores Chinese cultural nationalism since Xi Jinping became the President, that is, the ways that Xi constructs and politicises culture to serve his nationalist interests. It first situates cultural nationalism in the global context and clarifies its usage in China. Then the article explains how national humiliation, the ‘sick man’ metaphor, the ‘great power’ narrative, and national rejuvenation provide a broader context of understanding Chinese cultural nationalism. Applying summative content analysis to examine the government discourse on its website since Xi Jinping became the president in 2012, this article shows that Xi downplays national humiliation and the ‘sick man’ metaphor while emphasising the ‘great power’ narrative and national rejuvenation. The author argues that this politisation of culture has a strong personal feature of Xi and serves his nationalist purposes in many ways. Finally, this article discusses the rationales and risks of his promotion of such cultural nationalism and the implications of the study.

The portraits of disease

‘The portraits of disease’ explores the link between the symbolic use of diseases and the propagation of ideologies. It traces the origins of the term ‘Sick Man of Asia’ back to British newspapers in the mid-eighteenth century and its development into a metaphor for actual pathogens. The author contends that coloniality and pathogens share similarities, as both are highly transmissible and cannot be seen with the naked eye. The text also examines the influence of German-influenced microbiological research in the Japanese Empire on the expansion of public health methods and institutions in Taiwan, Korea and north-eastern China. This study calls for a broader conversation about the intersections between science, ideology and power in our contemporary global context.

Violence from a psychological and theological perspective

As an instrument of shared hope, of care for others, the Church, by virtue of divine grace, must shape future generations to be true communities of peace, capable of living the word of the Gospel. Violence, aggressive behavior has both bio-physiological causes, but it is also a learned reaction; however, the will of man dominates over all and as the source of aggression we find the sin that produces an aggression on the person who commits it, but also on fellow humans and nature. Orthodox spirituality sees in a violent man, a sick man, his acquisition being a commandment, and this must be achieved through understanding and through the infusion of love.

Public Health and Sanitary Reforms in the Context of the Formation of the Modern State in China: from Empire to Republic

The article discusses key episodes connected with the formation of public health care system in China in the last years of the Qing Empire and the first years of the Chinese Republic. It is shown that this process was part of a more general process of modernization of the Chinese statehood, the reason for which was the interference of foreign countries in the internal affairs of China. In an effort to get rid of the image of the “sick man of Asia” that accompanied the empire in its historical bankruptcy, state dignitaries, intellectuals and the nationalist-minded medical community proclaimed the need to reform the state system. They saw as an essential part of the reform process the creation of an effective health care system, and the condition for this was the use of the achievements of Western medical science and sanitation. Part of the processes under consideration were measures to control the Manchurian plague epidemic, to establish modern medical institutions, to educate the population in sanitary matters and to employ reputable medical specialists in the service of the government.

:Anglo-Saxon(ist) Pasts, PostSaxon Futures

:<i>Anglo-Saxon(ist) Pasts, PostSaxon Futures</i>

The Sick Person’s Relationship with God in the Healing Process according to Ben Sira (Sir 38:9–11)

Ben Sira’s teaching on medicine and healing in Sir 38:1–15 is divided into two parts: the first (38:1–8) deals directly with the medicine of the time (doctors – 38:1–3 and the medicines they used – 38:4–8), while the second focuses on the healing process (38:9–15). In the latter, the sage first focuses on the attitude of the sick (38:9–11) towards God and the role and tasks of the physician in the process of healing the sick (38:12–15). The article addresses Ben Sira’s teaching on the relationship of the sick man to the Lord (38:9–11). The sage, after positively evaluating and responding to modern medicine (a novelty in the Old Testament), returns in 38:9–11 to the implicitly expressed conviction found in the Bible that only God can restore health to a sick person – that He is the only physician. He therefore urges the sick person to turn to God. According to the sage, turning to the Most High (38:9a), prayer (38:9b), the rejection of sin and iniquity (38:10) and sacrifices (38:11) play an important role in the process of recovery. Sir 38:9–11 has a concentric structure with a call for a change in moral conduct at its centre (38:10). These are surrounded by appeals to turn to the Lord (38:9 and 38:11). According to Ben Sira, healing from illness is the work of God, so the sick person should make a conversion (abandon sin and turn away from evil) and renew his relationship with the Most High. According to him, conversion is crucial in the healing process – without it, the sick person cannot return to health and full strength. In this way, the sage expresses the Old Testament teaching about illness as the result of sin (retribution) and God as the only physician. What is new in Ben Sira’s teaching is the call to offer sacrifices for the recovery of health and healing from suffering.

