The issue of maximizing penetration depth with concurrent retaining or enhancement of image resolution constitutes one of the time invariant challenges in ultrasound imaging. Concerns about potential and undesirable side effects set limits on the possibility of overcoming the frequency dependent attenuation effects by increasing peak acoustic amplitudes of the waves probing the tissue. To overcome this limitation a pulse compression technique employing 16 bits Complementary Golay Sequences (CGS) Code was implemented at 4 MHz. In comparison with other, earlier proposed, coded excitation schemes, such as chirp, pseudo-random chirp and Barker codes, the CGS allowed virtually side lobe free operation. Experimental data indicate that the quality — resolution, signal penetration and contrast dynamics — of CGS images is better than the one obtain for standard ultrasonography using short burst excitation.
Almost all matter in our Universe exists in the form of plasma. Although it’s not easy to generate on Earth, it has a vast range of applications in medicine, biotechnology, farming and industry.
The aim of the paper is to analyse the Italian medical terminology, in particular will be taken into consideration the link between names of different illnesses and rhetoric procedures that might have influenced their lexical form. The examples of medical nomenclature will enable to illustrate the attitude towards the concept of illness and to show the complexity of phenomena perception and the impossibility to understand them completely. For this reason literary tropes, especially metonymy, enable to create terminology, although it will be never enough sufficient to guarantee the highest precision of these concepts.
In the fi rst half of the 20th century, the German historiography of medicine created genuine ideas of methodology of research on the history of the medical sciences and medicinal practice. They were a continuation of the native historiographic tradition which was present in German university didactics and literature about the history of medicine in the 19th century. The uniqueness of German anti-positivist methodologies was based on a perception of cultural context in the genesis of medical theories and doctrines. They were researching cultural factors in the overall structure and analysing their infl uence on academics’ and common folk’s perception. There were two rival methodological trends — neoromantic and sociocultural ones, and the second gained wider infl uence in the historiography of medicine. The sociocultural trend had a few research schools, among them: Kulturgeschichte der Medizin, Sozialgeschichte der Medizin and Alltagsgeschichte der Medizin. The main purpose of this paper is to show the genesis of German anti-positivist trends in 20th century, the most important achievements of sociocultural historiography in Germany till 1933 and after 1945, and its infl uence on the standard American historiography of medicine in 20th century. The paper also presents a wide range of literature printed in both Germany and USA about the aforementioned historiographic trends.
The literature is undisputed regarding the impact of mental health on public health, and there has been an increase in the use of primary healthcare, in particular, the consultations of general practitioners (GPs), with issues at this level. In the literature on the subject, the psychological intervention has been indicated as a positive factor in reversing this trend, and it is in this context that the present study was developed. We intend to explore the differences in the number of GP consultations prior to and after the psychology consultation in a Primary Healthcare Centre (PHC). To this end, data from 845 healthcare center users were collected between June 2004 and September 2014. Student’s t-test and mixed analysis of variance (ANOVA) was performed. The results point out a decrease in the number of GP consultations in the period subsequent to the first psychological consultation. We discuss that psychological intervention seems to have a positive effect, not only in improving the mental health of the population but also in the containment of costs in the health sector. The importance of the role of psychology in PHC was assumed.
Early modern medicine knew thousands of medicines and possible treatments that could be found in guidebooks, medical dissertations, herbaria, and dispensaries. The article presents the characteristics of the basic sources of the history of medicine, as well as their specifi city and the range of information they provide. The aim is to show possible source selection method in an attempt to describe a real picture of the therapeutic methods most commonly used by the offi cial medicine in Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth.
Manuscript number 888 of the Collection of Arabic manuscripts of the Royal Monastery of San Lorenzo of El Escorial (Spain) contains a small treatise composed by physician and pharmacologist ʿĪsā b. Māssah al-Baṣrī (9th century). This work offers a detailed description of different causal agents that originate the sexual impulse and its culmination, the coitus. The treatise enumerates and interprets the physical factors that conform man’s sexual response, which is viewed as a purely physiological process, as well as the cultural and psychological factors that shape and modulate the sexual preferences of each individual.
Septoria melissae Desm., the most important pathogen of lemon balm (Melissa officinalis) occurs each year on plantations. The fungus may cause serious yield losses in the absence of proper plant protection. Breeding resistant or tolerant cultivars could play an important role in plant protection of medicinal plants. However, only a few descriptions of tolerant varieties of lemon balm are available. The goal of this work was to evaluate the susceptibility of three accessions of M. officinalis against the pathogen of Septoria leaf spot under field conditions at Budapest-Soroksár (Hungary) in 2017–2018. Differences in susceptibility of the accessions were observed in both years. The accession of M. officinalis subsp. altissima proved to be the least susceptible to Septoria infection. The frequency of the infected leaves was only 5.1 and 28.1% in 2017 and 2018, respectively. However, the cultivar M. officinalis subsp. officinalis ‘Lorelei’ turned out to be the most susceptible to the pathogen with an average infection level of 26.1 and 66.6%, 1.3–6.1 times higher than that of the other accessions in each year, respectively. Development of disease tolerant M. officinalis cultivars may be an effective tool in the plant protection of lemon balm.
Scientists are increasingly specializing in narrower fields, and communication is often difficult between physicists researching elementary particles and those studying semiconductors, not to mention between physicists and biologists or doctors. This makes interdisciplinary work difficult. And yet sometimes they succeed. One thread of work underway at the PAS Institute of High Pressure Physics offers a good example.
The paper discusses conditions of proper communication between the doctor and the patient focusing on the Treatise of the Hypochondriack and Hysterick Passions (1711) by Bernard Mandeville. The method of treating hypochondria, based mainly on dialogue, presented in this work allows the doctor to correctly recognize disease and to awaken self-knowledge in the patient. Combining hypochondria with stomach problems, expanding the field of factors influencing the development of this disease proves that Mandeville interprets man holistically in the treatment process, and his preferred method focuses more on psychological rather than physical problems. Philopirio, as a representative of Mandeville’s medical views, assumes the role of a medical advisor, whose main task is physical and constant contact with the patient. The Philopirio’s method of treatment becomes effective thanks to medical virtues, especially diligence and empathy. Mandeville’s work unambiguously proves that in the process of diagnosis and convalescence communication between the doctor and the patient has an important role, and sometimes it is essential in the process of curing the patient.
The objective of this paper is the Arabic edition and the English translation of the Dissertation on thirst (الكلام في العطش), an anonymous text included in the miscellaneous manuscript nº 888 of the Royal Library of the Monastery of San Lorenzo de El Escorial in Madrid (Spain). This small treatise describes what thirst is, the types of thirst that exist, the causes why hydroponics are averse to water, the reason why diabetic people are continuously thirsty, the causes why people with fever are thirsty, the reason why some foods produce thirst and others do not, and so on. The whole manuscript is composed of fourteen works, written by the same copyist along 170 folios under the general title The book of medical and philosophical curiosities and utilities (كتاب النكت والثمار الطبية والفلسفية) and their subject are curious matters that are generally out of the span of most works on these two branches of knowledge.