Medical Nihilism

2019 ◽  
pp. 157-180
Author(s):  
Alex Broadbent

One thread running through this book so far has been a concern that medicine is not all it is cracked up to be. This chapter considers the most dramatic version of this stance, namely Medical Nihilism. Nihilism is the view that its object is worthless, accompanied by an emotional reaction of despair. Medical Nihilism is this attitude toward medicine. It was a common stance in the 19th century because of the persistent elusiveness of cures. The chapter considers Wootton’s nihilism about historical Western medicine, but focuses on Stegenga’s recent arguments for low confidence in contemporary medicine. Stegenga’s arguments are ultimately rejected, but the larger lesson is Medical Nihilism relies heavily on the Curative Thesis. Even if Therapeutic Nihilism were warranted (which the chapter denies), this would not warrant Nihilism about the whole of medicine, if medicine is properly characterized by the Inquiry Thesis, as the earlier parts of the book contend.

2019 ◽  
Vol 46 (3) ◽  
pp. 340-347
Author(s):  
Gaspard Aebischer ◽  
Philip Alexander Rieder

Sleep disorders have received growing public and scientific attention in the last decades. Scientific research and publications on sleeplessness are ongoing and considerable progress has been made on the medical understanding of sleep. And yet, insomnia affects an ever-growing number of people around the globe and remains both a difficult and common complaint general practitioners have to deal with on a daily basis. Sleeplessness is not new, although its transformation from a state of accepted wake to that of exasperating insomnia is a relatively recent transition in which, this article argues, Western medicine took an active part. In the 19th century, the theorisation of different nervous disorders and later of neurasthenia shaped the transformation of insomnia from a constituent of everyday life into a pathology. Based on research in French medical journals published in the second half of the 19th century, this article retraces a succession of medical paradigms for sleeplessness, including ‘symptomatic insomnia’, ‘nervous insomnia’ and interestingly, ‘insomnia’ as a key element in neurasthenia theories. The analysis of medical discourse in all successive theories reveals the decisive influence of physicians in the medicalisation of insomnia, their sociocultural representations echoing patient’s complaints as well as professional imperatives.


1990 ◽  
Vol 14 (4) ◽  
pp. 193-200 ◽  
Author(s):  
Etsuro Totsuka

In ancient Japan, written characters and religions were largely based on Chinese cultures. The first foreign physician was invited from Korea to Japan during the Shiragi Dynasty, when an Emperor became ill at the beginning of the 5th century. Since then, Chinese medicine dominated in Japan until Western medicine was introduced in the middle of the 19th century.


2019 ◽  
Vol 41 (1) ◽  
pp. 39-55
Author(s):  
Takashi Takekoshi

In this paper, we analyse features of the grammatical descriptions in Manchu grammar books from the Qing Dynasty. Manchu grammar books exemplify how Chinese scholars gave Chinese names to grammatical concepts in Manchu such as case, conjugation, and derivation which exist in agglutinating languages but not in isolating languages. A thorough examination reveals that Chinese scholarly understanding of Manchu grammar at the time had attained a high degree of sophistication. We conclude that the reason they did not apply modern grammatical concepts until the end of the 19th century was not a lack of ability but because the object of their grammatical descriptions was Chinese, a typical isolating language.


1970 ◽  
pp. 47-55
Author(s):  
Sarah Limorté

Levantine immigration to Chile started during the last quarter of the 19th century. This immigration, almost exclusively male at the outset, changed at the beginning of the 20th century when women started following their fathers, brothers, and husbands to the New World. Defining the role and status of the Arab woman within her community in Chile has never before been tackled in a detailed study. This article attempts to broach the subject by looking at Arabic newspapers published in Chile between 1912 and the end of the 1920s. A thematic analysis of articles dealing with the question of women or written by women, appearing in publications such as Al-Murshid, Asch-Schabibat, Al-Watan, and Oriente, will be discussed.


Author(s):  
Liubomyr Ilyn

Purpose. The purpose of the article is to analyze and systematize the views of social and political thinkers of Galicia in the 19th - beginning of the 20th centuries. on the right and manner of organizing a nation-state as a cathedral. Method. The methodology includes a set of general scientific, special legal, special historical and philosophical methods of scientific knowledge, as well as the principles of objectivity, historicism, systematic and comprehensive. The problem-chronological approach made it possible to identify the main stages of the evolution of the content of the idea of catholicity in Galicia's legal thought of the 19th century. Results. It is established that the idea of catholicity, which was borrowed from church terminology, during the nineteenth century. acquired clear legal and philosophical features that turned it into an effective principle of achieving state unity and integrity. For the Ukrainian statesmen of the 19th century. the idea of catholicity became fundamental in view of the separation of Ukrainians between the Russian and Austro-Hungarian empires. The idea of unity of Ukrainians of Galicia and the Dnieper region, formulated for the first time by the members of the Russian Trinity, underwent a long evolution and received theoretical reflection in the work of Bachynsky's «Ukraine irredenta». It is established that catholicity should be understood as a legal principle, according to which decisions are made in dialogue, by consensus, and thus able to satisfy the absolute majority of citizens of the state. For Galician Ukrainians, the principle of unity in the nineteenth century. implemented through the prism of «state» and «international» approaches. Scientific novelty. The main stages of formation and development of the idea of catholicity in the views of social and political figures of Halychyna of the XIX – beginning of the XX centuries are highlighted in the work. and highlighting the distinctive features of «national statehood» that they promoted and understood as possible in the process of unification of Ukrainian lands into one state. Practical significance. The results of the study can be used in further historical and legal studies, preparation of special courses.


2017 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 215-226
Author(s):  
Kurdish Studies

Andrea Fischer-Tahir and Sophie Wagenhofer (edsF), Disciplinary Spaces: Spatial Control, Forced Assimilation and Narratives of Progress since the 19th Century, Bielefeld: Transcript Verlag, 2017, 300 pp., (ISBN: 978-3-8376-3487-7).Ayşegül Aydın and Cem Emrence, Zones of Rebellion: Kurdish Insurgents and the Turkish State, Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2015, 192 pp., (ISBN: 978-0-801-45354-0).Evgenia I. Vasil’eva, Yugo-Vostochniy Kurdistan v XVI-XIX vv. Istochnik po Istorii Kurdskikh Emiratov Ardelan i Baban. [South-Eastern Kurdistan in the XVI-XIXth cc. A Source for the Study of Kurdish Emirates of Ardalān and Bābān], St Petersburg: Nestor-Istoria, 2016. 176 pp., (ISBN 978-5-4469-0775-5).Karin Mlodoch, The Limits of Trauma Discourse: Women Anfal Survivors in Kurdistan-Iraq, Berlin: Klaus Schwarz Verlag, 2014, 541 pp., (ISBN: 978-3-87997-719-2). 


2020 ◽  
Vol 19 (1) ◽  
pp. 13
Author(s):  
Leury Max Da Silva Chaves ◽  
Gabriel Vinicius Santos ◽  
Cauê La Scala Teixeira ◽  
Marzo Edir Da Silva-Grigoletto

 Bodyweight exercises (also popularly known as calisthenics) is a classic training method and its practice has been widespread since the 19th century, but little evidenced in the scientific literature over the years. This type of training aims to promote multi-system adaptations using body weight as an overload with no or few implements [1–3]. This characteristic makes exercise with body weight easy to apply, in addition to having an excellent cost-benefit ratio when compared to other training possibilities that require machines or materials [4,5].


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