A celebration of a distinctly American form of commercial architecture The only comprehensive history of America's 5-&-10-cent stores It was where you went to browse the latest issues of Life and Photoplay, where the folks bought reading glasses, and where your mom took you for a hot dog and a malted. It was the local 5-&-10-cent store, and it was an integral part of everyday life. In this lavishly illustrated homage to the 5-&-10-cent store, architectural historian Bernice Thomas (...) looks at the architectural achievements of the Kress Company. Devoted to bringing outstanding design to Main Street America, Kress supported an architectural division of more than 100 architects and draftsmen. The over 200 stores these people designed and built between 1900 and 1950 set a new standard in commercial architecture. Thomas takes us on an illustrated tour of sites across the United States —from New Orleans to Honolulu, Albuquerque to New York. She introduces us to the architects and how they deftly balanced sound merchandising principles with aesthetics. (shrink)

: Contemporary global health crises that involve mothers necessarily invoke the varied cultural problematics of maternal embodiment. Examining breastfeeding in light of current concerns about maternal contagion and contamination, with special attention to HIV and environmental toxins, allows us to consider how ambivalence toward maternal embodiment affects the ways we address these health crises within which mothers figure so significantly.

Contemporary global health crises that involve mothers necessarily invoke the varied cultural problematics of maternal embodiment. Examining breastfeeding in light of current concerns about maternal contagion and contamination, with special attention to HIV and environmental toxins, allows us to consider how ambivalence toward maternal embodiment affects the ways we address these health crises within which mothers figure so significantly.

Interpreting a scene of lactation failure allows us to represent breast-feeding as a contested social practice. This essay reads a novelistic scene of lactation failure in the context of the decline of breast-feeding in the twentieth century. The protagonist's ignorance of the female experiences of pregnancy, childbirth, and lactation is an effect of her objectification within the opposition between science and nature. Unnatural as a woman because she is a natural individual, the pastor's wife exemplifies the dilemmas of breast-feeding as (...) a biosocial practice of maternity in a technological society which features the breakdown of traditional female networks in which knowledge about maternity and breast-feeding are circulated. (shrink)

Abstract“Risky Business” considers hospital childbirth and the production of the concept of risk in obstetrics. Risk is a defining concept of medicalized childbirth. Approaching obstetrical risk with a goal of challenging its hold on practices demonstrates how risk itself is produced and maintained in particular institutional contexts. The goal here is to imagine new ways of understanding and assessing obstetrical risk, as part of an overall strategy of challenging technocratic approaches to childbirth and mothering. Surveying feminist approaches to childbirth, the (...) essay discusses how the mother’s health profile affects both medical education and the construction of childbirth as “risky business.”. (shrink)

Proposed educational outcomes for the health humanities in medical education range from empathy to visual thinking skills to social accountability. This lack of widely agreed-upon high-level curricular goals limits humanities educators’ ability to design purposeful curricula toward clear, common ends and threatens justifications for scarce curricular time. We propose a novel approach to the hoped-for outcomes of health humanities training in medical schools, which has the potential to encompass traditional health humanities knowledge, skills, and behaviors while also being concrete and (...) measurable: humanistic practice. Humanistic practice, adapted from the concept of ethical sensitivity, is an intentional process of applying humanities knowledge and skills to a clinical scenario by 1) noticing that the scenario requires humanities knowledge or skills, 2) informing one’s clinical and interpersonal strategy and behavior with humanities knowledge or skills, 3) reflecting on the effectiveness of the strategy and behavior, and 4) reorienting to develop new approaches for future practice. The construct of humanistic practice may help address some of the foundational problems in health humanities outcomes research since it transcends the traditional diverse content domains in the health humanities, can link patient and provider experiences, and may bridge the divide among the additive, curative, and intrinsic epistemic positions of humanities to medical education. (shrink)

Although medical and public health practitioners aim for high rates of vaccination, parent vaccination concerns confound doctors and complicate doctor-patient interactions. Medical and public health researchers have studied and attempted to counter antivaccination sentiments, but recommended approaches to dispel vaccination concerns have failed to produce long-lasting effects. We use observations made during a small study in a rural area in a southeastern state to demonstrate how a shift away from analyzing vaccination skepticism as a national issue with a global remedy (...) reveals the nuances in vaccination sentiments based on locality. Instead of seeing antivaccinationists as a distinct public based on statistical commonalities, we argue that examining vaccination beliefs and practices at the local level offers a fuller picture of the contextualized nature of vaccination decisions within the psychosocial spaces of families. A view of vaccination that emphasizes the local public, rather than a globally conceived antivaccination public, enables medical humanists and rhetoricians to offer important considerations for improving communications about vaccinations in clinical settings. (shrink)

