Henry Beecher was a distinguished professor of anesthesia and clinical investigator at Harvard Medical School. He became an iconic figure in bioethics, best known for his 1966 article describing 22 examples of unethical clinical research. This is one of the most frequently cited articles on ethics in the medical literature. Indeed, it may be seen as marking a watershed in the moral climate of medical research. In his history of bioethics, Albert Jonsen characterized Beecher as one of the “stars (...) in the bioethical firmament”. Daniel Callahan, founder of the Hastings Center, explained Beecher’s impact in a 1991 interview:“I think the role of Henry Beecher was very important in the mid 60s when he blew the... (shrink)

Contrary to the views expressed in many introductory physics textbooks, Henry Cavendish did not measure G, the gravitational constant contained in Newton’s Law of Universal Gravitation, F = G m1m2/r2. As the title of his paper states, Cavendish conducted “Experiments to Determine the Density of the Earth (1798).” As discussed below, one can use that measurement to determine G, but that was not Cavendish’s intent. In fact, the determination of G was not done until the latter part of the (...) nineteenth century. (shrink)

On June 16, 1966, the New England Journal of Medicine published “Ethics and Clinical Research” by Henry K. Beecher. Beecher’s account of 22 examples of unethical contemporary clinical research shook up the medical profession and helped pave the way for U.S. federal regulation of research involving human subjects. Five decades later, in this issue of Perspectives in Biology and Medicine, we pay tribute to the lasting significance of this whistle-blowing article and to the remarkable contributions of Henry Beecher. (...) Beecher was a pioneer in anesthesiology as an academic discipline and in research on pain and the placebo effect. He was an early and influential champion of randomized placebo-controlled... (shrink)

The 18th century was a wealth of knowledge, exploration and rapidly growing technology and expanding record-keeping made possible by advances in the printing press. In its determination to preserve the century of revolution, Gale initiated a revolution of its own: digitization of epic proportions to preserve these invaluable works in the largest archive of its kind. Now for the first time these high-quality digital copies of original 18th century manuscripts are available in print, making them highly accessible to libraries, undergraduate (...) students, and independent scholars. Western literary study flows out of eighteenth-century works by Alexander Pope, Daniel Defoe, Henry Fielding, Frances Burney, Denis Diderot, Johann Gottfried Herder, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, and others. Experience the birth of the modern novel, or compare the development of language using dictionaries and grammar discourses. ++++ The below data was compiled from various identification fields in the bibliographic record of this title. This data is provided as an additional tool in helping to insure edition identification: ++++ British Library T126964 Anonymous. By Benjamin Franklin. Only 100 copies printed. London: printed in the year, 1725. 32p.; 8°. (shrink)

This remarkable collection contains Isaiah Berlin's appreciations of seventeen people of unusual distinction in the intellectual or political world, sometimes both. The names of many of them are familiar: Winston Churchill, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Chaim Weizmann, Albert Einstein, and others. With the exception of Roosevelt, he met them all and knew many of them well. For this expanded edition, four new portraits have been added, including those of Virginia Woolf and Edmund Wilson. This volume also contains a vivid and (...) moving account of Berlin's meetings in Russia with Boris Pasternak and Anna Akhmatova in 1945 and 1956. Perhaps the most fascinating of these "personal impressions" is found in the epilogue, where Berlin describes the three strands in his own personality: Russian, English, and Jewish. (shrink)

Readers of “lives” of the famous know well the tendency of biography, and especially autobiography, to become steadily less interesting as the subject grows older. A predictable record of challenges met, enemies shafted, honours received and great men encountered often succeeds an account of a childhood that is a highly-coloured and unique emotional drama. Often the best pages are those on the subject’s schooldays, when the personality first tangles with the public realm. As Barry Oakley says of school in a (...) piece quoted in the book’s preface: “Like the stage, it’s an image of life: life accelerated, life concentrated, life more formidable.” The project of selecting just the highlights of all the stories of Australians’ schooldays promises, then, a high payoff if it is well done. It is a high-risk enterprise, though: a pointillist canvas brilliant in each fleck may easily look like mud from a distance. There are well over a hundred authors here, with only three pages or so each to paint a vignette of school. In fact, the result is an enormous success. The editors have a sure eye, and they and their research assistant, Pamela Williams, have put in the work to find the goods. Almost every piece is gripping, and quite different from the others. The total effect is additive, and is an unexampled insight into how the Australia we know came into being. The classics are there: Henry Lawson and Patrick White, Seven Little Australians and The Getting of Wisdom, Donald Horne, Barry Humphries and Clive James. So are the many unknowns whose recollections take us into obscure corners. If there is one overall theme, it is that of sameness, difference and “fitting in”. The effect of the accumulated evidence is rather more subtle than the received ideas on “identity and difference”, multiculturalism and so on. School is where the strangeness of one’s own family, or of one’s own personality, meets the social world – itself perhaps no less weird, objectively speaking, but possessed of resources for ensuring conformity. (shrink)

