The first career of William Alexander Hammond

Neurology in its modern sense was first studied in the well-known neurological institutions of France and England. In America, however, this new field of medicine was developed by a physician in a private practice, Dr. William Alexander Hammond. This article addresses the question how Hammond was able to limit his practice to neurology. It is argued that Hammond was a famous military physician before becoming the first practitioner of clinical neurology in America. This fame translated into a large referral base.     

A Note on Marinus of Alexandria

Abstract

Neurology in its modern sense was first studied in the well‐known neurological institutions of France and England. In America, however, this new field of medicine was developed by a physician in a private practice, Dr. William Alexander Hammond. This article addresses the question how Hammond was able to limit his practice to neurology. It is argued that Hammond was a famous military physician before becoming the first practitioner of clinical neurology in America. This fame translated into a large referral base.     

William Alexander Hammond: The Centenary of His Death

In the United States, the field of clinical neurology began within the medical practice of a single physician, William Alexander Hammond. In the 1870s, this New York medical practitioner became the first American physician who limited his practice to patients who suffered from symptoms potentially due to dysfunction of the nervous system. From the experience of his huge practice, Hammond wrote the first American textbook of neurology. With Silas Weir Mitchell, he founded the American Neurological Association. The year 2000 marked the 100th anniversary of Hammond's death and stimulates this brief survey of his life.     

"The Defendant Has Seemed to Live a Charmed Life": Hopt v. Utah: Territorial Justice, The Supreme Court of the United States, and Late Nineteenth-Century Death Penalty Jurisprudence

On March 7, 1887, the Supreme Court of the United States decided Fred Hopt's fourth appeal to that Court. The Utah Territory murderer's conviction had been reversed three times over seven years-his "charmed life"-but this time both his luck and his legal argument had run out: his fourth conviction was upheld. Justice Stephen J. Field dismissed Hopt's four major claims: that several members of the jury were improperly seated in spite of bias; that a doctor's evidence of cause of death was beyond the scope of his expertise; that the trial judge's "reasonable doubt" jury instruction was inadequate; and that the prosecutor's reference to the "many times the case had been before the courts" was prejudicial. Five months later, on August 11, Hopt was executed by a firing squad in the yard of the Utah Penitentiary. Hopt was only one of over two thousand convicted criminals, mostly murderers, who were legally executed in the United States in the two decades between 1880 and 1900. However, his defense team of court-appointed Salt Lake City lawyers had kept him alive for seven years. During that time he had four jury trials, four appeals to the Supreme Court of Utah Territory, and four appeals to the Supreme Court of the United States. He is the only death penalty litigant ever to be the subject of four full opinions of the Supreme Court of the United States.     

Walter Moxon, MD, FCRP (1836-1886): the cerebro-vascular system and the syndrome of "congestion of the brain": an analysis of his 1881 Croonian Lectures

Walter Moxon, MD, FRCP lived, practiced medicine, taught and wrote in the mid- to late- nineteenth-century Victorian England, mostly at Guy's Hospital, London. He was widely informed in the "Art of Physic," writing on a range of issues from cerebral lateralization of articulate speech to angina pectoris. The present paper will trace briefly his contributions to the newly discovered asymmetry of articulate speech in the left frontal lobe (1866) and will in more detail trace and analyze his 1881 Croonian Lectures at the Royal College of Physicians on a medical shibboleth referred to as "congestion of the brain." In a series of ingenious and rhetorically creative arguments with imaginative tropes, demonstrations, evolutionary accounts of cognition and blood metabolism for human/biped cognition, and cogent citations from the medical literature of the day, Moxon skillfully instructs his medical audience against the misleading notion of cerebral "congestion" as an underlying pathology for cognitive, motor, and sensory deficits seen in the clinic. In so doing, he provides the medical community with an in-depth glimpse at the circulatory system, its flow dynamics, and how they serve to meet the cognitive, motor, and sensory demands of upright bipedal man.     

