Catatonia is a psychomotor disorder that has gone through numerous descriptions since 1874, reflecting the many changes in psychiatric disease conceptualization that have occurred within that time frame. Catatonia has been variously described as a distinct disease entity, as a part of schizophrenia, and as a nonspecific manifestation of many disorders. Because of its association with schizophrenia, the description of catatonia was particularly affected by the psychopharmacological era, beginning in the 1950s, and by the development of the Diagnostic and Statistical (...) Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM). Changing trends in psychiatric research—especially the brain-based disease model, research methods favoured by the evidence-based medicine movement, and the codes and categories of the DSM—also profoundly influenced the evolving concept of catatonia. This paper discusses these important factors that affected recognition, treatment, and study of catatonia in order to reveal the biases and assumptions made when constructing a disease concept. (shrink)

The hematologist-historian author became interested in the nature 'medical miracles', following a request to write a report on a set of bone marrows that was sent to the Vatican as a possible miracle cure in a cause for canonization. She questioned the prevalence of medical miracles, their structure, and relationship to other 'official' miracles that are recognized by the Church. Evidence was drawn from a variety of sources: oral testimony of pilgrims at feast day celebrations, ex voto paintings, and 160 (...) miracle files in 67 canonization records of the Vatican Archives. Some changes can be detected through time, but the results also testify to remarkable longue durée in the healing experience: the patterns of suffering and despair, the gestures of pleading, the presence of beds and dreams, the astonishment of the caregivers, and above all the simultaneous recourse to medicine and religion both. (shrink)

Four years ago, as colleagues in our university's law and medical schools, we designed and began offering a course for law, medical, and nursing students, studying professionalism and professional ethics by reading and discussing current and earlier images of nurses, doctors, and lawyers in literature. We wanted to make professional ethics, professional culture, and professional education the objects of study rather than simply the unreflective consequences of exposure to professional language, culture, and training. We wanted to do it in an (...) interdisciplinary course where aspiring professionals could share their self-conceptions and their conceptions of each other, and we wanted to do it by using stories, our primary means for organizing experience and claiming meaning for it. This article tells the story of that experience: why we did it; how we did it; what we learned from doing it. (shrink)

I believe that the purpose of history in a medical school can be related to two simple goals: first, to make students a bit skeptical about everything else they are to be taught in the other lectures—skepticism fosters humility and life-long learning; second, to make them aware that medical history is a research discipline as compelling as any of the basic and clinical sciences they are traditionally taught. In the fall of 1988, I was given an opportunity to build a (...) “course” in history for medical students—a course with no fixed time slot, no fixed syllabus, and no fixed content. I wanted to teach history of anatomy during anatomy sessions, history of pathology during pathology, history of obstetrics during obstetrics, and so on. I hoped to end each session with a disciplinary controversy that extended into present pratice. The ultimate manifestation of infiltration would be to have one question on every exam that the students would write during their medical school experience. This is the story of how my medical history teaching moved from nothing to a program integrated throughout four years of medical studies, complete with goals and objectives and two questions of every exam. The content, advantages, and problems of the approach in the Queen's University experience will be presented. (shrink)

In recent years, the trend in environmental ethics has been to criticize the traditional Western anthropocentric attitude toward nature. Many environmentalists have looked toward some of the views held by indigenous peoples in various parts of the world and argue that important ecological lessons can be learned by studying their beliefs and attitudes toward nature. The traditional Western viewpoint has been labeled as a form of shallow environmentalism, allowing few rights for anything other than human life. In contrast, indigenous peoples (...) are seen as respecting all things. Thus, the claim is made that the latter’secological views are deeper than those of Western views. John Locke is often placed at the center of this tradition that is associated with indifference to the environment. Yet, a comparison of the fundamental beliefs that drive the environmental ethics of the Maori people with those of John Locke reveals surprising similaries. It may well be the case that any adoption by the West of another culture’s view would be too difficult given that there are so many foundational beliefs that are alien to the West, but which are nevertheless required to drive such an ethic. Nevertheless, if we can find similarities between various views, such as those of the Maori and Locke, we may have a greater appreciation of one another’s beliefs and hence less reluctance to adopt them if they will benefit the environment. Our efforts could then perhaps be directed toward putting environmental ethics into practice rather than fighting over which doctrine is the correct one. (shrink)

The parametrized Duffin–Kemmer–Petiau wave equation is formulated for many relativistic particles of spin-0 or spin-1. The first-quantized formulation lacks the fields of creation and annihilation operators which satisfy commutation relations subject to causality conditions, and which are essential to the Quantum Field Theoretic proof of the spin-statistics connection. It is instead proved that the wavefunctions for identical particles must be symmetric by extension of the nonrelativistic argument of Jabs. The causal commutators of Quantum Field Theory restrict entanglement to separations (...) of the order of the Compton wavelength \. The entanglement manifest in the symmetric Duffin–Kemmer–Petiau wavefunctions is unrestricted. (shrink)

We will consider the relativistic Duffin-Kemmer-Petiau equation in the presence of a pseudoharmonic potential in a magnetic field in the (1+2)-dimensional space-time for spin-one particles. To derive the energy eigenvalues and corresponding eigenfunctions, the analytical Nikiforov-Uvarov Method is used and some explanatory figures are included.