One professor of literature renounces his fight to discriminate wrong from right readings. He succumbs to pressures from theorists and practitioners in the profession at large and enters a world of unimagined intellectual freedom. After all, to suggest that some readings might be wrong is not only to engage in intellectual discrimination, but to enter into complicity with a number of imperious gestures that carry dire political consequences. Coming to terms with his newfound freedom to embrace all interpretations of texts (...) as equally valid, he outlines for those who follow thirteen rules that guide hermeneutical practice in our postmodern age. (shrink)

Proceedings of a Conference on experience in Medieval natural philosophy.

Empowerment and teamwork are buzzwords of progressive human resource practices. Along with these new job design methods come reduced hierarchical control mechanisms. In light of recent ethical scandals, there is considerable concern regarding the effectiveness of the control systems of these more recent work designs. This study compared the willingness of participants to report unethical behavior when presented with work scenarios in which the perpetrator was in the relative position of team member, peer, or subordinate and in cohesive or non-cohesive (...) conditions of relational closeness. After accounting for the covariates, both main effects and interaction effects were found, indicating that reporting behavior was influenced by relative position and relational closeness. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Criminal Law, Pain Relief, and Physician Aid in DyingFaye Girsh, Ed.D., Executive DirectorMadam:The article by Cantor and Thomas on “Pain Relief, Acceleration of Death, and Criminal Law” (KIEJ, June 1996) was a tortured attempt to develop criteria for the humane and compassionate physician who tries to serve the needs of a patient in unremitting pain. There are three areas that merit comment.The authors dealt with pain medications that (...) might have the undesirable side effect of causing death. They did not mention tolerance, which usually occurs in a patient with chronic pain and which would require exceedingly high doses to be effective. They did not mention barbiturates, which are preferable to opiates in causing death and which are used increasingly by compassionate physicians to answer the pleas of their suffering patients, but for which there is no excuse about alleviating pain. Would the criminal law just call the prescription of a lethal dose of barbiturates a reckless act and require conviction? Fortunately, juries, as the authors point out, do not balance these formulas on the head of a pin. When they see the circumstances under which these doctors do help their patients, they choose to nullify the law and would ignore the suggestions made in this article.The authors refer to the “consent” of the patient. They do not mention that these doctors are operating with more than consent; they are administering these medications because suffering patients are begging them to put them out of their pain and the indignities of the dying process. The article discusses the process as though it were the same as consent to elective surgery. These patients—with AIDS, cancer, and hopeless neurological degeneration—are not simply agreeing to a procedure; they are desperately seeking a way out. If the criminal law were to develop criteria for physician aid in dying, certainly one of them should be the active, witnessed, repeated request of such a patient for a certain, quick, painless, gentle death.The third point is that physicians do not face prosecution when administering no treatment to a patient whose life could be saved with treatment but who chooses not to receive it. This has been upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court; no criteria for suffering, alternatives, terminality, justifiability, or unbearability are required. The doctor can stand by while the patient dies what may be a protracted, difficult death, but it is within the law. What matters in this situation is the decision of the patient to refuse treatment, and that is absolute. How ironic that the patient who cannot refuse treatment must, with his or her doctor, jump through all these hoops to achieve a peaceful death.One worries that the physician who must balance the risk of “risky pain relief” against the accusation of recklessness will err in the direction of allowing [End Page 103] the patient to bear the pain rather than help with a dose of analgesics that might be considered beyond the stipulated “risk.”Why don’t we just be honest about it? Allow dying or hopelessly ill patients to make the decision about what they want by passing a carefully defined law allowing euthanasia rather than balancing the risk and trying to determine the “purpose” of the physician’s ministrations. We protect some patients from themselves while allowing others almost complete autonomy to make the choice of ending their lives. The authors were right in saying that proponents of rational laws consider this sheer hypocrisy.Faye Girsh, Executive DirectorHemlock Society U.S.A. Denver, COFaye Girsh misconceives our article’s objective as an “attempt to develop criteria” for the humane physician. Our goal in writing the paper was to analyze the current criminal law framework in the hope of sharpening debate and engendering normative critiques. We readily acknowledge tensions in the current legal framework and would support changes in that framework.Copyright © 1997 The Johns Hopkins University Press... (shrink)

