Studying the suicide in the Byzantine Empire is difficult due to the limited number of references to it. Their number is greater in the early years of the Empire, mainly because of the persecution of Christians and gradually decreases. The attitude of the Church also gradually hardens, as well as the law. The law was strictly followed to the West, but as far as the Eastern Empire is concerned t...

Written records have been describing extreme states of emotions since ancient Greece (Angst and Marneros, 2001), but Aretaeus of Cappadocia (which is geographically located in modern Turkey) was probably the first to outline the close relationship between depression and mania nearly 2000 years ago: "I think that melancholia is the beginning and a part of mania. . . The development of mania is r...

Evidence suggests that celiac disease initially emerged as a distinct intestinal disorder sometime after organization of hunter-gatherers into human workforces capable of agriculture, especially wheat cultivation. This Neolithic revolution possibly developed to permit competitive survival over other hunter-gatherer groups. Recent archeological data suggests that wheat cultivation may have occur...

Psychiatric disorders are like children laughing and playing gaily in the park, while behind a screen other children, dimly seen, cry out to us for help. We want to come to their aid but their shapes are like shadows. Nor do we know where they are. Bipolar disorder is like one of these children. We have it before us in the pharmaceutical advertising, the woman going up and down on the merry-go-...

m Diphtheria is one of the common infectious diseases of childhood which is rare today because of preventive immunizatioi~. A centuqr ago, however, it was one of the major lullers of children under the age of ten, and was widely feared throughout Europe and America.' Although the disease has been know11 since ancient times, and was described by Galen and Aretaeus in the second and third centuri...

Aretaeus of Cappadocia in the second century A.D. made a short and vivid characterization of diabetes as a “mysterious disease”. With its multiple phenotypes and the main “thin diabetes” and the “fat diabetes”, Lancereaux indicated to us where the secret of type 2 diabetes must be found, namely in the adipose tissue. The pathogenic discordance between beta-cell mass (which progressively decreas...

Dr Olayemi Fehintola, Department of Medicine, Obafemi Awolowo University, Ile-Ife, Nigeria; and Professor G E Erhabor, Consultant Chest Physician and Professor of Medicine, Obafemi Awolowo University, Ile-Ife, Nigeria, and President of the Nigerian Thoracic Society. Correspondence to: Dr O F Awopeju. Email: [email protected] Introduction The benefits of exercise cannot be overestimated as phys...

On September 5, 2008, the Warren Alpert Foundation nnounced that Harald zur Hausen and Lutz Gissmann had won he Foundation’s 20th annual prize. In the 1980s, zur Hausen and issmann provided the first concrete evidence that specific Human apillomavirus (HPV) types were linked to cancer of the cervix 1,2]. That was the prelude to assignment of the Nobel Prize to the erman scientist. “Dr. zur Haus...

Diabetes mellitus is a group of metabolic diseases characterised by chronic hyperglycemia resulting from defects in insulin secretion and/or insulin action, or both [1]. The history of diabetes dates back to 1550 BC as the polyuric states were described in an Egyptian papyrus, where treatment was given with a four day decoction of bones, wheat, grain, grit and earth. The term diabetes was coine...

Professor Lindeboom has assembled in this biography of the leading European physician of his age, twenty years or more deep study of Boerhaave and his works. It is a magnum opus which must for the foreseeable future remain the standard biography of a rare polymath, and it appeared happily in time for the tercentenary celebrations of Boerhaave's birth in 1688. Its publication ifils a longstandin...