1,721,226 research outputs found
Visible signs, invisible processes: Explaining poison in the late seventeenth century
No full textOlimpia Ginnetti was a young noblewoman from an illustrious if declining Roman family and the patient of prestigious physicians including Marcello Malpighi (1628-1694). After an illness of some months, she died in December 1693. Strong suspicions of poisoning were raised in her household and the city. For legal purposes an autopsy was performed in the presence of some of Rome’s best physicians and surgeons. Most of these were involved in the experimental culture fostered by the city’s medical institutions, in particular its hospitals, which provided a stimulating venue for those interested in the exchanges between medical, surgical and anatomical knowledge and practice. Moreover, the physicians and surgeons who took part in the dispute on the cause of Olimpia’s death were all to a certain extent interested in iatrochemistry. Chemical experimentation and anatomical investigation were equally thriving in Rome in the second half of the seventeenth century, as the activities of celebrated physicians such as Giovanni Maria Lancisi (1654-1720) and Giorgio Baglivi (1668-1707) show
Traces of Campanella in Italian medicine of the 17th century
No full textIn a close dialogue with Germana Ernst's works, this note is meant as a presentation of the traces left by Tommaso Campanella's philosophy and medicine in 17th century Italian medicine. Examining authors who have remembered or quoted works by Campanella - Marco Aurelio Severino, Thomas Bartholin, Leonardo Di Capua, Giacomo Sandri - enables a better assessment of the role played by Renaissance theories of natural magic in medicine and healing; it also allows an indirect appreciation of Campanella's Medicinalium libri. Campanella's work seems to have found more of an audience among practitioners, such as surgeons and anatomists, than among academic physicians
History of Epidemics: A Bibliographical Essay on Secondary Sources in Italian and on Italy
No full textItalian medical history in the age of positivism showed a strong interest in epidemics. This can be seen in Alfonso Corradi’s monumental Annali (1865-1895) and in works of other 19th-century historians who addressed major public health issues in the newly unified country. Local history was also widely practiced in Italy, and it was instrumental in discovering and publishing a wealth of documentation on past epidemic and endemic diseases, as well as on measures such as quarantines that were invented or introduced in the peninsula as early as the late Middle Ages. The way Italian historians looked at epidemics in the 20th century was shaped by politics, religion and literature more than by demography, epidemiology, or technical knowledge in the medical field. This article and its accompanying bibliography will focus on regional historiography and deal with the history of plague, smallpox, cholera and malaria, and other diseases addressed in works published after the 1980s
Journals and the sciences in the provinces of the Kingdom of Naples, 1780s-1790s
No full textLearned and scientific journals underwent many changes between the end of the 18th and the
beginning of the 19th centuries. Specialized journals multiplied. Popularization for the lay, not
necessarily for the scientifically minded or educated, public became one of the aims of a
meaningful part of periodicals. In what follows, I will examine learned journals in a specific European local context, the Kingdom
of Naples, and in a rather brief chronology—just a decade at the end of the 18th century, the 1780s
and early 1790s. I will use scientific cases and journal articles
from the 1780s and the early 1790s in order to show how the provinces became important in the last
decades of the 18th century, both as loci of scientific observation and experiences as in their quality
of recipients of foreign news
Il segreto di san Gennaro: Storia naturale di un miracolo napoletano. Francesco Paolo de Ceglia. Einaudi Storia 69. Torino: Einaudi, 2016. xvi + 410 pp. €32.
No full textRecensione del volume omonimo di Francesco De Cegli
Complex dispersion relation of a double chain of lossy metal nanoparticles
No full textWe study the propagation characteristics of optical signals in waveguides composed of a double chain of metallic nanoparticles embedded in a dielectric host. We find that the complex Bloch band diagram for the guided modes, derived by the Mie scattering theory including material losses, exhibits strong differences with respect to the previously studied single chain. The results of the model are validated through the finite element solution of the Maxwell equations
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Full text linkThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
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