Witnessing Violence, Witnessing as Violence: Police Torture and Power in Twentieth-Century India

Police custodial violence was a normal occurrence in the southern Indian province of Madras through the twentieth century, across the colonial and postcolonial periods alike. While governmental authorities attributed torture to individual deviants and the press attributed the practice to a lack of government will in punishing offenders, this article locates police impunity in broader structures of power that permeated society. Specifically, it shows how the deployment of seemingly objective forms of evidence in adjudicating cases of torture—the testimony of respectable persons, medical expertise, and police writing—discounted the voices of victims of violence, reaffirming instead policing’s alignment with class, caste, and gendered authority. Equally, the very act of witnessing produced some subjects as socially privileged by virtue of their respectable status, their expertise, or their literacy, further separating them from bodies that were vulnerable to state violence. Police sovereign power within the station was thus constituted in conjunction with disciplinary power across society.

Forensic Medical Expertise in Traditional China: Legal Regulation and Practice

The article deals with the problems of forensic medical expertise in traditional China in the investigation of crimes related to murder and death of people under unknown circumstances. The research featured legal acts and related comments that regulated the procedure. The author focused on the treatise of the XIII century Sung Tzu's "Washing Away of Wrongs" (Hsi yüan lu), which became the first essay on forensic medicine in world history. This document was far ahead of European works on this topic and was still in use in the early XX century. Constant conflicts between non-official comments and legal norms were one of the most serious problems that judicial practice had to face. For instance, according to the century-long shiht’u practice, specially authorized employees (wutso) with no medical training were responsible for describing internal and external injuries on the human body. Medical education was not mandatory for those performing forensic medical examination because autopsy was prohibited under the threat of punishment in the form of hard labor, and all conclusions about the causes of death were made on the basis of external examination. However, the main problem was the legal responsibility for the falsification of forensic medical examination. It often affected innocent people while real criminals managed to escape punishment, which violated the yin-yang harmony.

Insomnia, Medicalization, and Expert Knowledge

Historians have clearly articulated the ways in which sleeplessness has long been part of the human condition. As an object of medical expertise and public health intervention, however, insomnia is a much more recent invention, having gained its status as a pathology during the 1870s. But while insomnia has attracted considerable and concerted attention from public health authorities allied with sleep medicine specialists, this phenomenon is not well explained by classical medicalization theory, in part because it is the sleepless sufferers, not the medical experts, who typically have the authority to diagnose insomnia. The dynamics of insomnia’s history are better described as those of a boundary object, around which concepts and practices of biomedicine and psychology coalesce to frame contemporary notions of self-medicalization and self-experiment.

Consumer background and composition on state medical boards: Who are these citizen members and do they adequately protect the public?

The composition and background of members of state medical boards, including public or citizen members, can impact the functionality and public perception of medical boards in the United States. This study analyzed the number of public members on each state medical board and their professional backgrounds or expertise to regulate the medical profession. The findings show that for nearly half of state medical boards public members comprise at least a quarter of their voting members; however, more than half of public members for all state medical boards have no measurable medical experience or background, including in patient safety. The need for public members to have medical expertise or background – especially in patient safety -- is discussed along with potential policy recommendations.

ENRICH: Exploiting Image Similarity to Maximize Efficient Machine Learning in Medical Imaging

Deep learning (DL) requires labeled data. Labeling medical images requires medical expertise, which is often a bottleneck. It is therefore useful to prioritize labeling those images that are most likely to improve a model's performance, a practice known as instance selection. Here we introduce ENRICH, a method that selects images for labeling based on how much novelty each image adds to the growing training set. In our implementation, we use cosine similarity between autoencoder embeddings to measure that novelty. We show that ENRICH achieves nearly maximal performance on classification and segmentation tasks using only a fraction of available images, and outperforms the default practice of selecting images at random. We also present evidence that instance selection may perform categorically better on medical vs. non-medical imaging tasks. In conclusion, ENRICH is a simple, computationally efficient method for prioritizing images for expert labeling for DL.

The 1918 Influenza Pandemic: Back to the Future?

