mayor and aldermen of the city of London put into place a set of orders " concerning the infection of the plague, " which was then sweeping through the population. He intended that these actions would be " very expedient for preventing and avoiding of infection of sickness " (1). At that time, London faced a public health crisis, with an inadequate scientific base in that the role of rats and t...

Politics play a central part in determining health and development outcomes as Gorik Ooms highlights in his recent commentary. As health becomes more global and more politicized the need grows to better understand the inherently political processes at all levels of governance, such as ideological positions, ideas, value judgments, and power. I agree that global health research should strengthen...

One of the more surprising features of the literature on public health and on health policy research in Europe and North America is the scarcity of references on the impact of political variables on health policy and on health outcomes. One can find in this literature a growing number of articles that focus on the social and cultural determinants of health, but very few indeed on the political ...

RATIONALE Public health policies are often dependent on political decision-making, but little is known of the impact of different forms of government on countries' health policies. In this exploratory study we studied the association between a wide range of process and outcome indicators of health policy and four groups of political factors (levels of democracy, e.g. voice and accountability; p...

Islamic economists preoccupation with the deductive approach needs being moderated by a greater recourse to induction, especially in discussing the role of values in the economic system. Values have played an important role in the Christian West in the past, not withstanding the current advocacy of moral relativism. Every social decision implies a value judgment. Values permeate the contemporar...

The abortive attempts of Sir Humphry Davy to introduce modest reforms at the Royal Society of London during his Presidency (1820-27) contrast with his (largely unstudied) earlier experience of administration at the Royal Institution of Great Britain (RI). Davy's attempts to combat the systemic weaknesses in governance and funding, and his role in effecting changes at the RI, in association with...

The Mexica Empire reached an outstanding social, economic and politic organization among Mesoamerican civilizations. Even though archaeology and history provide substantial information about their past, their biological origin and the demographic consequences of their settlement in the Central Valley of Mexico remain unsolved. Two main hypotheses compete to explain the Mexica origin: a social r...

The concurrent development of political economy and the modern conception of medicine was reflected from the first decades of the seventeenth century by a degree of interdisciplinary borrowing based on analogy between the human body and the body politic. It seemed perfectly feasible that the growing knowledge of the human body and its diseases might inspire new concepts, and vindicate the use o...