Early nineteenth century Brazil saw a vibrant movement to study nature, including a number of expeditions aimed at gathering a corpus of knowledge on Brazilian flora. One of the main goals of these expeditions was to map and identify plant species of economic and therapeutic value. The government undertook and sponsored various initiatives, and it was within this context that the Bahian voyager...

Desiderius Erasmus set out his views on medical ethics just over 500 years ago. Applying the characteristic approach of Renaissance Humanism, he drew upon a variety of classical sources to develop his own account of medical obligation. Of particular interest is Erasmus's attention to the patient's duties as well as the physician's. By treating this reciprocal relationship as a friendship betwee...

Thanks to Web 2.0, retail websites and online communities provide user reviews to help consumers make purchase decisions. Current IS and marketing literature reveal that user reviews can form strong social influence on consumers’ purchase decisions. However, few studies systematically examined how social influence is developed from user reviews. To bridge the gap, our research explores what fac...

Scientists are not always remembered for the ideas they cherished most. In the case of the French biologist Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, his name since the end of the nineteenth century has been tightly linked to the idea of the inheritance of acquired characters. This was indeed an idea that he endorsed, but he did not claim it as his own nor did he give it much thought. He took pride instead in adv...

In his famous visit to the U.S. early in the nineteenth century, the French observer Alexis de Tocqueville was surprised by what he saw as “an equality of condition” in his travels around the country. Although he commented on the existence of wealth in the new nation, he was impressed by what he saw as its relative lack of concentration (de Tocqueville 1969). Recent studies by social historians...

This introductory article gives an overview of the history and culture intimacy in nineteenth-century art, architecture literature, discusses key theories concepts. It explains how t...

on former Medical Societies and Journals in Calcutta. Beginning with the Medical and Physical Society of Calcutta in 1823 which met in the Asiatic Society's rooms and published a series of volumes of Transactions, he traced the history through several short-lived attempts to found medical journals in the first half of the nineteenth century, and through the long series of Indian Annals of Medic...

T h e eff iciency wage mode l is developed in this paper to explain the radical restructuring of agricultural product ion towards cattle and sheep in Ire land that occurred after the blight at tack of 1846 . T h e pre -Famine structure and product ion changes consequent to the blight are examined statistically using cross sectional data at a county level. T h e paper concludes that the blight l...

T he " Third World " – the division of humanity into haves and have-nots – was shaped by fatal interactions between world climate and world economy at the end of the nineteenth century. Three waves of drought, famine and disease devastated agriculture throughout the tropics and northern China when the monsoons failed. The total human toll could not have been less than 30 million victims. Fifty ...