J.-B. Charcot; father of French polar research

Polar Record ◽  
1989 ◽  
Vol 25 (154) ◽  
pp. 191-196
Author(s):  
Jean Malaurie

AbstractBorn in 1867 and trained as a doctor, Jean-Baptiste Charcot gave up a fashionable medical practice to become, in his mid-thirties, France's leading polar explorer. His two major expeditions to the peninsular sector of Antarctica and the Bellingshausen Sea (1903–05, 1908–10) resulted in many new discoveries of land and established his reputation as a leader in the fields of scientific oceanography, research and survey. After service in World War I he continued polar work with a series of ten summer expeditions to the Arctic (1926–36), in which many young explorers were trained. Lost with his ship Pourquoi Pas? in a storm off Iceland in 1936, Charcot is remembered for qualities of leadership and scientific integrity which inspire the current generation of French polar scientists.

2018 ◽  
Vol 29 (2) ◽  
pp. 187-198 ◽  
Author(s):  
AD (Sandy) Macleod

Case reports of the abrupt recovery of hysterical disorders during World War I (1914–18), though undoubtedly subject to publication bias, raise both aetiological and treatment issues regarding pseudo-neurological conversion symptoms. Published clinical anecdotes report circumstantial, psychotherapeutic, hypnotic, persuasive (and coercive) methods seemingly inducing recovery, and also responses to fright and alterations of consciousness. The ethics of modern medical practice would not allow many of these techniques, which were reported to be effective, even in the chronic cases.


2021 ◽  
pp. 69-90
Author(s):  
David Bosco

The world wars of the 20th century saw the collapse of pre-war rules designed to protect merchant shipping from interference. In both wars, combatants engaged in unrestricted submarine warfare and imposed vast ocean exclusion zones, leading to unprecedented interference with ocean commerce. After World War I, the United States began to supplant Britain as the leading naval power, and it feuded with Britain over maritime rights. Other developments in the interwar period included significant state-sponsored ocean research, including activity by Germany in the Atlantic and the Soviets in the Arctic. Maritime commerce was buffeted by the shocks of the world wars. Eager to trim costs, US shipping companies experimented with “flags of convenience” to avoid new national safety and labor regulations. The question of the breadth of the territorial sea remained unresolved, as governments bickered about the appropriate outer limit of sovereign control.


Polar Record ◽  
2004 ◽  
Vol 40 (1) ◽  
pp. 31-38 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kjell-G. Kjaer ◽  
Hilary Foxworthy

The steam barque Danmark, used on Ludvig Mylius-Erichsen's expedition to northeast Greenland (1906–08), was originally a Scottish whaler named Sir Colin Campbell, built in 1855 in Sunderland. After nine years of whaling out of Peterhead, in 1865 Sir Colin Campbell started the transportation of cryolite from the mines of Ivigtut in southwest Greenland to the United States and several European ports. This trade lasted for 103 years, until 1968. In the early 1870s, the ship was sold to Norwegian owners, renamed Magdalena, fitted with a steam-engine, and used as part of the Tønsberg sealing fleet. In 1894 she was the ship in which Roald Amundsen made his first voyage to the Arctic. In 1905 Magdalena was chartered by the estate of William Ziegler for a relief expedition to Bass Rock, northeast Greenland, to search for members of the Fiala-Ziegler expedition. The next year she was sold to the Danmark-Expedition and renamed Danmark. The main task for the expedition was to survey the coast from 77°N to Independence Bay, an area that was completely unknown. In addition to geographical exploration, much ethnographical, ornithological, zoological, hydrographical, meteorological, and botanical work was carried out on the expedition. In 1909, Danmark was sold to the mining company Grønlandske Minedrifts Aktieselskab of Copenhagen. She made voyages every year to Greenland, returning with copper and graphite. In 1916 she was chartered by the American Museum of Natural History to bring home the members of the Crocker Land Expedition. When in December 1917 she returned to Denmark, her captain did not know that, in their two years' absence, the coastal signals had been changed due to conditions in World War I. Danmark grounded off Høganes, Sweden; condemned, she was sold to a breaker's yard, and her masts, sails, engine, and other fittings were sold at auction the following year.


