Bringing Order from the Chaos of Names,Texts and Nature: Collection and Translation of Chinese Materia Medica in Nineteenth-Century Britain

Paying attention to the research of Daniel Hanbury (1825–75), whose scientific practice revolved around names, languages and their translations of Chinese materia medica, this article discusses the centrality of names development of drug knowledge in nineteenth-century Britain. Along with the collection of material specimens, names both in transliteration and in Chinese characters were gathered locally through correspondence networks. On the other hand, names within older texts that had hitherto remained disparate were reclaimed by the nineteenth-century effort to consult and collate earlier accounts of each item. As such, the collection, identification and translation of names constituted an integral part of the process of making Chinese materia medica recognizable within a new system of universal scientific knowledge. Hanbury’s extensive efforts collating and streamlining numerous names demonstrates that the early makings of scientific drug knowledge relied heavily upon a series of textual practices and peculiar modes of knowledge brokerage that straddled distant points of time and space.     

1959年全国急性传染病学术会议的历史考察

1959年5月,为适应防疫的需要并迎接新中国成立10周年,中华人民共和国卫生部、中国人民解放军总后勤部卫生部和中华医学会在北京联合召开了全国急性传染病学术会议。会议贯彻中西医结合的卫生工作方针,结合时代发展需要,交流并总结了新中国成立以来医学界在防治急性传染病方面取得的成功经验,制定了8种急性传染病防治方案,对此后的传染病防治和研究起到了重要的推动作用。此次会议既为当代中国防疫史增添了浓墨重彩的一笔,同时也在我国医学发展史上具有重要意义。     

Trade's Value: Relational Transactions in the Papua New Guinea Betel Nut Trade

The betel nut trade in Papua New Guinea is big business. Betel nut, a mild indigenous stimulant, is considered the ‘green gold of the grassroots’. It is the country's most significant domestic cash crop and, in terms of rural incomes, a rival to the dominant export cash crops. Its sale is an important livelihood strategy in both rural and urban areas, the most visible manifestation of a flourishing informal economy. In betel nut marketplaces money ‘flows’ and ‘overflows’, traders wield large wads of cash, and vast sums change hands. Whether seeking their fortunes or only tinned fish, people trade betel nut first and foremost to make money, but such interests in trade do not automatically displace other forms of value. This paper is concerned with marketplaces and trade in contemporary Papua New Guinea and what is conveyed in those transactions between buyer and seller. Against the often impersonal and utilitarian rendering of trade, this paper seeks to foreground the sociability of trade and the multiple forms of value that may be simultaneously attached to monetised market transactions. This is not to conceal the discrete, unenduring, and competitive dynamics of trade, which prominently feature in many betel nut transactions, but instead to examine an important dynamic often overlooked. Market transactions, far from being asocial, or even socially destructive, have the capacity to generate and sustain diverse social relations including those of kinship and friendship.     

Glass Beads from 15th–17th Century CE Jar Burial Sites in Cambodia's Cardamom Mountains

A total of 74 glass beads, included as grave goods in 15th–17th century CE jar burials from Cambodia's Cardamom Mountains, were analysed using laser ablation – inductively coupled plasma – mass spectrometry (LA–ICP–MS). Several glass types were identified, including two subtypes of high‐alumina mineral soda glass, and lead–potash glass. The final glass type represents a newly discovered and previously unidentified type of high‐alumina soda glass, with high magnesia (m‐Na–Al Mg>). This study represents the first glass data from the mid‐second millennium CE from Cambodia and sheds light on the multiple long‐distance maritime exchange networks in which the upland people buried in the jars were participating.     

New Presses for Old Grapes: I: Multiple Classification Analysis

Searching, gathering, organizing, and retrieving data are basic tasks for historians. As long as historians work by themselves, decisions concerning data format, data exchange, computer platform, and the like remain secondary. Teams of historians often use relational databases for centralized data storage. However, fundamental risks are implicit when one uses databases. Among technical considerations, the process of transformation between the source and the database is a deciding factor. For those who gather data, the effective use of such possibilities as data exchange, compatibility, and simplicity of survey and the reuse of the data in other contexts and platforms becomes increasingly important. In contrast, the user's needs include the possibility of data verification and use of the data for more than one question. Many relational databases have considerable shortcomings because the stored data lose the visual characteristics, the syntax, and the semantics of the original source. The EuroClimHist database environment is a part of the NCCR Climate project. It uses a data tool, written in Java for the gathering of documentary data, which generates extensible markup language (XML) files for data exchange.     