Ancient dialectic started as an art of refutation and evolved into a science akin to our logic, grammar and linguistics. Scholars of ancient philosophy have traditionally focused on Plato's and Aristotle's dialectic without paying much attention to the diverse conceptions and uses of dialectic presented by philosophers after the classical period. To bridge this gap, this volume aims at a comprehensive understanding of the competing Hellenistic and Imperial definitions of dialectic and their connections with those of the classical period. It (...) starts from the Megaric school of the fourth century BCE and the early Peripatetics, via Epicurus, the Stoics, the Academic sceptics and Cicero, to Sextus Empiricus and Galen in the second century CE. The philosophical foundations and various uses of dialectic are closely analysed and systematically examined together with the numerous objections that were raised against them. (shrink)

This volume gathers an international team of renowned scholars in the fields of ancient greek philosophy, in order to explore the continuous but changing dialogue between Platonism and Aristotelianism from the early imperial age to the end of Antiquity. While most chapters concern Platonists (Philo, Plutarch, Plotinus, Syrianus, Proclus, Damascius, Philoponus), and their uses or criticism of Aristotle's doctrines, several chapters are also devoted to Peripatetic authors (Boethius and mostly Alexander of Aphrodisias) and their attitudes towards Plato's positions. Each of (...) the eleven chapters draws the attention to specific polemical contexts and philosophical problems which made Platonists and Aristotelians unite against common adversaries like the Stoics, or split up, not only in the fields of metaphysics and cosmology, but also in epistemology, psychology and ethics. (shrink)

When making decisions, humans can observe many kinds of information about others' activities, but their effects on performance are not well understood. We investigated social learning strategies using a simple problem-solving task in which participants search a complex space, and each can view and imitate others' solutions. Results showed that participants combined multiple sources of information to guide learning, including payoffs of peers' solutions, popularity of solution elements among peers, similarity of peers' solutions to their own, and relative payoffs from (...) individual exploration. Furthermore, performance was positively associated with imitation rates at both the individual and group levels. When peers' payoffs were hidden, popularity and similarity biases reversed, participants searched more broadly and randomly, and both quality and equity of exploration suffered. We conclude that when peers' solutions can be effectively compared, imitation does not simply permit scrounging, but it can also facilitate propagation of good solutions for further cumulative exploration. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Criminal Law, Pain Relief, and Physician Aid in DyingFaye Girsh, Ed.D., Executive DirectorMadam:The article by Cantor and Thomas on “Pain Relief, Acceleration of Death, and Criminal Law” (KIEJ, June 1996) was a tortured attempt to develop criteria for the humane and compassionate physician who tries to serve the needs of a patient in unremitting pain. There are three areas that merit comment.The authors dealt with pain medications that (...) might have the undesirable side effect of causing death. They did not mention tolerance, which usually occurs in a patient with chronic pain and which would require exceedingly high doses to be effective. They did not mention barbiturates, which are preferable to opiates in causing death and which are used increasingly by compassionate physicians to answer the pleas of their suffering patients, but for which there is no excuse about alleviating pain. Would the criminal law just call the prescription of a lethal dose of barbiturates a reckless act and require conviction? Fortunately, juries, as the authors point out, do not balance these formulas on the head of a pin. When they see the circumstances under which these doctors do help their patients, they choose to nullify the law and would ignore the suggestions made in this article.The authors refer to the “consent” of the patient. They do not mention that these doctors are operating with more than consent; they are administering these medications because suffering patients are begging them to put them out of their pain and the indignities of the dying process. The article discusses the process as though it were the same as consent to elective surgery. These patients—with AIDS, cancer, and hopeless neurological degeneration—are not simply agreeing to a procedure; they are desperately seeking a way out. If the criminal law were to develop criteria for physician aid in dying, certainly one of them should be the active, witnessed, repeated request of such a patient for a certain, quick, painless, gentle death.The third point is that physicians do not face prosecution when administering no treatment to a patient whose life could be saved with treatment but who chooses not to receive it. This has been upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court; no criteria for suffering, alternatives, terminality, justifiability, or unbearability are required. The doctor can stand by while the patient dies what may be a protracted, difficult death, but it is within the law. What matters in this situation is the decision of the patient to refuse treatment, and that is absolute. How ironic that the patient who cannot refuse treatment must, with his or her doctor, jump through all these hoops to achieve a peaceful death.One worries that the physician who must balance the risk of “risky pain relief” against the accusation of recklessness will err in the direction of allowing [End Page 103] the patient to bear the pain rather than help with a dose of analgesics that might be considered beyond the stipulated “risk.”Why don’t we just be honest about it? Allow dying or hopelessly ill patients to make the decision about what they want by passing a carefully defined law allowing euthanasia rather than balancing the risk and trying to determine the “purpose” of the physician’s ministrations. We protect some patients from themselves while allowing others almost complete autonomy to make the choice of ending their lives. The authors were right in saying that proponents of rational laws consider this sheer hypocrisy.Faye Girsh, Executive DirectorHemlock Society U.S.A. Denver, COFaye Girsh misconceives our article’s objective as an “attempt to develop criteria” for the humane physician. Our goal in writing the paper was to analyze the current criminal law framework in the hope of sharpening debate and engendering normative critiques. We readily acknowledge tensions in the current legal framework and would support changes in that framework.Copyright © 1997 The Johns Hopkins University Press... (shrink)

