Claimed by culture: circumcision, cochlear implants and the ‘intact’ body

This review essay discusses the debates on infant male circumcision and on paediatric cochlear implants, two instances of surgical interventions done on small children without there being any pressing life-threatening indication. Reviewing these two issues together—something that has not previously been done, although there is a vast scholarly debate on both issues separately—helps frame the medical humanities and the current turn in the field towards abandoning the nature/culture and science/humanities divides. The debates on these procedures are fraught with a distinction between medicine and culture which constructs a certain kind of body as ‘natural’ and seeks to defend that body against ‘cultural’ interventions while welcoming supposedly acultural ‘medical’ interventions on other bodies. In the scholarship in medical humanities and medical ethics on these topics, this implicit nature/culture divide and view on medicine as separate from culture is also evident. My contention is that the medical humanities have important work to do here, in particular regarding a critique of the notion of the ‘whole’ or ‘intact’ body.

Hortus Indicus Malabaricus: An Enquiry Into Alien Plants:II

Rheede’s Magnum Opus (1678-1693) – Horti Indici Malabarici – reflects the indigenous medical knowledge of the people of Malabar region (India) in the 17th century. It invited attention of researchers from different walks of life. It dovetailed the science of medicine and culture of indigenous people of India. The present author extended investigation on it from the standpoint of plant invasion prior to this period. This accounts sheds light on additional 32 alien plant species pertaining to 32 genera and 23 angiospermic families. As many as 20 biogeographical regions have been divulged for their floral contribution to India. The American and African continents share maximum contribution. Nearly all parts of the Old and New Worlds showed contacts with the then India. The author is inclined to state that such ancient botanical annals should be re-investigated on various grounds to disclose past biological invasion which help manage our present biodiversity.

Introduction

The book probes the worlds of the social histories of medicine and culture as pivotal entry points into what constitutes madness and deviancy in the asylum records. It will also be the first one to bring together institutional and non-institutional histories of insanity by focussing on Hindi medical literature. Psychiatric repertoire found its way in the Hindi vernacular wherein the meaning and context differed dramatically. Therefore, the study traces the emergence of ‘mind sciences’ in Hindi during the period of high nationalism. The book unmasks the irrationalities of colonialism and nationalism by contextualizing the social, cultural, and political frames in which racial, primordial, psychical, spiritual, and psychiatric understanding of madness enmeshed resulting to a peculiar milieu.

Fick’s Laws

Atoms and molecules are not completely immobile within a solid material. They move by jumping into vacancies or interstitial sites in the crystal lattice. The laws describing their motion were discovered by Adolf Fick in the mid-19th century, modelled on analogous laws for the flow of heat (Fourier’s law) and electricity (Ohm’s law). According to Fick’s first law, the rate at which atoms move is proportional to the concentration gradient, with the diffusion coefficient defined as the constant of proportionality. Fick’s second law generalises the first law to a wide range of situations and is called the diffusion equation. This chapter examines a number of characteristic diffusion profiles; the difference between self, intrinsic, inter- and tracer diffusion coefficients; the Kirkendall effect and porosity formation when different components move at different speeds; and the Arrhenius temperature dependence of diffusion. Fick was a physiologist and derived his laws initially to describe the flow of blood through the heart. He made advances in anatomy, physiology and medicine, developing methods of monitoring blood pressure, muscular power, corneal pressure and glaucoma. He lived at the time of Bismarck’s post-Napoléonic unification of Germany and the associated flowering of German science, engineering, medicine and culture.

Quantum-synergetic ontology of generalized corporeality: from anthropology of theatre to humanization of artificial intelligence. The question of boundaries

The question of understanding of corporeality in philosophy, science, medicine and culture goes back centuries and remains relevant until the present. This relates mostly to anthropological challenges of the crisis technogenic civilization that is trying to improve human nature, without understanding of its holism, taking into account existential issues of hybrid man-machine systems and socies, virtual and cyber-physical umvelts, within which corporeality becomes more of an atavism and a deterrent for the rapid worlds managed by the powerful artificial intelligence. In philosophy of the XX century, the understanding of generalized corporeality is associated primarily with the phenomenological project of E. Husserl and its advancement in the works of M. Merleau-Ponty, French poststructuralists A. Artaud, G. Deleuze, F. Guattari, who conceptualizes the idea of generalized corporeality in cultural terms, rather than in natural science. The author proposes the introduction of the ontologies of generalized corporeality based on differentiation of its functional manifestations in communication and theatrical art, referring to the modern representations on the mechanism and their potential implementation on the level of physiology and mental sphere of personality, as well as on the level of substantial factors of biology, psychophysics and robotics. For these purposes, the author attracts the concepts of synergetics and quantum theory as the grounds for such functional ontologies; at the same time, full ontology of generalized corporeality is presented by direct product of the ontologies of states and temporal ontologies of physical and mental processes of a human, which allows creating a semiotics of corporeality of acting or anthropomorphic avatar-robot. The article explores the boundaries of emulation of human corporeality by the modern means of IT technologies, and the question of unattainability of many creative and spiritual sub-bodies of a person using technical means.

Coming Home

By the mid-twentieth century, two things appeared destined for extinction in the United States: the practice of home birth and the profession of midwifery. In 1940, close to half of all U.S. births took place in the hospital, and the trend was increasing. By 1970, the percentage of hospital births reached an all-time high of 99.4%, and the obstetrician, rather than the midwife, assumed nearly complete control over what had become an entirely medicalized procedure. Then, seemingly out of nowhere, an explosion of new alternative organizations, publications, and conferences cropped up, documenting a very different demographic trend; by 1977, the percentage of out-of-hospital births had more than doubled. Home birth was making a comeback, but why? A quiet revolution spread across cities and suburbs, towns and farms, as individuals challenged legal, institutional, and medical protocols by choosing unlicensed midwives to catch their babies at home. Drawing on archival materials and interviews with midwives, doctors, and home birth consumers, Coming Home analyzes the ideas, values, and experiences that led to this quiet revolution, and its long-term consequences for our understanding of birth, medicine, and culture.