Author: Ann Jannetta File Type: pdf In Japan, as late as the mid-nineteenth century, smallpox claimed the lives of an estimated twenty percent of all children bornmost of them before the age of five. When the apathetic Tokugawa shogunate failed to respond, Japanese physicians, learned in Western medicine and medical technology, became the primary disseminators of Jennerian vaccinationa new medical technology to prevent smallpox. Tracing its origins from rural England, Jannetta investigates the transmission of Jennerian vaccination to and throughout pre-Meiji Japan. Relying on Dutch, Japanese, Russian, and English sources, the book treats Japanese physicians as leading agents of social and institutional change, showing how they used traditional strategies involving scholarship, marriage, and adoption to forge new local, national, and international networks in the first half of the nineteenth century. The Vaccinators details the appalling cost of Japans almost 300-year isolation and examines in depth a nation on the cusp of political and social upheaval. **Review In her new study, Professor Jannetta traces Edward Jenners discovery of cowpox vaccination in rural England in 1798 to the primary role Japanese ranpo (Dutch, or Western methods) physicians played in institutionalizing medical knowledge by tirelessly promoting Jennerian vaccination to prevent smallpox. This is a deftly written and argued work on an important public health topic of nineteenth-century Japan, combined with a transnational examination of diffusing medical knowledge of one of the worlds major epidemic diseases. (Journal of the History of Medicine & Allied Sciences) Jannettas narrative is genuinely engaging, and it is enriched by her use of primary sources in multiple languages . . . She delves deeply into decidedly local, personal interactions while keeping in view a broader, global historical context. This is quite an achievement. (Brian Platt) Ann Jannetta has done a wonderful job of presenting not only the medical and political but also the artistic, intellectual, religious, and social context of the introduction of Jennerian vaccination to Japan . . . The Vaccinators is a wonderful addition to the scholarly literature on the Dutch enclave in Japan, on nineteenth-century Japan, on the history of medicine in Japan, and on the history of the worldwide diffusion of vaccination. (C. Michele Thompson East Asian Science, Technology and Medicine) A fascinating look at Japanese culture and politics in the last century, and the attitudes of those outside who wanted to at least see in. (Book News) [A] concise and insightful medical history of late Tokugawa Japan, focusing on Japans adoption of Jennerian vaccination against smallpox during the early 19th century . . . Jannettas historical research provides a valuable avenue to understanding how contact with Western knowledge helped Japan break away from self-imposed isolation toward modernization. (CHOICE) Jannetta has accomplished an admirable task in tracing the technology transfer, which encompasses Europe, the Americas, and Asia, utilizing extensive sources written in multiple (some classical) languages. The book is useful for students and teachers in world history, medical history, environmental history, and Japanese history, society, and politics. For scholars interested in the changing relationships between people and microbes, and the dynamics of the nineteenth-century global commercialintellectual networks and the Tokugawa seclusion policy, Jannettas study will provide a wealth of insights. (Sumiko Otsubo Review of Policy Research) The Vaccinators provides a meticulously documented and compelling account of the invention and spread of smallpox vaccination and the vicissitudes of its introduction into Japan in the early 19th century . . . This is a work of immense value to scholars and student of late Edo and early Meju history, society and culture, the history of rangaku (Dutch studies) and ranpo (Dutch medicine) in Japan, the history of science and medicine, public health and epidemiology. Jannetta is to be congratulated on her prodigious achievement. (Penelope Shino) Jannetta deftly manages a broad range of international and local Japanese sources to support her case. The presentation is impeccable, and the prose is a pleasure to read . . . It is a book that deserves to be read by a wide range of medical historians as well as those interested mores specifically in Japanese social history. (Journal of Japanese Studies) A clear and compelling narrative on a subject that has not been treated in depth before, this book will stand as the best work in English on the subject of vaccination in Japan. The argument that networking at a local level enabled vaccination technique to spread throughout a decentralized Japan is fascinating and has implications far beyond the subject of vaccination. (Richard Rubinger Indiana University) From the Inside Flap In Japan, as late as the mid-nineteenth century, smallpox claimed the lives of an estimated twenty percent of all children bornmost of them before the age of five. When the apathetic Tokugawa shogunate failed to respond to this health crisis, Japanese physicians, learned in Western medicine and medical technology, became the primary disseminators of Jennerian vaccinationa new medical technology to prevent smallpox. Tracing its origins from rural England, Jannetta investigates the transmission of Jennerian vaccination, via various foreign and domestic networks, to and throughout pre-Meiji Japan. Relying on Dutch, Japanese, Russian, and English sources, the book treats Japanese physicians as leading agents of social and institutional change, showing how they used traditional strategies involving scholarship, marriage, and adoption to forge new local, national, and international networks in the first half of the nineteenth century. With an interesting parallel to the recent SARS crisis, The Vaccinators details the appalling cost of Japans almost three-hundred-year isolation and examines in depth a nation on the cusp of political and social upheaval.

Author: Corine Hartman File Type: epub []

Author: Adam Foulds File Type: epub A visionary novel by one of the most talented writers of his generation (The Times Literary Supplement)-shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize Based on real events, The Quickening Maze won over UK critics and readers alike with its rapturous prose and vivid exploration of poetry and madness. Historically accurate yet brilliantly imagined, this is the debut publication of this elegant and riveting novel in the United States. In 1837, after years of struggling with alcoholism and depression, the great nature poet John Clare finds himself in High Beach- a mental institution located in Epping Forest on the outskirts of London. It is not long before another famed writer, the young Alfred Tennyson, moves nearby and grows entwined in the catastrophic schemes of the hospitals owner, the peculiar Dr. Matthew Allen, his lonely adolescent daughter, and a coterie of mysterious local characters. With lyrical grace, the cloistered world of High Beach and its residents are brought richly to life in this enchanting book.

Author: Mireille Hildebrandt File Type: pdf Law, Human Agency and Autonomic Computing interrogates the legal implications of the notion and experience of human agencyimplied bythe emerging paradigm of autonomic computing, and the socio-technical infrastructures it supports. The development of autonomic computing and ambient intelligence self-governing systems challengetraditional philosophical conceptions of human self-constitution and agency, with significant consequences for the theory and practice of constitutional self-government. Ideasof identity, subjectivity, agency, personhood, intentionality, and embodiment are all central to the functioning of modern legal systems. But once artificial entities become more autonomic, and less dependent on deliberate human intervention, criteria like agency, intentionality and self-determination, become too fragile to serve as defining criteria for human subjectivity, personality or identity, and for characterizing the processes through which individual citizens become moral and legal subjects. Are autonomic yet artificial systems shrinking the distance between (acting) subjects and (acted upon) objects? How distinctively human will agency be in a world of autonomic computing? Or, alternatively, does autonomic computing merely disclose that we were never, in this sense,human anyway? A dialogue between philosophers of technology and philosophers of law, this book addresses these questions, as it takes up the unprecedented opportunity that autonomic computing and ambient intelligence offerfor a reassessment of the most basic concepts of law.