Maʻagan Mikhael B,Israel: a preliminary report of a Late Byzantine–Early Islamic period shipwreck

The Ma?agan Mikhael B shipwreck was found in 1.5m of water, beneath 1.5m of sand, 70m off the Mediterranean coast of Israel. The hull remains are in a good state of preservation, comprising the endposts, aprons, framing timbers, hull planks, stringers, and bulkheads. The finds comprise rigging elements, wooden artefacts, organic finds, animal bones, glassware, coins, bricks, stones, ceramic sherds, and complete amphoras. The shipwreck was dated to the 7th–8th centuries AD; which makes it an exceptional source of information regarding various aspects of ship construction, seamanship, and seafaring in the area in Late Antiquity.     

Performing a cure for schizophrenia: insulin coma therapy on the wards

Most historians of psychiatry regard insulin coma therapy (ICT) either as an embarrassing stumble on the path to modern biological psychiatry or as one member of a long line of somatic therapies used to treat mental illness in the mid-twentieth century. This article explores the ICT era, roughly 1933-60, as a key moment in the development of American psychiatry. Developed only ten years after insulin had been embraced as a "miracle drug" for the treatment of diabetes, ICT was perceived by psychiatrists as a means of bringing their field closer to mainstream medicine, particularly to neurology. In addition, the story of ICT reveals how a treatment never quite proven on paper was unquestionably efficacious in the local world in which it was performed. An institutionally-based treatment, ICT was administered in a specific area of the mental hospital deemed the insulin unit, a room with its own staff, practices, and attitudes toward mental illness. There, psychiatrists often experienced wondrous recoveries of individual, formerly intractable patients. These intense personal experiences allowed psychiatrists to feel truly efficacious, enabling them to reinvent themselves as medical doctors rather than behavioral and disciplinary supervisors. The confidence they derived from this capacity, along with the operating room-like setting of the insulin unit, the unit's specialized staffing and group bond, and the availability of both risk-assessment tests and a medley of treatments that countered side effects and complications, allowed ICT to be understood as an efficacious treatment for schizophrenia within the local world in which it was administered.     

Mast-Step Coins among the Romans

The archaeological evidence of more than a dozen ancient shipwrecks indicates that the tradition of placing a coin inside the mast-step of a ship's hold probably originated with the Romans. The mast-step coin phenomenon, which persisted through the Middle Ages and continues in various forms today, has often been characterized according to the modern concept of 'luck'. The custom was, however, not one of an exclusively maritime nature; rather, it was ultimately derived from a long-standing religious tradition that can be traced back to the consecration of the earliest Greek temples.
© 2007 The Author     

A Note on a Digression on Arendt in Waller Newell's Tyranny: A New Interpretation

This note explores Newell's instructive digression, in his Tyranny, about Hannah Arendt's reading of Aristotle (in The Human Condition). I supplement his account of Arendt as collapsing the theory/practice distinction as a result of her indebtedness to Heidegger.