NTM
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This paper is part of Forum COVID-19: Perspectives in the Humanities and Social Sciences. In the current COVID 19 pandemic, the importance of professional nursing is widely recognized. In German-speaking and international research, the history of nursing during pandemics and epidemics is largely unwritten. This paper gives an overview of questions and results in this research area and discusses the potential of a pandemic nursing history.
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This paper is part of Forum COVID-19: Perspectives in the Humanities and Social Sciences. The novel coronavirus (Sars-CoV-2) poses a huge challenge to the world community. ⋯ A prominent example of such a development is SOLIDARITY. The epistemological dimensions of this trial, which is coordinated by the WHO, and the resulting ethical implications are discussed in this article.
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This paper is part of Forum COVID-19: Perspectives in the Humanities and Social Sciences. The Spanish Flu 1918-1920 caused between 50 and 100 million deaths. ⋯ Patient perseverance seems to be an appropriate label for the lack of any action. The appearance of new viruses had a massive impact on the discourse concerning pandemics: "patient perseverance" became "omnipresent prevention." The actual measures against SARS-CoV‑2 exceed the "omnipresent prevention" used during the 2009 swine flu pandemic by far.
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In the middle of the eighteenth century, Carl von Linné, Johann Christoph Gatterer, and Christian Wilhelm Büttner attempted to realize the old idea of deciphering the alphabet of the world, which Francis Bacon had raised as a general postulate of science. This article describes these attempts and their interrelations. Linné used the model of the alphabet to classify plants according to the characters of this fruiting body. ⋯ Büttner constructed a general alphabet of languages which connected the phonetics of language with the historically known alphabets. Early on, diplomatics and ethnography combined the natural order of natural history and the cultural order of the alphabet with the attempt to register development and to document development by the evolution of forms. Based on the shared model of the alphabet and on the common necessity to classify their empirical material, natural history and the description of culture were related attempts in the middle of the eighteenth century to comprehend the alphabetically organized nature and a naturally ordered culture.
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Historical Article
['Biomedicine' in anthropological literature. The career of a concept between analysis and polemics].
During its career in North American social sciences and anthropology since the late 1960s the concept of 'biomedicine' acquired a large variety of meanings, sometimes even contradictory ones. Originating in research on biological and medical phenomena in technical areas like nuclear weapons, space flight, informatics or engineering, the term 'biomedical' entered politics and the social sciences, especially medical anthropology. ⋯ Oscillating between the levels of anthropological research or analysis and of practical health care delivery, intra- and cross-cultural perspectives and affirmative and critical attitudes the term has to be carefully considered in any reading of past and recent literature. The rather ate German reception included replacing the term Schulmedizin born of older controversies on naturopathy, as well as naming the more somatic part of illness and medicine-as opposed to psychic or social aspects-and serving as the criticised object of many feminist and post-colonial studies on health.