A              in the social sciences is that civic traditions are more salient in Western Europe than in Central and Eastern Europe. Among the scholars who subscribe to this view, there are many who have located the origin of the difference in the pre-modern past. Typically they see the appearance of autonomous cities in many parts of Western Europe in the late Middle Ages as the ...

In 1778 Dr Anton Mesmer arrived in Paris from Austria with his new theory of illness and the treatment he had created. He believed in the power of “animal magnetism”, a universal fluid to cure illness. Groups of his patients gathered in a room surrounding a large enclosed wooden tub with iron wands protruding out of it. The patients would hold the wands and touch them to their afflicted parts. ...

The previous chapter considered how short-term variations in climatic conditions and extreme weather events can exert direct effects on human death rates, physical injury, mental health and other health outcomes. Changes in mean climatic conditions and climate variability also can affect human health via indirect pathways, particularly via changes in biological and ecological processes that inf...

Without the rule of law limiting discretionary powers government agencies, but also other organizations and in-dividuals no individual freedom is possible. If re-presentatives or private persons can order at their discretion individuals to behave in certain ways, liberty guaranteed. As Immanuel Kant expressed it «man free if he needs obey person solely law.» And even indi-viduals are only oblig...

The historical tradition connects the final period of life and burial place Galician-Volhynian Prince Lev Danylovych with a small Carpathian village Spas (Lviv region) which is situated in Upper Dnister area. Considering fact, that we have almost no evidence about this Prince, only connected archaeological data along some fragmentary give us opportunity to reconstruct status role area during me...

was brought into clinical medicine in the twentieth century.' This is a study of two distinguished English physicians, Thomas Horder and Walter Langdon Brown, who had almost simultaneous and identical careers and were major figures in the introduction of some of the findings and practices of new laboratory sciences into clinical work. There are important similarities and differences in their re...

IN THE LATE autumn of 1623, the poet John Donne, then Dean of St. Paul's Cathedral, contracted typhus which was sweeping London in epidemic.' For almost three weeks Donne suffered a near-mortal fever, visited by his physicians and nursed by a few faithful servants. More fortunate than many, Donne did not die of the disease, and by early January, confined to a chair by his bedside, he had begun ...

The chewing of coca leaves was practiced in Peru in remote times, possibly before the Incas. Nevertheless, in the opinion of chroniclers of the conquest of Peru by the Spaniards, the cultivation and use of coca was very restricted at that time, so that chewing was a privilege of the Inca aristocracy, who consumed coca during official and religious ceremonies. According to the chronicler Santill...

UNTIL THE NINETEENTH CENTURY London had two geographical poles, the Court and the Port. Economically both these poles were defined primarily by their relationship to what a subsequent age would call the service sector. They were of course very different. The Court is taken here as a convenient shorthand that includes the government, parliament, the aristocracy and the Court’s allies in the prof...