Catatonia

Author(s):  
Max Fink

For more than a century, catatonia has been considered a marker of the Kraepelin/Bleuler concept of schizophrenia. However, over the past half-century, it has been increasingly recognized as a separate entity, independently diagnosable and treatable. This chapter explores the diagnosis, treatment, and biological underpinnings of catatonia. Initially, it lists certain motor behaviours whose presentation might indicate catatonia, according to the Catatonia Rating Scale (CRS) such as mutism, delirium, and repetitive rhythmic acts. Through the intravenous administration of certain drugs, such as benzodiazepines, barbiturates, or gamma-aminobutyric acid (GABA) agonists, the effect on the patient’s CRS score is used to confirm the diagnosis. The treatment history of catatonia prior to the discovery of the efficacy of benzodiazepines and induced grand mal seizures (electroconvulsive therapy) is broached, such as chemically induced seizures and amobarbital. Finally, its different presentations are discussed, along with its consideration as a biological fear response.

2020 ◽  
Vol 50 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 58-66
Author(s):  
Giuliano Pancaldi

Here I survey a sample of the essays and reviews on the sciences of the long eighteenth century published in this journal since it was founded in 1969. The connecting thread is some historiographic reflections on the role that disciplines—in both the sciences we study and the fields we practice—have played in the development of the history of science over the past half century. I argue that, as far as disciplines are concerned, we now find ourselves a bit closer to a situation described in our studies of the long eighteenth century than we were fifty years ago. This should both favor our understanding of that period and, hopefully, make the historical studies that explore it more relevant to present-day developments and science policy. This essay is part of a special issue entitled “Looking Backward, Looking Forward: HSNS at 50,” edited by Erika Lorraine Milam.


1989 ◽  
Vol 23 (1) ◽  
pp. 179-207 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mick Moore

The Sri Lankan rural economy has long been categorized into a plantation sector producing tea, rubber and some coconuts for export, and a smallholder sector producing mainly food, especially rice, for domestic consumption. While incomplete, this dichotomy is still usable. One of the significant features of Sri Lankan rural history over the past half century has been a partial transfer of tea and rubber production from the plantation sector to the smallholder sector. In this and in related respects the traditional plantation-smallholder dichotomy has been weakening. Yet in another important respect there has been no convergence between the two sectors. The plantation sector has remained fully capitalist in the commonsense meaning of that term, while capitalist relations of production appear to have made few further inroads into the smallholder sector. True that a great deal of the labour used in smallholder production is hired. But that has long been the case. The evidence suggests that since World War Two the small family farm has at least held its own as the dominant form under which land is owned and managed. This has happened despite rapid population growth on a terrain already densely populated.


1988 ◽  
Vol 47 (1) ◽  
pp. 41-90 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nathan Sivin

Sinology and the history of science have changed practically beyond recognition in the past half-century. Both have become academic specialisms, with their own departments, journals, and professional societies. Both have moved off in new directions, drawing on the tools and insights of several disciplines. Although some sinologists still honor no ambition beyond explicating primary texts, on many of the field's frontiers philology is no more than a tool. Similarly, many technical historians now explore issues for which anthropology or systems analysis is as indispensable as traditional historiography.


2018 ◽  
Vol 50 (3) ◽  
pp. 487-503 ◽  
Author(s):  
Howard M. Wachtel

Fifty years on, the Review of Radical Political Economics ( RRPE) lives on against the odds that such a quixotic 1968 adventure could survive for half a century. As the first managing editor of the RRPE and one of the founders of the Union for Radical Political Economics (URPE), I have compiled a history of the first five years of the journal and the organization. This retrospective is primarily based on archival research, supplemented by my recollections. It concludes with some thoughts on how URPE and the RRPE affected the study and uses of economics in the past half century.