Magnetic observations were essential for polar navigation, and were carried out systematically on both sea and land-based expeditions to the Canadian Arctic throughout the nineteenth century. John Franklin took a particular interest in magnetic studies and encouraged the Admiralty to adopt Robert Were Fox's dip circle. The establishment of the Toronto magnetic observatory provided a base for John Henry Lefroy's survey of the North West Territories. The Royal Navy's programme of magnetic research, commenced in the aftermath of the (...) Napoleonic Wars, was maintained until the British Arctic Expedition of 1875–76, commanded by Nares. In all these expeditions, the nature and limits of the observations were determined by the available instruments. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:354 BOOK REVIEWS (continuously) revisable character, he falls back on an account of theology as rhetoric so as to make the best of a bad job. For persuasion is what we use when we know demonstration is hopeless. As a result, Professor Cunningham's study, which could most usefully have "placed" a variety of theologies of past, present, and, prospectively, future on the spectrum of (onto-) logic, poetic, and rhetoric, (...) concludes instead that theology must regard itself as rhetorical or perish! This inevitably narrows the several services theologies of different kinds can perform for the Church. Imagine how biblical studies would be reduced were the exegete only to treat his text as paraenesis, and never as history or as a symbolic world. Nonetheless, on the way from its (as I find) unsatisfactory startingpoint and to its depressing conclusion, Faithful Persuasion has worthwhile points to make about a number of authors (of various periods) and topics, though it might have made them more persuasively (its author's key term) had the intended audience (middle-brow or academic?) been more clearly viewed in advance. AIDAN NICHOLS, O.P. Blackfriars Cambridge, England Church and Culture: German Catholic Theology, 1860-1914. By THOMAS FRANKLIN O'MEARA, O.P. Notre Dame/London: University of Notre Dame Press, 1991. Pp. x + 260. $35.95 (cloth). " In 1925, Baden's Kultusminister, a Protestant, began an address to the Gorresgesellschaft in Heidelberg by describing this era: ' Brave men like Hertling, Schell, Julius Bachem, and Carl Muth, shook the German Catholic world in order to lead it out of its fortress, to lead it again into the midst of the life and activity of the entire people, even when this seemed at first strange and uncomfortable ' " (pp. 159f.). Even to many theologians, the era in question-the last four decades of the nineteenth century through the outbreak of the "Great War"is comparatively unknown. There has been, of course, renewed interest in prominent theological figures like John Henry Newman, but his German-speaking contemporaries are for the most part strangers to the English-speaking world. And this is the first reason why this book is important: it describes a forgotten world of a century or so ago, yet one whose theological problematic was strikingly similar to our own. The " contours " of this period, deftly described in the first part of this book, were both varied and complex. Politically speaking, during the nineteenth century, " Germany " changed from an assortment of BOOK REVIEWS 355 geographically contiguous minor and medium-sized states to an Empire dominated by Prussia. Such a political re.arrangement had ecclesiastical implications: Roman Catholics, who previously had been the majority in places like Bavaria found themselves a persecuted minority during the Kulturkampf under Bismarck. And like many other victims of persecution, Roman Catholics adopted a "fortress mentality"fearful of Berlin, which was influenced by both the Lutheran Reformation and the Enlightenment, and mesmerized by Rome, which was coming under the increasing influence of neoscholasticism in doctrine and ultramontanism in discipline. German Catholic theologians found themselves in a quandary: what direction should they take? Many, like Joseph Kleutgen, took refuge in Rome; a few, like Joseph Schnitzer, found the appeal of Berlin more attractive; still others, however, tried to steer an independent course in dialogue with the culture of their day. The second and major part of this book focuses on five such theologians: Matthias Joseph Scheeben, Alois Schmid, Paul Schanz, Herman Schell, and Carl Braig. Scheeben (1835-88), "the best known and the most read in the first half of the twentieth century " (p. 53), pursued an independent route in seeking a " transcendent synthesis " incorporating both patristic and idealist thought; indeed, his lengthy Mysteries of Christ"ianity continued to enjoy a certain popularity up till the time of Vatican II, though more as a resource for spiritual reading than as a work of systematic theology. Like Newman, Scheeben's thought was sui generis, "and inspired the most divergent evaluations " (p. 65) ; unlike Newman, Scheeben has few disciples today. In contrast to Scheeben, the other four theologians attempted to emerge from the " fortress " of Roman Catholic defensiveness and to engage the historical and philosophical currents of their age. The... (shrink)

Henry Lord Brougham (1778-1868) belongs with Thomas Jefferson and Horace Mann in the United States and Egerton Ryerson in Canada as one of the great promoters and founders of public education in the English-speaking world. His most famous phrase is The schoolmaster is abroad and this quote symbolizes his belief that the fate of the modern, liberal society depends on free access to education for the population at large. It is not that Brougham any more than Jefferson failed to (...) draw a distinction between the education that was fitted for the gifted few and that suited to the general public whose lives would lack the leisure for intellectual pursuits of the highest difficulty and training. Rather it is that Brougham adheres to a philosophy of enlightenment which sees the interests of science and society as ultimately indistinguishable and which insists that the spread of knowledge about both the natural and social worlds carries with it no price in terms of individual or social morality. This paper gives an overview of Brougham's philosophy of public enlightenment including his views on the example of Benjamin Franklin. It then reviews the attacks on this philosophy from the Anglican point of view in the form of the Reverend E.W. Grinfield's A Reply to Mr. Brougham's Practical Observations upon the Education of the People and from the Roman Catholic point of view in Cardinal Newman's famous Tamworth Reading Room and Discourse on University Education. (shrink)

O presente artigo se sustenta fundamentalmente em dois textos seminais de Franklin Leopoldo e Silva que representam uma contribuição essencial em meu caminho filosófico e especialmente na compreensão que desenvolvi e continuo desenvolvendo da filosofia bergsoniana. No meu modo de ver, tais textos iluminam, como poucos grandes textos, a originalidade, a importância e a potência de Bergson para o pensamento contemporâneo. Em diálogo com esses dois textos, associo, preponderantemente, textos do próprio Bergson e outros textos de Leopoldo e Silva, (...) procurando assinalar, a partir daí, o valor de suas filosofias em nossa formação ao integrarem pensamento, vida e história. (shrink)