AT THE end of the eleventh century a spate of intellectual activity in all fields, usually known as the Twelfth-Century Renaissance, began in Western Europe. Medical knowledge, consequently, made considerable advances with the rediscovery, mainly from Arabic sources, of Ancient Greek medical texts and with the translation of the works of skilled Arabic doctors who practised according to Greek p...

Claudius Galen and his scholarly teachings defined the practice of medicine in Western Europe for 1500 years (Figure 1). His empiric approach, based on original animal experimentation, and his reputation for miraculous cures had an enormous influence on Western medicine during the Middle Ages and Renaissance until William Harvey’s discovery of the circulation of blood in the early seventeenth c...

This paper is concerned with the massively multi-player online role-playing game Ultima Online. Because of the large number of players, the evolution of sub-groups, or guilds, are very common. This document contains a general description of Ultima Online and an analysis of a particular guild. I show that the guild can be classified as a virtual community and discuss the importance of its rules ...