Les revues médicales depuis 1800

French medical journals take the lead among the 1 385 titles of the statistical survey (15.4%). Efficient tool in communication, with an important publishing market, linked to the rise of medicine in the 19^th century, prosperity of medical journals do not only mean rise of specialties. Monthly periodicals dominate quickly the publishing market which is also characterized by complex links between generalist and highly specialized medicine, public health and professional training.     

The spring,the seed and the tree: Gregory of Tours on the wonders of nature

In the preface to his liturgical calendar The reckoning of the course of the stars Bishop Gregory of Tours (538–594) — author also of Ten books of histories and Eight books of miracles as well as of a Commentary on the understanding of the Psalter (of which, however, only fragments are preserved) — declares God's “wonders” of the natural world to be superior to the seven ancient wonders of the world. The reason for this is that the latter, being works of men, are subject to decay and destruction, while the former, as miraculous works of God, are divinely sustained and renewed daily or annually, thereby becoming imperishable. An examination of the associative contexts in which two of these wonders — the sea (enlarged to include water in its various forms) and plant life — occur in the rest of Gregory's works reveals several essential themes of his thinking not only about nature, but also about God, man and society. Thought, for him, nature as a (divinely sustained) system of regularities does exist as a kind of backdrop, sudden unpredictable divine — and sometimes diabolic — action in and through phenomena occupies the center of the stage. Gregory tends to see this action in the shape of what he regards as pre-existing images or patterns of invisible spiritual truth, to which the visible, even material, structure of events must necessarily conform. He shows, too, how this action could reflect as well as meet various needs of the individual and of society as a whole. An association which recurs almost constantly in his treatment of divine action in these natural phenomena, which he sometimes describes as analogous to that in man, is precisely that with the cluster of closely related concepts of renewal, rebirth and creation ex nihilo. Together with what appears as an extreme, as it were ‘poetical’, sensitivity to sudden perceptions and intuitions, something like a longing for and surrender to what he describes as “astonished admiration” may have helped to make possible his recognition of that which he designated as divine creative power in the world of visible reality as well as in man's inner experience. His seeing this as an essential dynamic of the holy may mean that he felt it to be a fundamental need and concern not only of the individual personality but also, more obscurely, of the society in which he found himself.     

New techniques for the recovery of small amounts of mature enamel proteins

Currently there are no non-destructive techniques to obtain protein from the dental enamel, the most mineralized tissue in mammals and most resistant to diagenesis, which provides a window to the developing period by means of incremental markings containing proteins. To recover protein, dissolution of powdered enamel is required. Here we tested whether samples obtained by micro-etching of the enamel surface were adequate for protein analysis by MALDI-TOF/TOF mass spectrometry and identification in protein databases. The micro-etch techniques were effective in generating adequate samples for mass spectrometry (from 3 to 13.4 μm superficial enamel), being also highly conservative, since they rendered masses of enamel ranging from 0.1 to 0.4 mg. Using these techniques the separation of proteins by SDS-PAGE was not necessary, and the whole procedure was easier. Results showed successful identification of specific enamel proteins after whole crown superficial etching with 11% EDTA in the case of immature porcine samples, and with 10% HCl in the case of mature human enamel. X- and Y-isoforms of amelogenin, ameloblastin, and enamelin peptides were identified. The new techniques described here allowed the successful recovery of enamel proteins, opening new avenues for the use of enamel protein information in fossil/archeological material, where sometimes little protein is left.     

Conflicting images of the Zuider Zee around 1900: nation-building and the struggle against water

In 1918, the Dutch government decided to enclose and reclaim the Zuider Zee (later called the IJsselmeer). The preceding decades had been marked by broad public debate about the utility and urgency of the project. Around 1900, its proponents constructed images of the region and of the Dutch nation in which the Zuider Zee was no longer a crossroads. They emphasized the backwardness of the area and depicted the sea as a domestic enemy, its violent storms posing a threat to the nation. Cornelis Lely’s Zuider Zee proposal (1891) promised a bright future for both the region and the Netherlands as a whole. The struggle against the water would revitalize the nation (by stimulating nation-building) and modernize its international image (perceived as a picturesque but archaic country). Opponents of the project feared the high costs and developed a counter-image: the Zuider Zee region as heartland of ‘authentic’ Dutch culture, a heritage that would be jeopardized by the project. The article concludes by highlighting the synchronicity of the non-synchronous: the Zuider Zee region was envisioned as a region living in the past, thereby constituting an ‘internal Other’ in a country undergoing rapid modernization around 1900.     

Philosophy as a cultural resource and medium of reflection for Hermann Weyl

In a talk given at Zurich in the late 1940s, Hermann Weyl discussed Ferdinand Gonseth's dialectical epistemology and considered it as being restricted too strictly to aspects of historical change. His experiences with post-Kantian dialectical philosophy, in particular Johann Gottlieb Fichte's derivation of the concept of space and matter, had been a stronger dialectical background for his own 1918 studies in purely infinitesimal geometry and the early geometrically unified field theory of matter (extending the Mie-Hilbert program). Although now Weyl distantiated himself from the speculative features of his youthful philosophizing and in particular from his earlier enthusiasm for Fichte, he again had deep doubts as to the cultural foundations of modern mathematical sciences and its role in material culture of high modernity. For Weyl, philosophical «reflection» was a cultural necessity he now turned towards Karl Jaspers' and Martin Heidegger's existentialism to find deeper grounds, similar to his turn towards Fichte's philosophy after World War I. The discussion in the late 1940s can be read as a kind of post-World-War-II «Nachtrag» to Weyl's more widely known philosophical comments on mathematics and the natural sciences published in the middle of the 1920s.     

王庆云《石渠余纪》所载道光关税辨析

研究清代财政史,王庆云所著《石渠余纪》是一本绕不过去的著作。这是因为,迄今为止,研究清代财政问题,最常用的办法仍然是以个别年份的数据,以点代面地分析清代财政收支的总量及趋势。而《石渠余纪》则提供了相当多的可用数据。其中,由于卷6《直省关税表》列出了户工两部各税关道光二十一年（1841）、二十二年、二十五年、二十九年四个年份的关税定额及实征数,因而成为学术界引用的重点。     

Pour une sociologie de la société transnationale

Proposing a general framework for the study of the emerging transnational society, the article critically surveys predominant disciplinary perspectives in this field, and outlines an approach based on a core/periphery model with oligopolistic competition. Within this general framework, sociology finds its specific subject in the ties that connect human beings across national borders, directly or mediated by transnational institutions. An elaborated and amended version of this approach is illustrated, among others, by the dynamics of cultural globalization and the «world language system».