We present a general derivation of the Duffin-Kemmer-Petiau (D.K.P) equation on the relativistic phase space proposed by Bohm and Hiley. We consider geometric algebras and the idea of algebraic spinors due to Riesz and Cartan. The generators βμ (p) of the D.K.P algebras are constructed in the standard fashion used to construct Clifford algebras out of bilinear forms. Free D.K.P particles and D.K.P particles in a prescribed external electromagnetic field are analized and general Liouville type equations for these cases (...) are obtained. Choosing particular values for the label p we classify the different types of the D.K.P Liouville operators. (shrink)

We present an exact solution of the one-dimensional modified Klein Gordon and Duffin Kemmer Petiau equations with a step potential in the presence of minimal length in the uncertainty relation, where the expressions of the new transmission and reflection coefficients are determined for all cases. As an application, the Klein paradox in the presence of minimal length is discussed for all equations.

In December of 1899, Sir John Scott Burdon-Sanderson delivered an address to the Middlesex Hospital Medical Society in London on the relation between science and medicine. Commenting specifically on the future of medicine in the upcoming century, he criticized the gap between scientific research in academic settings and the practice of medicine in the clinical setting. He ends by stating that “all depends on whether you accept the proposition I have submitted to you—namely, that the science of medicine, even more (...) than the art, holds the promise of the future” (Burdon-Sanderson 1900, 255). Burdon-Sanderson’s proposition was actualized in the United States through the Flexner Report of 1910, which helped to universalize what medical education would come to look like in the country: the emphasis was placed squarely on science, rather than art (Flexner 1910). While there are still gaps between clinical practice and scientific research, there is no doubt that modern medicine is scientific medicine. There is also no doubt that scientific medicine leads to better health outcomes (Duffin 2010).However, some have argued that the emphasis of medicine as a science has left the art of medicine behind, to the detriment of modern medicine. Thomas Duffy, for instance, an internist at the Yale School of Medicine, states that the aftermath of the Flexner Report “created an excellence in science that was not balanced by a comparable excellence in clinical caring” (2011,276). Indeed, at the onset of our current century, many called for a reinvestment in the art of medicine so as to balance the emphasis on science (The Commonwealth Fund 2002; Committee on the Roles of Academic Health Centers in the 21 st Century 2003; Association of American Medical Colleges 2004). The burgeoning field of medical humanities—that is, the interdisciplinary field dedicated to demonstrating “how the arts and humanities inform and 2elevate the work of healing” (Campo 2005)—is evidence that such calls have been heard. While we surely want to celebrate scientific medicine, there are certain areas of medical practice where the art of medicine is as important, if not more important , as the science of medicine. We argue that one of those areas is the sphere of cancer care in which health professionals are asked not only to treat patients with cancer, but also to help them navigate through what is oftentimes one of the scariest, most vulnerable, and suffering-ridden times of their lives. Using concepts from the phenomenological tradition, we aim to provide philosophical clarity to situations in the medical setting in which health professionals must treat the whole person, rather than simply the person’s body, in order to provide proper patient care, thus highlighting an element of the art of medicine. We end by providing three principles that we think can help guide phenomenologically-informed cancer care. (shrink)

In this work we review the derivation of Dirac and Weinberg equations based on a “principle of indistinguishability” for the (j,0) and (0,j) irreducible representations (irreps) of the homogeneous Lorentz group (HLG). We generalize this principle and explore its consequences for other irreps containing j≥1. We rederive Ahluwalia–Kirchbach equation using this principle and conclude that it yields $\mathcal{O}(p^{2j} )$ equations of motion for any representation containing spin j and lower spins. We also use the obtained generators of the HLG for (...) a given representation to explore the possibility of the existence of first order equations for that representation. We show that, except for j= $ - \frac{1}{2}$ , there exists no Dirac-like equation for the (j,0)⊕(0,j) representation nor for the ( $ - \frac{1}{2}$ , $ - \frac{1}{2}$ ) representation. We rederive Kemmer–Duffin–Petieau (KDP) equation for the (1,0)⊕( $ - \frac{1}{2}$ , $ - \frac{1}{2}$ )⊕(0,1) representation by this method and show that the (1, $ - \frac{1}{2}$ )⊕( $ - \frac{1}{2}$ ,1) representation satisfies a Dirac-like equation which describes a multiplet of $j = \frac{3}{2}{\text{ and }}j = \frac{1}{2}$ with masses m and m/2, respectively. (shrink)

A brief review of two-body Dirac and Kemmer-Duffin-Petiau approaches for the bound state problem of two fermions is presented from an algebraic point of view in a comparative manner. Reduction of the direct product of two Dirac spaces is discussed.

We show that particle-antiparticle exchange and covariant motion reversal are two physically different aspects of the same mathematical transformation, either in the prequantal relativistic equation of motion of a charged point particle, in the general scheme of second quantization, or in the spinning wave equations of Dirac and of Petiau-Duffin-Kemmer. While, classically, charge reversal and rest mass reversal are equivalent operations, in the wave mechanical case mass reversal must be supplemented by exchange of the two adjoint equations, implying ψ (...) ⇄ $\bar \psi$ .Denoting by M the rest mass reversal, P the parity reversal, T the Racah time reversal, and Z the ψ ⇄ $\bar \psi$ exchange, the connection with the usual scheme of charge conjugation, parity reversal, and Wigner motion reversal, is with, of course. (shrink)

The basic methods that have been used for describing bound-state quantum electrodynamics are described and critically discussed. These include the external field approximation, the quasi-potential approaches, the effective potential approach, the Bethe–Salpeter method, and the three-dimensional equations of Lepage and other workers. Other methods less frequently used but of some intrinsic interest such as applications of the Duffin–Kemmer equation are also described. A comparison of the strengths and shortcomings of these various approaches is included.