1985 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 122-137 ◽  
Author(s):  
Albert Carozzi

The reaction in Germany indicates that in spite of World War I, the geological community was very much alive. Opinions ranged from violent and emotional rejections by prominent scientists, who saw their previously published theories challenged, to active acceptance of an exciting new concept to be tested in the various fields of geology. The French reaction, delayed by the death of many geologists during the war, and hampered by the language barrier, remained provincial and chauvinistic. Only lofty and skeptical comments were presented against what was considered an amateurish theory by a geophysicist. In reality, nobody in France, with the exception of Philibert Russo and Boris Choubert, was at the time involved in any orogenic theory or prepared to accept the challenge. The idea of continental bridges prevailed. In Switzerland, after the introduction of Wegener's ideas by Emile Argand during the war, and in spite of strong anti-German feelings, the concept was accepted quickly and enthusiastically as the best framework for solving critical problems of Alpine tectonics. Several famous Austrian geologists had published orogenic theories for the Alps based on the contraction the-ory and rejected Wegener's mobilism, but later, under the influence of Swiss geologists, they showed partial acceptance. Belgian geologists rejected Wegener's theory because they considered the beautiful symmetry of the present surface of the Earth incompatible with the assumed breaking-up of an original continental mass. Italian geologists, with a few exceptions, rejected Wegener's "aberration" while Spain, unaffected by the war, had a positive attitude which was facilitated by an early translation and a receptive academic audience. Dutch geologists, deeply involved with the Indonesian archipelago, accepted widespread mobilism with enthusiasm since it provided a spectacular answer to their problems. The Scandinavians, supportive but unable to interpret Precambrian geology with Wegener's theory, concentrated their efforts on astronomical and geodetic studies of present-day drift in the Arctic region. In summary, the reaction in Continental Europe was extremely diversified and dominated by an association of strong post World War I politics, the language barrier, the stifling of academic authority, passions of individuals, and regionalism of geology.


2020 ◽  
pp. 253-270
Author(s):  
D. V. Andriyanova ◽  
D. Yu. Fedotova

The article is devoted to the study of medical practice in Western Siberia of the late XIX - early XX centuries. Attention is paid to the organization of medical practice in the Tobolsk province. The quantitative and official composition of medical personnel is described. The relevance of the study is due to the fact that on the basis of a wide body of diverse material for the first time the experience of the activities and biographies of medical inspectors: N. A. Stroganov, F. K. Zembitsky, V. I. Nikitenko, M. V. Miloslavsky, G. N. Egorov is considered. Their role in the development of medical practice in the Tobolsk province of 1895-1917 is described. It is shown that these inspectors had a high level of education and extensive experience in medical work. It is pointed out that, despite all the efforts and significant success in the development of medical practice, there were objective difficulties in this field of activity, among which there was a shortage of personnel, funding, long distances between settlements, the Russian-Japanese War and World War I, etc. The authors use a representative base of both published sources and unpublished materials from the collections of the State Archives of Tobolsk.


2017 ◽  
pp. 142-155
Author(s):  
I. Rozinskiy ◽  
N. Rozinskaya

The article examines the socio-economic causes of the outcome of the Spanish Civil War (1936-1936), which, as opposed to the Russian Civil War, resulted in the victory of the “Whites”. Choice of Spain as the object of comparison with Russia is justified not only by similarity of civil wars occurred in the two countries in the XX century, but also by a large number of common features in their history. Based on statistical data on the changes in economic well-being of different strata of Spanish population during several decades before the civil war, the authors formulate the hypothesis according to which the increase of real incomes of Spaniards engaged in agriculture is “responsible” for their conservative political sympathies. As a result, contrary to the situation in Russia, where the peasantry did not support the Whites, in Spain the peasants’ position predetermined the outcome of the confrontation resulting in the victory of the Spanish analogue of the Whites. According to the authors, the possibility of stable increase of Spanish peasants’ incomes was caused by the nation’s non-involvement in World War I and also by more limited, compared to Russia and some other countries, spending on creation of heavy (primarily military-related) industry in Spain.


2016 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 32-54 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jesse Tumblin

This article examines the way a group of colonies on the far reaches of British power – Australia, New Zealand, Canada, and India, dealt with the imperatives of their own security in the early twentieth century. Each of these evolved into Dominion status and then to sovereign statehood (India lastly and most thoroughly) over the first half of the twentieth century, and their sovereignties evolved amidst a number of related and often countervailing problems of self-defence and cooperative security strategy within the British Empire. The article examines how security – the abstracted political goods of military force – worked alongside race in the greater Pacific to build colonial sovereignties before the First World War. Its first section examines the internal-domestic dimension of sovereignty and its need to secure territory through the issue of imperial naval subsidies. A number of colonies paid subsidies to Britain to support the Royal Navy and thus to contribute in financial terms to their strategic defense. These subsidies provoked increasing opposition after the turn of the twentieth century, and the article exlpores why colonial actors of various types thought financial subsidies threatened their sovereignties in important ways. The second section of the article examines the external-diplomatic dimension of sovereignty by looking at the way colonial actors responded to the Anglo-Japanese Alliance. I argue that colonial actors deployed security as a logic that allowed them to pursue their own bids for sovereignty and autonomy, leverage racial discourses that shaped state-building projects, and ultimately to attempt to nudge the focus of the British Empire's grand strategy away from Europe and into Asia.


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