Introduction and Goals 19th century Europe was infested with diphteria, tuberculosis (TB), cholera and multiple infectious diseases. Cholera and TB are examples of diseases that had been deadly in the 19th century and declined rapidly independently of the discovery of medication. In particular, in the UK there was a shift from ubiquitous mortality to extremely low mortality from the mid-19th to...

The development of 2,3-dimercaptopropanol (British Anti-Lewisite, BAL) by Peters, Stocken, and Thompson (1) has made available a potent antidote for arsenical poisoning. Study of the chemical combination of arsenic with sensitive enzymes and cells indicated that the arsenic could, under certain circumstances, be removed from the cells, and that enzymes could be reactivated by the action of BAL ...

Inorganic trivalent arsenicals are vicinal thiol-reacting agents, and dithiothreitol (DTT) is a well-known dithiol agent. Interestingly, both decreasing and increasing effects of DTT on arsenic trioxide-induced apoptosis have been reported. We now provide data to show that, at high concentrations, DTT, dimercaptosuccinic acid (DMSA), and dimercaptopropanesulfonic acid (DMPS) decreased arsenic t...

Large alluvial deltas of the Mekong River in southern Vietnam and Cambodia and the Red River in northern Vietnam have groundwaters that are exploited for drinking water by private tube-wells, which are of increasing demand since the mid-1990s. This paper presents an overview of groundwater arsenic pollution in the Mekong delta: arsenic concentrations ranged from 1-1610 microg/L in Cambodia (ave...

Arsenic is an important poison bot 1 or homicidal and suicidal purposes. As it is w 1 e y distributed in nature exact information a oil the amount of arsenic normally present m human tissues, excreta and foodstuns is great importance in medico-legal inves1 iga 10 When it is present in large quantity in viscera of a suspected case of arsenic poisoning, no difficulty arises in giving a defini e o...

Acute and chronic exposure to arsenic has been reported in several countries of the world, with major outbreaks of arsenosis occurring in Argentina, Bangladesh, India, Mexico, Thailand, and Taiwan, where a large proportion of drinking water (groundwater) is contaminated with high concentrations of arsenic. Research has also pointed to significantly higher standardized mortality rates for cancer...

COVER Partial view of the predictive map of high levels of arsenic in groundwater resources in China (blue, low probability; red, high probability; width, 600 kilometers; resolution, 1 square kilometer). Chronic arsenic poisoning from contaminated groundwater is a major health problem in many parts of China. An estimated 19.6 million people are potentially exposed to elevated arsenic concentrat...

This paper presents the traditions of assisted childbirth in the Brazilian state of Bahia in the 19th Century and develops the hypothesis that two obstetrical traditions coexisted in the capital, Salvador, namely the doctor-midwives--who used technical resources and knowledge acquired from obstetrics as a medical specialty--and the traditional midwives, whose know-how was purely of an empirical...