2000 ◽  
Vol 31 (1) ◽  
pp. 2-4
Author(s):  
Judith T. Sowder

The beginning of a new year as well as the threshold of a new century and a new millennium seem appropriate times to take stock of where we have been and where we are going as a mathematics education research community. We have accomplished a great deal in the past half century of our existence, and I for one look forward to reading the forthcoming book on the history of mathematics education, edited by Jeremy Kilpatrick and George Stanic. That book will review for us our progress thus far, but what are the challenges we now face? This question will be addressed in various ways at various gatherings in the coming year, and new agendas will result from those discussions.


Author(s):  
Reinhard Müller

This essay examines the nature of pentateuchal redaction, the various positions that scholars have taken on it across the history of modern biblical studies, and the ways that these theories contribute to larger theories of compositional history. It highlights the manner in which redactional theories have been especially productive among continental European scholars over the past half-century. The essay concludes with a consideration of external, empirical evidence for redaction, especially among the Persian and Hellenistic period witnesses to the Pentateuch.


2012 ◽  
Vol 69 (2) ◽  
pp. 237-254
Author(s):  
Susan Schroeder

Over the course of the past half century, the field of colonial Latin American history has been greatly enriched by the contributions of Father Stafford Poole. He has written 14 books and 84 articles and book chapters and has readily shared his knowledge at coundess symposia and other scholarly forums. Renowned as a historian, he was also a seminary administrator and professor of history in Missouri and California. Moreover, his background and formation are surely unique among priests in the United States and his story is certainly worth the telling.


1961 ◽  
Vol 93 (5) ◽  
pp. 360-379 ◽  
Author(s):  
F. E. Webb ◽  
J. R. Blais ◽  
R. W. Nash

The spruce budworm (Choristoneura fumiferana (Clem.)) is a forest pest in all Canadian Provinces and Territories, and in the northeastern, midwest, and northwestern Unired States. It is by iar the most destructive insect affeiting the extensive balsam fir-spruce forest types in Ontario, Quebec, the Maritime Provinces, and Maine. Outbreaks of varying extent have been reported from these regions almost every year for the past half-century (deGryse, 1947). Periods in which outbreaks were particularly severe and widespread occurred from about 1909 to 1920 and in the 1940's and 1950's. In both periods, outbreaks showed a tendency to shift from west to east, intensifying first in parts of northern Ontario and Quebec and dying out in the Atlantic region south of the St. Lawrence River.


2018 ◽  
Vol 58 (1-4) ◽  
pp. 157-169
Author(s):  
James C. Henriques

Summary Very likely due to its modest nature, the Cosa Mithraeum has been mentioned in scholarly publications only four times – each in passing – since its discovery in 1954. This sparse attention, restricted solely to literature on Cosa, has meant that the mithraeum is well-known among those intimately familiar with the colony, but has languished in complete obscurity among Mithraic scholars for the past half century. In addition to bringing the Cosa Mithraeum to the attention of a wider audience, this article also argues for a re-evaluation of the most recent dating of the mithraeum. Recent advances in scholarship on mithraea at Ostia give ample reason to suggest that the original date for the Cosa Mithraeum might be more accurate than later interpreters have assumed. Furthermore, the ongoing excavations of Cosa's bath complex, conducted by Florida State University, Bryn Mawr College, and Tübingen University have revealed a city that was still quite active during the 2nd century CE. In light of these developments, this article is an overdue study of the Cosa Mithraeum and its role in the history of the colony.


Author(s):  
John L. Brooke

The twenty-five-year political history of the early American republic, covering the period from the first federal election through the War of 1812, critically shaped the terms and path of American politics over the ensuing two centuries. During this time the United States emerged from the volatility of revolutionary politics to establish the bipolar party structure that has dominated the American political landscape ever since. The central ideological debate over the power of the national government was shaped by classical understandings of politics and by powerfully contested interests. This essay begins with a short chronological summary of the politics of the period, and then turns to the five broad frameworks that historians of the politics of the early republic have addressed over the past half-century: party structure, republican ideology, political culture, slavery, and state-formation.


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