International labour migration of Asian women

Chris Beyrer. War in the Blood: sex, Politics and AIDS in Southeast Asia. Bangkok: White Lotus Books; London and New York: Zed Books, 1998. £42.50, hardcover; £14.95, paper.

Christine B. N. Chin. In Service and Servitude: foreign Female Domestic Workers and the Malaysian “Modernity” Project. New York: Columbia University Press, 1998. xxiv, 299 pp. US$20.50, paper.

Siriporn Skrobanek, Nataya Boonpakdee and Chutima Jantateero. The Traffic in Women: human Realities of the International Sex Trade. London and New York: Zed Books, 1997. vii, 124 pp. £32.95, hardcover.     

A perplexing document in the early history of Gilles de la Tourette Syndrome: Melotti's rendition of a "Lecture of Charcot" (including a complete translation from the Italian with commentary)

In 1885, Dr. Guilio Melotti published an Italian translation of a lecture on "Convulsive Tics with Coprolalia and Echolalia" given by Jean-Martin Charcot. Although this lecture often has been cited as an authoritative statement of Charcot's view, until now it has not been translated into English. The lecture presents a number of statements that appear nowhere else in Charcot's published corpus, including some that seem to contradict Charcot's other pronouncements on maladie des tics. Although the Melotti-Charcot lecture may portray Charcot's position accurately in many passages, the article most likely is a compilation from a variety of sources.     

Lung cancer, chronic disease epidemiology, and medicine, 1948-1964

Beginning in the early 1950s, a series of epidemiological, biochemical, pathological, and animal studies demonstrated a link between cigarette smoking and lung cancer. A number of reputable scientists challenged these findings, but for a variety of reasons, including the behavior of the tobacco industry, historians have assumed that these objections were insubstantial and disingenuous. Viewing these objections in scientific and medical perspective, however, suggests that there was a legitimate and reasonable scientific controversy over cigarette smoking and lung cancer in the 1950s and early 1960s. That controversy had important consequences. A new chronic disease epidemiology emerged, transforming the role and importance of epidemiology to medical research. This new epidemiology supplemented Koch's postulates, establishing a statistical method that allowed for linking environmental factors to the etiology of chronic diseases. The 1964 report to the surgeon general, Smoking and Health, represented the denouement and codification of these developments. This reexamination of the scientific controversy over smoking in the 1950s and early 1960s provides an important context for understanding the subsequent public relations battles between the tobacco industry and public health after 1964.     

The Role of Bubo virginianus magellanicus as Rodent Bone Accumulator in Archaeological Sites: A Case Study for the Atuel River (Mendoza,Argentina)

Micromammalian bone assemblages from modern pellets of the strigiform Bubo virginianus magellanicus, from the upper Atuel River (southern Mendoza, Argentina), were taphonomically analysed. The results allow us to place B. v. magellanicus in the category of intermediate modification (Category 2). This sample has also been compared with results from other members of this genus, in order to classify B. v. magellanicus as a taphonomic agent. The participation of the Bubo species in archaeological accumulations has been documented, but in Argentina, the role of B. v. magellanicus has been reported up to the present. It is partly because of the sequence of one archaeological site in the south of Mendoza Province called Laguna El Sosneado‐3 (LS‐3). However, considering the absence of a current taphonomic model of this owl, this participation was mentioned as a hypothesis. In the current investigation, archaeological and modern samples have been compared. The results indicate that the skeletal element assemblages recovered from LS‐3 were accumulated by strigiform birds. Taphonomical evidence of light modifications on units I and IV indicates that Tyto alba (Category 1) was probably the main species involved in these units, whereas the taphonomical evidence on skeletal element assemblages recovered from units II and III suggests the action of a strigiform with a major category of modification such as B. v. magellanicus. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.