Wilson, Brandeis, and the Supreme Court Nomination

In late January 1916, many readers of the New York World chuckled as they looked at Rollin Kirby's editorial cartoon entitled, "The Blow that Almost Killed Father." In the drawing, Kirby showed a Wall Street big-shot—one who looked a little like J. P. Morgan—prostrate in his desk chair, the ticker-tape machine broken and leaning against the desk, a picture of the New York Stock Exchange askew on the wall, and a newspaper dropped to the ground, its headline blaring " Brandeis for the Supreme Court ."     

The role of the physician: Eugene Sanger and a standard of care at the Elmira prison camp

The conduct of American military physicians in prisoner of war (POW) camps has been called into question by the abuse scandals at Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo Bay. This essay explores the experiences of the first U.S. military physicians to confront POW patients in large numbers-events that occurred during the American Civil War. While POWs received sub-standard care in camps north and south, the war also saw the issuance of the first document to outline the rights of POWs. This ambivalence toward the proper care and treatment of the POW is evident in the career of Dr. Eugene Sanger, the first Union surgeon at the prison camp in Elmira, New York. Sanger demonstrated both concern about the sanitary condition of the camp and pride in the deaths of POWs as furthering the overall war aims. His cruelty attracted some censure, but Sanger never faced disciplinary action. He was honorably discharged and went on to become the Surgeon General of his home state. This article places his actions at Elmira in the context of medical ethics, Army orders, and Northern opinion in 1864, and it will argue that the lack of Federal response to Eugene Sanger's poor record while serving at the prison set a precedent for inferior medical care of POWs by American military physicians.     

Social control,structure and practice

Black, Donald, ed. Toward A General Theory of Social Control. Volume 1: Fundamentals. New York: Academic Press, 1984. xvi + 363 pp. including author and subject indexes, bibliographies, list of contributors. $45.00 cloth.

Black, Donald, ed. Toward A General Theory of Social Control. Volume 2: Selected Problems. New York: Academic Press, 1984. x + 310 pp. including author and subject indexes, bibliographies, list of contributors. S39.50 cloth.     

Capablanca's stroke: an early case of neurogenic heart disease. Cuban-world-champion of chess 1921-1927

The great chess master Jose Raul Capablanca died of a stroke in New York city in 1942. An analysis of his death is instructive in the discussion of cardiac repercussions of hypertensive cerebral hemorrhage, particularly regarding the close relationship between subendocardial hemorrhage and its probable source - sympathetic activation - caused by stroke.     

Proceedings at the Meetings of the Archaeological Institute

The excavator has two advantages over his architect colleague in the study of ancient buildings: he can take his studies back long before the date of the earliest surviving vernacular buildings; and, by beginning his researches at ground level and going down, he can study parts that other researchers cannot reach. This paper, arising out of excavations undertaken in medieval York over the past eight years, seeks to compare what is now known about the underpinnings of York's medieval buildings with the development established, in the main by Denys Spittle's colleagues in the York office of the RCHM, from the above-ground evidence, the surviving buildings. It is offered to Mr Spittle, a scholar whose studies usually stop at ground level, from one whose studies as often as not begin there, on the one hand in recognition of the patient tolerance he has shown of the enthusiasms of the excavator during his incumbancy of the Institute's secretaryship; and on the other in the hopes that future vernacular building studies will increasingly show a marrying of the evidence from excavations with that from the standing buildings.     

TO THE PLANETARIUM—THERE IS STILL TIME!