Sex inequality in the Māori population in the prehistoric,proto-historic and early historic Eras in a Trans-Polynesian context

This study considers evidence of Māori sex inequality in life chances during the prehistoric, proto-historic and early historic eras in terms of sex differences in bone size and structure, historic reports of sex dimorphism in height, and early census data of ratios of numbers of males to females. The triangulated evidence suggests significant inequality by sex. This evidence is then placed into a contact era Polynesian context. The broader evidence, also triangulated, suggests that sex inequality amongst Māori was not unique in Polynesia. Nor, however, was inequality universal across Polynesia. There are wide differences in sex inequality in different contact-era Polynesian societies. Sex inequality appears to have been less in Tonga, Samoa and Hawai’i than in New Zealand, Tahiti, the Marquesas, Easter Island and the Cook Islands. Sex inequality mostly collapsed by the first third of the 20th century, rendering the cross-island comparisons much more homogeneous.     

Initial results from the programme of petrographic analysis of Iron Age pottery from the United Arab Emirates

This article presents the results of petrographic analyses of a collection of sixty potsherds from various sites of the Iron Age period in south‐eastern Arabia. Several macroscopic groups were identified during previous research. The fine red painted ware and the sandy buff ware appear to be homogeneous in composition and might represent two groups of production. Compositionally, fine red painted ware recalls Bronze Age pottery groups in Oman. Sandy buff ware could have been produced in the oasis of Al Ain, in the Emirate of Abu Dhabi. Both groups are represented at several sites, which indicates regional exchange. One sherd from Rumeilah could be related to Mesopotamian ceramics and is probably a Mesopotamian import.     

Ukraine's Financial Crisis, 2009

A prominent specialist in the economic affairs of the former Soviet Union relates and analyzes the state of Ukraine's economy in light of a series of discussions and interviews with the country's Prime Minister and leading economic officials in Kyiv in 2008 and April 2009. The author, a former economic advisor to the country's government and co-chair of the UN's Blue Ribbon Commission for Ukraine, devotes this paper to a penetrating analysis of the impact of the global financial crisis of 2008-2009 on Ukraine's budget, banks, exchange rates, money supply, industrial sectors (particularly energy and steel), GDP, and inflationary pressures. Due attention is given to economic relations with the EU and Russia as well as to financial assistance from the IMF.Journal of Economic Literature, Classification Numbers: E500, E600, O520, P200. 1 table, 4 figures, 38 references.     

Forging Environmentalism: Justice,Livelihood and Contested Environments. Joanne Bauer,ed.

A senior Japanese authority on the Russian economy and its energy sector addresses the country's exposure to the so-called Dutch disease, suggesting that Russia did suffer from the potentially ruinous overdependence on oil and gas exports. The author argues, however, that the symptoms of the disease were actually not severe, attributing his interpretation to: (1) drastic decline of noncompetitive domestic manufacturing industries in the 1990s, which prompted a huge inflow of imports in the 2000s, but left competitive manufacturing enterprises in a position to survive; (2) extraordinary oil price increases in the 2000s, which significantly raised household and business incomes, creating augmented demand for products of domestic origin; (3) large differences between Russian and world prices of oil and gas, which functioned as subsidies for domestic manufacturing; and (4) massive intervention in foreign exchange markets by the Central Bank of Russia, which restricted the growth of imports and thus strengthened the surviving domestic manufacturing enterprises.     

Exchange Rate Policy and the Central and East European Financial Crisis

A prominent specialist on economic developments in the former Soviet Union and Central and Eastern European (CEE) countries examines the ways in which the global financial crisis of 2008-2010 has impacted the economies of the 10 new eastern member states of the European Union (CEE-10). The author assesses the multiple preconditions of the crisis (e.g., excessive current account deficits, large foreign debt, inadequate currency reserves, immense credit expansion, rising inflation and real estate prices) as well as the rapid financial adjustments that had to be undertaken to overcome it (e.g., current account rebalancing, reducing budget deficits, pension and fiscal reform). He devotes considerable attention to the key issue of how the differences in exchange rate policies in these countries affected their abilities to respond to the crisis and outlines measures that should be implemented to enhance the crisis management capability of non-eurozone states relying on currency boards or floating exchange rates.