From sick old man to mythical hero

In his autobiography, Conversations with Myself, Mandela spoke about his concern that the worldhad a false image of him as a saint and semi-god (Mandela, 2012). However, it can be noted thatMandela and the ANC carefully built up his symbolic power in the press and media to representhim as “some kind of Messiah” (Ottaway, 1993:11) who had led South Africa to freedom almostsingle-handedly, and in doing so cemented his ideals of liberation, peace and non-racialisationin the imagination of the world. However, as Mandela’s health deteriorated before his death, hisconstructed immortality was tested as society began to question if his legacy could live on withoutthe physical presence of ‘Mandela the man’. Consequently, this article examines the representationof Mandela in his few final years. In an examination of the Independent Online news repository in2010 and 2013, this research highlights how ‘Madiba’s Magic’ was a carefully constructed mediaimage and one that, during his long illness, forced South Africans, and the world, to recognise his‘humanness’. The paper concludes, however, by documenting the immense power of Mandela’slegacy as played out in the press, and how, after death, his carefully constructed legacy roseabove the damage of his prolonged illness, elevating him from a sick old man and reinforcing himas a mythical revolutionary.

Strindberg's Representation of Anxiety in The Father: Between Naturalistic Determinism and Existential Indeterminism

Strindberg's Representation of Anxiety in <i>The Father</i>: Between Naturalistic Determinism and Existential Indeterminism

Trade in the Levant during the Ottoman Empire until 1887: Aleppo - as a Model

The importance of Aleppo’s location in Levant, springs from the role it plays in international trade, its openness to the world, especially after the industrial revolution in Europe, and the issuance of modern laws alongside economic reformations made by the Ottoman Empire in most fields. However, this flourishment ended with the weakness and disintegration of the state—a matter that was engendered by the intervention of European countries, and the beginning of colonial projects to divide the property of the sick man (the Ottoman Empire), especially in the Levant.

Fear the fear: the historical analogies of COVID-19 in US–China relations

The impacts of the novel coronavirus (hereafter COVID-19) pose one of the greatest crises of our generation. The policy decisions that the US and Chinese governments take will shape the current order of international relations, the global supply chain of medical supplies, and US–China relations. The COVID-19 crisis leads to the empirical puzzles: how do the two great world powers construct their narratives on the global pandemic and toward each other? What are the meanings, if any, of fear in US–China relations? This study explores the narrative of fear that is constituted in the US and China discourse. The historical analogies, such as the Boxer Indemnity, sick man of Asia, and Pearl Harbor attack, offer great examples to the political construction of the “fearful” other through specific representations amid the outbreak of COVID-19. Specifically, they have become the “cultural scripts” that define how they interact and who they are. The article proceeds as follows. First, this study examines the current literature of realism, constructivism, and discourse analysis. Second, it proposes a comparative framework for understanding the expressions of fear and threat perceptions for both countries. Specifically, the “Pearl Harbor Moment” from the US, and “the Boxer Indemnity” from the Chinese government substantially shape the landscape of US–China relations. Third, it highlights how the political elites appropriate these historical analogies in constructing their political identities and offers insights into the future of US–China relations. Finally, this article concludes with thoughts on the studies on the struggle of great powers and implications for pandemic politics.

" ‘병든 중국’을 치료하기 - 청말 중국에서의 신체에 대한 새로운 인식 - "

China’s defeat in the two mid-nineteenth century Opium Wars led many Chinese Confucian scholars to realize that China was not the center of the world and damaged their long-standing pride in Chinese civilization. After that, a negative perspective of China grew rapidly in the West, represented by a view of China as the “sick man of Asia.” This negative perception was widespread m China as well. This paper examines the creation and dissemination of the sick man of Asia narrative and critically explores the Western-centered ideas that supported the narrative, such as social Darwinism, pathology, imperialism, and Orientalism. In addition, by analyzing reform-minded intellectuals’ worldviews and renewed views of the body and the Dianshizhai Pictorial’s illustrations of Western sports and medical technology, this paper investigates the ways in which the sick man of Asia narrative was reproduced in China and influenced Chinese society.

