Adler Museum bulletin最新文献

After the Anglo-Boer (South African) War (1899-1902), there was a shortage of unskilled labor on the South African gold mines. Chinese men were imported to make up for the deficit. This article reviews the records of indentured Chinese mine workers examined for repatriation in 1905. The records tell of high proportions of social disorders, respiratory diseases, musculoskeletal disorders, opium addiction, and injury. These reflect the social and physical conditions to which these men were exposed in the mines.

From the onset of the Black Death in 1347-48, Italian cities which faced the Mediterranean, an epidemic sea, constructed a complex and articulated health defence system which was an example to all other western countries. The cornerstones of this health defence system lay in quarantine, sanitary cordons, lazarets, disinfection, and in the social regulation of the population at risk. Medicine played no part. Its impotence in dealing with epidemic diseases left health defence to the initiative of the civil authorities who rigorously fought the repeated incursions of plague, which from the end of Middle Ages severely tried and tested social organisation, economic life and public order, all of which were threatened by reactions of fear and aggression. From the fifteenth century onwards the public authorities instituted health magistracies which perfected policing and hygiene strategies based on isolation, separation and social control. This progressively extended to individuals in the community through 'health certificates'. This paper follows the evolution and crises of the conceptual, cultural adn institutional response to epidemics through the centuries up to the appearance of the plague of cholera and its disappearance.

Various minerals, metals, clays, and rocks were among the natural medicinal substances used by physicians and pharmacists in early times in different cultures, for example, the ancient civilizations of Egypt and Mesopotamia. Classical physicians such as Hippocrates and Dioscorides mention tens of inorganic medicinal substances in their writings. Many references to minerals and chemicals are also found in the Muslim medical literature of the Eastern and Western Caliphates. The historical research presented in this article focuses on the inorganic substances applied as remedies by the medieval and early Ottoman (7th-17th) inhabitants of the Levant. The article is based upon a literature review covering tens of different historical sources, from the medieval and early Ottoman periods. Relevant information was found in the works of physicians such as al-Tamimi, Benevenutus, Ibn al-Baytar, Daud al-Antaki, and Hayyim Vital. The research revealed evidences of the medicinal uses of fifteen inorganic substances: Alum, Arsenic, Sulphide, Asphalt, Jew's stone, Earth sp., Galena, Haematite, iron, Lead, Pyrite, Salt, Sulphur, Thermal water, Green Vitriol, and Zinc. Inorganic materials comprise 5.2% of the list of medicinal substances. The geographic origin of most of these substances is the Levant, in which two geo-historical centers have been recorded: the Rift Valley and the northern region of the Levant, including upper Galilee, Mount Lebanon and Mount Hermon. A notable tendency to use these substances for treating diseases of the skin, the eyes, the sexual organs, and haemorrhoids was detected.