<b><i>Background:</i></b> It is just over a century since the 1918 flu pandemic, sometimes referred to as the “mother” of pandemics. This brief retrospective of the 1918 pandemic is taken from the viewpoint of the current SARS-CoV-2/COVID-19 pandemic and is based on a short lecture given during the 2021 Virtual Congress of the ERA-EDTA. <b><i>Summary:</i></b> This review summarizes and highlights some of the earlier pandemic’s salient features, some parallels with today, and some potential learnings, bearing in mind that the flu pandemic occurred over 100 years ago at a time of major turmoil during the climax to WWl, and with limited medical expertise and knowledge, research facilities, or well-structured and resourced healthcare services. While there is little or no information on renal complications at the time, or an effective treatment, some observations in relation to COVID-19 and vaccination are included. <b><i>Key Messages:</i></b> Lessons are difficult to draw from 1918 other than the importance and value of non-pharmaceutical measures to limit viral transmission. While the economic impact of the 1918 pandemic was significant, as it is now with COVID-19, subsequent economic analysis has shown that protecting public health and preserving economic activity are not mutually exclusive. Both H1N1 and SARS-CoV-2 viruses are neurotropic and may cause chronically debilitating neurological diseases, including conditions such as encephalitis lethargica (still debated) and myalgic encephalomyelitis (chronic fatigue syndrome), respectively. Although coronavirus and influenza viral infections have some similarities, they are certainly not the same, as we are realising, and future infectious pandemics may still surprise us, but being “forewarned is forearmed.”

Hormonal Health: Period Tracking Apps, Wellness, and Self-Management in the Era of Surveillance Capitalism

Period tracking is an increasingly widespread practice, and its emphasis is changing from monitoring fertility to encompassing a more broad-based picture of users’ health. Delving into the data of one’s menstrual cycle, and the hormones that are presumed to be intimately linked with it, is a practice that is reshaping ideas about health and wellness, while also shaping subjects and subjectivities that succeed under conditions of surveillance capitalism. Through close examination of six extended interviews, this article elaborates a version of period tracking that sidesteps fertility and, in doing so, participates in the “queering” of menstrual technologies. Apps can facilitate the integration of institutional medical expertise and quotidian embodied experience within a broader approach to the self as a management project. We introduce the concept of “hormonal health” to describe a way of caring for, and knowing about, bodies, one that weaves together mental and physical health, correlates subjective and objective information, and calls into question the boundary between illness and wellness. For those we spoke with, menstrual cycles are understood to affect selfhood across any simplistic body-mind division or reproductive imperative, engendering complex techniques of self-management, including monitoring, hypothesizing, intervening in medical appointments, adjusting schedules, and interpreting social interactions. Such techniques empower their proponents, but not within conditions of their choosing. In addition to problems with data privacy and profit, these techniques perpetuate individualized solutions and the internalization of pressures in a gender-stratified, neoliberal context, facilitating success within flawed structures.

Issues of examination of the ability to work in the practical work of a doctor

Medical expertise has its origins in the distant past. Prof. Shibkov attributes it to the time of the emergence of forensic medicine, namely for Zap. Europe by 1532, when the charter of Charles V was issued (the so-called Cardina), and for Russia by 1716, when the military charter was issued (article 154) (under Peter I). In the distant past (about 200 years ago) it appears in Zap. In Europe, the practice of insurance expertise is first in the interests of private and voluntary, and then compulsory insurance.

About errors in the appointment of forensic medical examination in cases of crimes in the field of artificial human reproduction

It is impossible to establish the circumstances to be proved in the investigation of crimes related to medical errors without the use of special knowledge in the fi eld of forensic medicine. For the designated category of criminal cases, the expert opinion plays a key role in understanding the signs of the objective side of the crime. Unfortunately, in theory and in practice, there is still no uniform understanding of a number of concepts that are important for the development of a legally correct position by the parties to the prosecution and defense. This leads to problems when making procedural decisions by the investigation and the court, provokes public outrage. The article emphasizes that the experts make procedural, epistemological and activity errors in the production of all types of examinations. In relation to forensic medical expertise in cases of crimes in the fi eld of artifi cial human reproduction, some common errors that arise at the stage of formulating questions submitted for the expert’s permission are indicated. This study was carried out with the fi nancial support of the RFBR within the framework of scientifi c project No. 18-29-14084.

HUMAN BEING IN NORM AND PATHOLOGY: TOWARDS THE QUESTION OF EXPERTISE IN MEDICINE

The article discusses a problem of a change in habitual paradigms of human being understanding in medicine within the progress of medical science and practice. The prevalence of natural scientific principles in medical expertise is becoming ineffective; medicine is losing its subject – a human being in norm and pathology. The awareness of the consequences of an object-oriented attitude contributed to the development of new notions about the subject of medicine, fixed in a socio-cultural and, later, person-oriented approaches in scientific understanding of human being in norm and pathology, as well as the development of practices aimed at protecting humans from interference. As a result, a new form of expertise is emerging in medicine – ethical expertise, aimed at protecting a human being. However, in the process of ethical expertise evolution, as the author shows, a shift has taken place towards bureaucratic management, oriented to proceduralism and efficiency. Moreover, ethical expertise continues to use socio-cultural approach as its methodological basis, which is not sufficient within the new situation of blurring boundary between norm and pathology. A human being himself as an object of expertise is disappearing.