Max Rubner and the Biopolitics of Rational Nutrition

Eager to move on after the divisiveSonderwegdebates of the 1980s, historians of modern Germany have been busily elaborating a new central narrative around the notion of biopolitics. Aimed at producing a more powerful and productive society by regulating, optimizing, and even exterminating specific human populations, biopolitics has encompassed everything from housing reform, anti-smoking campaigns, and child vaccination programs to pro- and anti-natalist tax policies, national census taking, and the science of industrial hygiene. Identified by Michel Foucault and others as a general feature of all Western modernities, biopolitics has been a particularly fruitful concept for German historians, who have used it to trace the evolution of racial hygiene—the Nazi variant of eugenics and Germany's most infamous application of biopolitical principles—from a politically diverse group of Wilhelmine and Weimar social reformers. The very normality of these reformers, given the international context, has in turn allowed scholars to avoid labeling German modernity as deviant while at the same time framing the murderous dynamic of the Nazi years as a potential latent in modernity more generally. As Edward Ross Dickinson put it in an excellent review article recently, Germany has emerged from this reevaluation “not as a nation having trouble modernizing, but as a nation of troubling modernity.”

Olympus E330 DSLR for Photomicrography with Older Design Microscopes

Jan Hinsch wrote an excellent review article “About the Use of Digital Single Lens Reflex Cameras on Microscopes” in 2004 for the web journal Modern Microscopy, http://www.modernmicroscopy.com/main.asp?article=33&print=true. The purpose of this article is to demonstrate the capabilities of the new Olympus Evolt E-330 DSLR for use with older design microscopes to capture the full diagonal of an 18 mm field number eyepiece that is not high eyepoint. This camera can be fitted with OM mount film camera lenses using the Olympus MF-1 adapter. A key requirement I had before purchasing a DSLR was that critical focusing must be possible at the full resolution of the sensor. I asked the Olympus Precision Instruments Group whether Olympus would have a DSLR available with this capability, and learned from them that the new E-330 DSLR would allow a selected area to be displayed at full resolution from the main CMOS sensor for critical focusing. This 7.5 megapixel sensor measures 13 by 17 mm.

You Need Teachers

The excellent review article by Leffert1 and the accompanying commentary by Bergner2 made important points regarding the changing role of the pediatric allergist and the broad requirements for knowledge of any physicians who are to provide specialty care for children with asthma. While the current state of the art allows a high degree of control for this disease,3 considerable morbidity from inadequately treated asthma persists. This situation is unlikely to change rapidly unless departments of pediatrics place a high priority on ensuring that the modern allergist described by Dr. Bergner is on their faculty to teach the current housestaff and provide continuing education for the practitioner; only then will most general pediatricians be able to assume the role envisioned by Dr. Leffert.

Sudden Death in Infancy

We were much interested to see the excellent review article on sudden and unexpected death in infancy in the January issue of Pediatrics (39:123, 1967). We have been working for some years on the condition of congenital deafness with abnormalities of the electrocardiogram, and we feel that this and other genetically determined disorders of cardiac conduction must play a definite though possibly numerically minor role in the causation of sudden and unexpected death in infancy.

Alcaptonuria

I have read with considerable interest the excellent review article by Dr. Selma E. Snyderman in Pediatrics (21:117, 1958), entitled, "The Metabolism of Amino Acids." There are, however, a few minor points in regard to the discussion of alcaptonuria which I should like to call to the attention of your readers. First, with respect to pathogenesis: Alcaptonuria is, in fact, not a disease, but rather the temporally initial manifestation of a very distinct syndrome, characterized by alcaptonuria, ochronosis and arthritis.