This review essay examines James McFarland's Constellation: Friedrich Nietzsche and Walter Benjamin in the Now‐Time of History, which stages a comparative reading of the two thinkers’ works and argues that they shared a resistance to the conventions of nineteenth‐century historicism as well as a desire to attend not to causation as a force in history but rather to the importance of each individual “present.” Benjamin's term “dialectics at a standstill” is a formulation only a reader of Nietzsche could have produced, as McFarland ably demonstrates. This review essay also delves into Benjamin's own use of the “constellation” motif, identifying complexities McFarland leaves out of his account. Influenced by Nietzsche's own uses of astronomical and astrological motifs, Benjamin employed the image of the constellation as a symbol not only for temporality (say, of the time it takes for starlight to reach our planet). He also used it to examine our transforming relationship with the cosmos and with nature most broadly, and, in the famous “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” he used it as a figure for the proper relationship historians should establish between their own period and the past; this is what yields an understanding of the present moment as the Jetztzeit, the “time of the now” enjoying its own dignity beyond any causal relationship with the future it may have. However, and as this review essay suggests, Benjamin's uses of the constellation image, and of images of stars, telescopes, and planetariums more generally, were highly ambivalent. They can serve as indices of his shifting views of modernity and of his desire that modern experience, seemingly condemned to alienation, might be redeemed.     

Reply to Flesher–Rick Rylance

Walter Moxon, MD, FRCP lived, practiced medicine, taught and wrote in the mid- to late- nineteenth-century Victorian England, mostly at Guy's Hospital, London. He was widely informed in the “Art of Physic,” writing on a range of issues from cerebral lateralization of articulate speech to angina pectoris. The present paper will trace briefly his contributions to the newly discovered asymmetry of articulate speech in the left frontal lobe (1866) and will in more detail trace and analyze his 1881 Croonian Lectures at the Royal College of Physicians on a medical shibboleth referred to as “congestion of the brain.” In a series of ingenious and rhetorically creative arguments with imaginative tropes, demonstrations, evolutionary accounts of cognition and blood metabolism for human/biped cognition, and cogent citations from the medical literature of the day, Moxon skillfully instructs his medical audience against the misleading notion of cerebral “congestion” as an underlying pathology for cognitive, motor, and sensory deficits seen in the clinic. In so doing, he provides the medical community with an in-depth glimpse at the circulatory system, its flow dynamics, and how they serve to meet the cognitive, motor, and sensory demands of upright bipedal man.     

Reminiscences of the Solicitor General's Office

A few years ago Danielle Stern suggested to her grandfather that as the oldest member of the family, he ought to put down his memories of both the family and of his law practice. Stern did, and in it he describes various members of the family, and how he came to go to Harvard Law School, graduating in 1932 during the Great Depression. Although he had been an editor of the Harvard Law Review and graduated magna cum laude, the major New York firms passed him by because he was a Jew. He did manage to get a job with a small law firm at $25 a week, and about a year later went to Washington to join the New Deal. We are pleased to present that part of Mr. Stern s memoirs that deals with his years in the Justice Department and then in the Solicitor General s office.     

The psychiatric works of Emil Kraepelin: a many-faceted story of modern medicine

A new English language edition of some of the major works of Emil Kraepelin (1856-1926), the famous German psychiatrist, appeared in 2002. This essay has been written to mark the occasion. Kraepelin is famous for his psychiatric nosology, specifically the demarcation of dementia praecox (schizophrenia) and manic-depressive insanity (bi-polar disorder). This essay deals not only with these topics but with many other aspects of Kraepelin's psychiatry: his talents as a writer and teacher; his unusual and intense concern with volition; his lack of psychological empathy with his patients, on the one hand, and on the other, his humane care for their physical well-being; his tangled involvement with psychoanalysis; his war on alcohol; his tradition-bound treatment of hysteria; his reflective attempt to understand paranoia; some criticisms of his work; the debate over the role played by his famous diagnostic cards (Z?hlkarten); his misuse of his psychiatric beliefs in the public arena. A conclusion addresses both his shortcomings and his assets.     

“A Most Revolting State of Affairs”: Theodore Roosevelt’s Aldermanic Bill and the New York Assembly City Investigating Committee of 1884

In 1884 Theodore Roosevelt chaired a special committee of the New York Assembly, charged with investigating corruption in New York City departments. Roosevelt had also presented to the Assembly a bill to strip the city’s Board of Aldermen of their power to confirm mayoral appointments. The “Roosevelt bill” sought to break the power of Tammany over these appointments, and reduce waste and corruption. While the committee’s investigation provided the press lurid examples of corruption and incompetence, in the end it did little to diminish Tammany’s power. For Roosevelt, however, the committee hearings served as a perfect backdrop to his Aldermanic bill which was eventually signed into law by Governor Grover Cleveland. The parallel paths of the bill and the committee revealed Roosevelt as a shrewd politico building his reputation as an urban reformer.     

