The development and evolution of “cerebral thermometry”: Clinical applications of a nineteenth-century approach to cerebral localization and neurological diagnosis

ABSTRACT

Surface thermometers were developed in the latter half of the nineteenth century. In 1877, Broca, already famous for his contributions to the cerebral localization of nonfluent aphasia, presented his first clinical observations on cranial surface temperatures: In two cases, cranial surface temperatures were decreased over a middle cerebral artery infarction, and increased in surrounding areas, which Broca attributed to “compensatory hyperaemia.” As Broca made apparent in a later report in 1879, he had used a “thermometric crown,” an apparatus consisting of six to eight large-reservoir mercury thermometers strapped against the head. Following Broca’s report, American neurologists reported cases in which cranial surface temperatures were increased either locally over a superficial brain tumor or globally with a cerebral abscess. Despite promising anecdotal reports, contemporaries recognized that significant technical and practical problems limited its accuracy, reliability, and clinical utility. Advocates never demonstrated that this technology provided significant marginal benefit to the medical history and physical examination. The technique fell out of fashion before 1900, though some early advocates promoted it into the early twentieth century. It was ultimately replaced by more effective technologies for cerebral localization and neurological diagnosis.     

Mill’s closet: J.S. Mill on solitude and the imperfect democracy

This paper focuses on the role solitude played in John Stuart Mill’s political thought. By doing so, it challenges contemporary appropriations of Mill’s thought by participatory, deliberative and epistemic theories of democracy. Mill considered solitude to be contrary to political participation and public debate, but nonetheless regarded it as essential for democracy and for intellectual progress. Since the early 1830s Mill began developing an idea of solitude while simultaneously forming a particular kind of a democratic model which I refer to as ‘imperfect democracy’. According to this model, democracy is restrained by non-democratic elements which offer a contrary spirit and are not incorporated by democracy. At first Mill believed the ‘leisured class’ would fulfil this task, but later considered solitude as a possible solution. This paper follows the way in which these ideas were crystallised in Mill’s thought, and by doing so offers a novel interpretation of Mill’s political thought and his nuanced understanding of solitude, political participation and democracy.     

A vision of Ireland, 1967: John Montague’s aisling ghéar

More than fifty years after its publication as a broadsheet ballad, John Montague’s “The Rape of the Aisling” (1967) retains its satirical force. Whilst not the first instance in Irish writing to acknowledge sexual abuse of young people by priests (two years earlier John McGahern’s The Dark had been banned partly on the grounds of its rendering of clerical malfeasance), Montague’s rough ballad nonetheless places sexual abuse at the very heart of its assault on the Catholic Church’s baleful influence on a society on the cusp of dramatic social change. By adopting, and radically adapting, that most malleable of literary forms – the aisling or dream-vision poem – Montague seems to suggest that in mid-twentieth-century Ireland it is not the “Saxon occupier” who poses a risk to Republican ideals. Now, it is members of a home-grown patriarchy, the “access-all-areas men in black” who abuse and rape children and young people in their care, who seek to compromise the Proclamation’s promise to cherish “all of the children of the nation equally”.     

John Hewitt’s curatorial eye: art and poetry in the municipal galleries

ABSTRACT

This article examines the art writing of the poet, critic, and curator John Hewitt in mid-twentieth century Ireland and Northern Ireland. Hewitt’s promotion of modern art and artist collectives in Ulster through shifting definitions of internationalism and regionalism will be linked to the art writing of Herbert Read and the late poetry of W.B. Yeats. Taking an interdisciplinary approach to Hewitt’s poetry and art writing reveals the sustained imbrication of politics, poetry and the visual arts in his thinking. Hewitt’s ottava rima poem in response to Yeats, “The Municipal Gallery Revisited, October 1954”, will be reassessed with recourse to the context of the Municipal Gallery in Dublin and its mid-century sculpture collections. By identifying artworks within the Municipal Gallery poem, the article illustrates Hewitt’s broader dialogues with the late Yeats and the art scene in Ireland.     

Mourning the Un-mournable? Political Theology Between Refugees and Religion

Since the arrival, or the attempted arrival, of millions of refugees in Europe, the performances of the Center for Political Beauty – a Berlin-based collective of artists and activists – have had a huge impact on public and political debates about Germany's migration policies. In this paper, I analyze the performance “The Dead Are Coming” in which the artists buried refugees who drowned in their attempt to enter the European Union. Drawing on Judith Butler's political philosophy of performativity, I assess “The Dead Are Coming” as a “doing” rather than a “describing” of dignity. I argue that the integration of God into the practices of mourning enables both the activists and the audience to resist the differential distribution of dignity in Europe's migration policy. Ultimately, I advocate a re-thinking of political theology in which art learns from theology and theology learns from art in order to promote dignity under de-dignifying conditions.