The relation of form and function

Foley, William A., and Robert D. Van Valin. Functional Syntax and Universal Grammar. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984. xii + 416 pp. including notes, references, and topics and language indices. $59.50 cloth, $19.95 paper.     

Alcohol Studies and Anthropology: Broadening the Venture

Caplan, Pat, ed. The Cultural Construction of Sexuality. London: Tav‐istock, 1987. xi + 304 pp. including name and subject indexes. $44.00 cloth; $16.95 paper.

Williams, Walter L. The Spirit and the Flesh: Sexual Diversity in American Indian Culture. Boston: Beacon Press, 1986. xi + 344 pp. including 16 black‐and‐white plates, bibliography, and index. $21.95 cloth.     

Living in the tenth century. Mentalities and social orders

In his series of lectures, Le pouvoir psychiatrique, Michel Foucault employs concepts from the military field of knowledge in order to analyse the founding scenes of psychiatry. I focus on three issues connected to Foucault's use of these military terms. Firstly, I examine why Foucault was reluctant to use concepts from sociology and psychology in Le pouvoir psychiatrique and how this affects the notions that he had formulated in his earlier work, Histoire de la folie. Secondly, I show how he challenges traditional understandings of the founding scenes of psychiatry by using concepts from a different field of knowledge. In doing this, he creates metaphors, and this is something that he himself had previously been critical of doing. Thirdly, I reflect upon the fact that Foucault's creative use of concepts from different disciplines and examples from different historical times can be related to episodes in his own life; I argue why it is important to supplement a structural analysis with linguistic, phenomenological and hermeneutical ones.     

Neurognostics Question: An American Neurophysiologist,Pioneer of Electromyography,A President of Universities and Scientific Advisor to United States Presidents

The semantics of pain are an important and interesting aspect of any language. Ancient Greek and Latin had multiple words for pain, which makes scrutinizing different meanings problematic. The ancient physician Galen approached this issue through the use of adjectives to describe the qualities for pain, instead of the words for pain themselves. The medical texts of Celsus and Caelius Aurelianus reveal that Latin also vested particular significance in qualifiers to distinguish between different types of pain. This article looks at the qualifying terms used for pain in the ancient Greek and Latin languages to reveal a sophisticated Greco-Roman vocabulary for pain.