Institutions,Rules, and the Lawmaking Process

Binder, Sarah A. Minority Rights, Majority Rule: Partisanship and the Development of Congress. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997. Pp. 250. $59.95, hardbound; $18.95, softbound.

Dion, Douglas. Turning the Legislative Thumbscrew: Minority Rights and Procedural Change in Legislative Politics. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997. Pp. 312. $49.50, hardbound.

Krehbiel, Keith. Pivotal Politics: A Theory of U.S. Lawmaking. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998. Pp. 240. $42.00, hardbound; $17.00, softbound.

Hammond, Susan Webb. Congressional Caucuses in National Policy Making. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998. Pp. 272. $39.95 hardbound.     

借鉴，还是抄袭——评《对列宁一国建成社会主义思想及其意义的探讨》

陈立旭的《对列宁一国建成社会主义思想及其意义的探讨》一,主要内容抄自李心华的《列宁“一国建成”思想新论》稿。陈立旭认为自己的行为是借鉴。到底是借鉴,还是抄袭?经过详细比较证明,陈立旭的《探讨》是一篇道地的抄袭之作。抄袭就是抄袭,抄袭和借鉴是有区别的。     

The White Paper: Wilder Penfield,the Stream of Consciousness,and the Physiology of Mind

ABSTRACT

Wilder Penfield is justly famous for his contributions to our understanding of epilepsy and of the structure-function relationship of the brain. His theory on the relationship of the brain and mind is less well known. Based on the effects of the electrical stimulation of the cortex in conscious patients, Penfield believed that consciousness and mind are functions of what he referred to as the centrencephalic integrating system. This functional system comprised bidirectional pathways between the upper brainstem, the thalami, and the cerebral cortex of both hemispheres, and was the physical substrate from which memory, perception, initiative, will, and judgment arose. It was the source of the stream of consciousness and the physical basis of mind. This paper reviews how Penfield arrived at this conception of the mind-brain relationship. Although Penfield ultimately felt that he had failed in his attempt to unify brain and mind, his work shed new light on the relationship of memory to the mesial temporal structures and to the temporal cortex; and his association of consciousness and the brainstem preceded the conceptualization of the reticular activating system by a generation. In these, as in so many aspects of neurobiology, Penfield was prescient.     

The Archaeology of Slavery at the Van Cortlandt Plantation in the Bronx,New York

Excavations at the Van Cortlandt Mansion, the central structure of an eighteenth-century plantation located in Van Cortlandt Park in the Bronx, New York, highlight the difficulty of using archaeological evidence to document the story of enslavement in early America. While the documents indicate the extent of the Van Cortlandts' involvement in the slave trade and in the reliance on enslaved labor to build and run their enterprise, the excavations carried out over several years have not yielded concomitant evidence.     

May Games and Noble Savages: The Native American in Early Celebrations of the Tammany Society

This paper discusses the May Day celebrations of the “Sons of Saint Tammany,” an American holiday fraternity under the patronage of an historical Lenape (Delaware) Indian chieftain, which incorporated many Native American performative elements. Beginning in Philadelphia in the colonial period and quickly becoming a vehicle for republican sentiments, the Tammany idea spread to many other east coast cities. The May Day revels of the Society reached their heyday in the early years of the new nation (Federalist period). Two trends in the use of Native materials are identified, the “vaudevillian” and the more serious ethnographic. The latter led to incidents of what can be called “carnivalesque diplomacy,” with native American delegations to the U.S. capital. Dr Samuel Mitchill's elaborate mythopoetic oration for the New York chapter in 1795 is taken as an end point for the creative appropriation of Native American elements. New York's Tammany Society would eventually evolve into the famous political machine of the Democratic Party, leaving behind the original May Day idyll and Indian masquerade.