Sleeping Lion or Sick Man? Machine Learning Approaches to Deciphering Heterogeneous Images of Chinese in North America

Based on more than 280,000 newspaper articles published in North America, this study proposes an integrative machine learning framework to explore heterogeneous social sentiments over time. After retrieving and preprocessing articles containing the term “Chinese” from six mainstream newspapers, we identified major discussion topics and assigned articles to their corresponding topics via posterior probabilities estimated by using a novel Bayesian nonparametric model, the hierarchical Dirichlet process. We also employed a groundbreaking deep learning technique, bidirectional encoder representations from transformers, to assign a negative or positive sentiment score to each newspaper article, which was trained on binary-labeled movie reviews from the Internet Movie Database (IMDb). By combining state-of-the-art tools for topic modeling and sentiment analysis, we found an overall lack of consensus on whether sentiments in North America since 1978 were pro- or anti-Chinese. Moreover, the images of Chinese are highly topic specific: (1) sentiments across different topics show distinct trajectories over the period of study; (2) discussion topics explain much more of the variation in sentiments than do the publisher, year of publication, or country of publisher; (3) less positive sentiments appear to be more relevant to material concerns than to ethnic considerations, whereas more positive sentiments are associated with an appreciation of culture; and (4) sentiments on the same or similar topic might exhibit different temporal patterns in the United States and Canada. These new findings not only suggest a multifaceted and dynamic view of social sentiments in a transnational context but also call for a paradigm shift in understanding intertwined sociodiscursive interactions over time.

Newfoundland and Labrador: The Paradoxical "Sick Man" of Canada

Newfoundland and Labrador: The Paradoxical "Sick Man" of Canada

Zhang Weishen: A Pioneer in the Development and Industrial Production of Penicillin in New China

The research and development of penicillin started with difficulty before 1949 and achieved certain results. In 1951, after the founding of the People's Republic of China, Zhang Weishen, as the only Chinese scientist who had been trained and worked in a penicillin research and development center in the United States for many years, overcame many difficulties and returned to China. In 1953, with the efforts of Zhang Weishen and his colleagues, China realized the industrialized production of penicillin, alleviating the urgent needs of the masses. Antibiotics has also become the first discipline to achieve major scientific and technological achievements after the founding of the New China. In the mid-1950s, the technical breakthrough in the localization of lactose substitutes marked the localization of the raw materials of the penicillin-producing culture medium, which paved the way for the industrialized production of penicillin with Chinese characteristics. Antibiotics have become one of the most widely used and affordable drugs for hundreds of millions of patients in China, and China has since ended the humiliating history of the "Sick Man of East Asia".

Correlation of the local criminal legislation with the bioethical problems

The actuality of the approached subject results from the interest shown in knowing the correlation of the local criminal legislation with the problems of bioethics. The correct application of the criminal provisions in force in relation to bioethics, can help the sick man, but especially it can ensure the further healthy development of the human species. This is necessary in order to defend, protect and possibly heal any man, meaning by this the obligation to improve the quality of life through appropriate medical measures to prevent, combat, support and protect the population.

De-Historicizing (Mainstream) Ottoman Historiography on Tanzimat and Tahdith: Jus Gentium and Pax Britannica Violate Osmanli Sovereignty in Arabia

The (secular-humanist) philosophical theology governing (positivist) disciplines such as International Law and International Relations precludes a priori any communicative examination of how the exclusion of Arab-Ottoman jurisprudence is necessary for the ontological coherence of jurisprudent concepts such as society and sovereignty, together with teleological narratives constellating the “Age of Reason” such as modernity and civilization. The exercise of sovereignty by the British Crown—in 19th and 20th century Arabia—consisted of (positivist) legal doctrines comprising “scientific processes” denying Ottoman legal sovereignty, thereby proceeding to “order” societies situated in Dar al-Islam and “detach” Ottoman-Arab subjects from their Ummah. This “rational exercise” of power by the British Crown—mythologizing an unbridgeable epistemological gap between a Latin-European subject as civic and an objectified Ottoman-Arab as despotic—legalized (regulatory) measures referencing ethno/sect-centric paradigms which not only “deported” Ottoman-Arab ijtihad (Eng. legal reasoning and exegetic hermeneutics) from the realm of “international law”, but also rationalized geographic demarcations and demographic alterations across Ottoman-Arab vilayets. Both inter-related disciplines, therefore, affirm an “exclusionary self-image” when dealing with “foreign epistemologies” by transforming “cultural difference” into “legal difference”, thus suing that it is in the protection of jus gentium that “recognized sovereigns” exercise redeeming measures on “Turks”, “Moors”, or “Arabs”. It is precisely the knowledge lost ensuing from such irreflexive “positivist image” that this legal-historical research seeks to deconstruct by moving beyond a myopic analysis claiming Ottoman-Arab ‘Umran (Eng. civilization) as homme malade (i.e., sick man); or that the Caliphate attempted but failed to become reasonable during the 18th and 19th century because it adhered to Arab-Islamic philosophical theology. Therefore, this research commits to deconstructing “mainstream” Ottoman historiography claiming that tanzimat (Eng. reorganization) and tahdith (Eng. modernization) were simply “degenerative periods” affirming the temporal “backwardness” of Ottoman civilization and/or the innate incapacity of its epistemology in furnishing a (modern) civil society.