y father was a mathematician. When I was a teenager, I talked to him about careers. I love math, even fairly esoteric stuff. He surprised me by saying, “Math is something to pursue only if you cannot imagine doing anything else. You can follow other careers and still do math, but pure math can be very isolating; only a few people in the world are likely to really understand what you are working...

Georges Bataille’s writing seems to teethe with something utterly foreign to the discipline of philosophy. In this paper, I investigate what Jason Wirth calls’ Bataille’s “mad game of writing” in order to show that Bataille’s bizarre writing style is actually an extension of his ethical and philosophical commitments. Bataille’s writing attempts to produce a state within the reader rather than s...

might be termed the “uncertainty principle” of statistical analysis: general data (How well does this player hit against left-handers? How well does this therapy work in myocardial infarction?) often fail to take into account consequential distinctions; but more specific data (How well does this player hit against hard-throwing left-handers on warm Sunday afternoons in late September? How well ...

Any good general history of medieval medicine will tell the reader briefly about a collection of short medical texts later known as the Articella, saying that it provided an introduction to medicine and established the authority of Hippocratic and Galenic medicine, and that it became the core of medical teaching in medieval universities. Cornelius O'Boyle explores what it meant at the universit...

progress with its repetitive nature depicting it as an uninterrupted spiral. The history of sneeze is however neither of these but rather represents a closed circle. In the Talmudic text, the Mishnah, 'sneeze' was described as a dialectic summation of a thesis and antithesis combining the bad with the good. Sneezing in this concept means a unity of the bad, fearful omen and the good 'salvation'...

Recent data made available to me confirms the gathering strength of Information Polity amongst academics and professionals worldwide. Of particular significance for a journal that sets out to be international in its outreach and content is the interest to be found in the journal in the USA, India, Canada, China as well as in the UK and many other European countries. Such reach will add weight t...

‘Practice makes perfect’ is one of the most oft-heard aphorisms during our years of upbringing and education. Indeed, we believe that this rule makes perfect sense when applied to the practice of peritoneal dialysis. To date, there have been no robust randomized trials qualified enough to stir the cauldron that determines superiority (if any) of one dialysis modality over another. Although ever...

The title of my lecture derives from a statement by the great lexicographer Dr Samuel Johnson in the course of a review of the Essay on Waters, by Dr Charles Lucas. Lucas extolled the healing powers of the waters at Bath (where he was physician) and elsewhere during an enforced hiatus in his political life in Dublin. Dr Johnson was evidently not persuaded: “It is incident to physicians, I am af...

It is easy to center on the changes we view as problems while other changes go unnoticed. After attempting to develop a balance sheet of changes over my adult life, I believe that the positive changes overwhelm the negative changes in most areas. However, in one area that we deal with on a daily basis in our offices the changes in the lives and education of children some of these changes are de...

Along with mechanics and astronomy, medicine played an important role at the beginning of the sixteenth century in the process that led to a new understanding of measurement and its importance for the progress of knowledge. A pivotal figure in this sense can be considered the Italian physician Santorio Santori (1561-1636) who, with his work Ars de statica medicina (Venice 1614), originated an e...