they served. At an intermediate level, pharmacologists at the University of Wisconsin did good by contributing to new products for the many firms which they advised, and by bringing money and technical resources from the industry to their university. At the most specific level, the harrowing tale is recounted of the difficulties between Eli Lilly and the University of Toronto about insulin, and...

Until the 1960s, when the advent of the Eurodollar market transformed the banking industry, British-owned banks were the predominant form of multinational bank. From the 1830s, British banks had established overseas branches, first in British colonial settlements in Australia and Canada, later in Asia, Latin America, Africa, and even California. By 1914 a group of around 30 banks owned and oper...

Between 1911 and 1919, Joseph Grinnell, Tracy Storer, and their colleagues from the University of California at Berkeley’s Museum of Vertebrate Zoology (MVZ) surveyed the terrestrial vertebrates along a transect that stretched from the western foothills of the Sierra Nevada, through Yosemite National Park, to the area around Mono Lake. These surveys were part of a larger study of the fauna of C...

After completing my Ph.D. in Physics at Princeton University, I obtained a postdoctoral position at Rockefeller University. In the early sixties, Detlev Bronk, who was president (1953–1968) of the then Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research hired George Uhlenbeck, Mark Kac and Theodore Berlin (1961), among others, to establish a Mathematical Physics group, and Abraham Pais (1962) to lead a ...

Obituary support for his work, and, in this, he was also singularly successful. In an article reviewing a biography of Ruther-ford (one of Max's early heroes), Max says he was disappointed to find the famous Cavendish Laboratory poorly equipped when he arrived and explains his view that Rutherford's failure to raise enough money to equip the Laboratory properly was a weakness shared by Bragg. M...

During the 1914-1918 war there was, from year to year, a mounting number of deaths among the inpatients of some (but not all) English asylums. By the beginning of 1916 the Board of Control, the small government office responsible for offering guidance to managers and monitoring the proper running of asylums in England and Wales, was perturbed and puzzled by the figures.' The most important func...

This biographical sketch of Ignacio V. Ponseti, MD, corresponds to the historic text, The Classic: Congenital Club Foot: The Results of Treatment, available at DOI 10.1007/s11999-009-0720-2 and The Classic: Observations on Pathogenesis and Treatment of Congenital Clubfoot, available at DOI 10.1007/s11999-009-0721-1.

It is now almost a hundred years since Fournier, much against the standard belief of the times, proposed that syphilis was the likely cause of tabes dorsalis. Alfred Fournier (Fig. 1) was unquestionably the foremost syphilologist in France in the last 30 years of the 19th century, but his life and works are little known in English-speaking countries, probably because so few of his works have be...

What is the attitude and what are the positions adopted by the Catholic Church in Belgium vis-à-vis the family between the middle of the nineteenth century and World War I? The question is important for several reasons. Between 1750 and 1950, the family underwent impressive changes (Ariès, 1960; Burguière, 1986). The Church occupied an exceptional, and contested, place within the conjugal and f...