Background Noninvasive prenatal testing (NIPT) designed to screen for fetal genetic conditions, is increasingly being implemented as a part of routine prenatal care screening in the United States (US). However, these advances in reproductive genetic technology necessitate empirical research on the ethical and social implications of NIPT among populations underrepresented in genetic research, particularly Black women with sickle cell disease (SCD).Methods Forty (N = 40) semi-structured interviews were conducted virtually with Black women in the US (19 participants with SCD; 21 (...) participants without SCD) from June 2021 to January 2022. We employed a qualitative approach to examine the study participants’ perceptions of the potential advancement of NIPT for screening SCD in the fetus. Data were analyzed using NVivo 12 qualitative software.Results The themes revealed the complexities involving the intersectional lived experiences of SCD, prenatal care, lack of synergy among health providers, and NIPT decision-making. The results further revealed that even when Black women have shared commonalities in their lived experiences while navigating SCD and motherhood, their perceptions of NIPT screening technologies are divergent.Conclusion Expanding the ethical discourse on the social implications of NIPT is critical to fully elucidate how Black women perceive NIPT’s utility, particularly as NIPT advances to screen for SCD in the fetus. Neglecting to include Black women with genetic conditions in empirical studies on NIPT may contribute to ongoing health inequities and limit and constrain reproductive choices among Black women with and without SCD. (shrink)

We present a series of three analyses of young children's linguistic input to determine the distributional information it could plausibly offer to the process of grammatical category learning. Each analysis was conducted on four separate corpora from the CHILDES database (MacWhinney, 2000) of speech directed to children under 2;5. We showthat, in accord with other findings, a distributional analysis which categorizeswords based on their co‐occurrence patterns with surroundingwords successfully categorizes the majority of nouns and verbs. In Analyses 2 and 3, (...) we attempt to make our analyses more closely relevant to natural language acquisition by adopting more realistic assumptions about howyoung children represent their input. In Analysis 2, we limit the distributional context by imposing phrase structure boundaries, and find that categorization improves even beyond that obtained from less limited contexts. In Analysis 3, we reduce the representation of input elements which young children might not fully process and we find that categorization is not adversely affected: Although noun categorization is worse than in Analyses 1 and 2, it is still good; and verb categorization actually improves. Overall, successful categorization of nouns and verbs is maintained across all analyses. These results provide promising support for theories of grammatical category formation involving distributional analysis, as long as these analyses are combined with appropriate assumptions about the child learner's computational biases and capabilities. (shrink)

: This paper considers whether a physician is criminally liable for administering a dose of painkillers that hastens a patient's death. The common wisdom is that a version of the doctrine of double effect legally protects the physician. That is, a physician is supposedly acting lawfully so long as the physician's primary purpose is to relieve suffering. This paper suggests that the criminal liability issue is more complex than that. Physician culpability can be based on recklessness, and recklessness hinges on (...) whether a physician has taken an unjustifiable risk of hastening death. The authors identify three conditions of justifiability. Their analysis helps to explain the distinction between euthanasia, which is legally banned, and the use of risky analgesics, which is permitted in limited circumstances. (shrink)

Consent remains a crucial, yet challenging, cornerstone of clinical practice. The ethical, legal and professional understandings of this construct have evolved away from a doctor-centred act to a patient-centred process that encompasses the patient’s values, beliefs and goals. This alignment of consent with the philosophy of shared decision-making was affirmed in a recent high-profile Supreme Court ruling in England. The communication of information is central to this model of health care delivery but it can be difficult for doctors to gauge (...) the information needs of the individual patient. The aim of this paper is to describe ‘core information sets’ which are defined as a minimum set of consensus-derived information about a given procedure to be discussed with all patients. Importantly, they are intended to catalyse discussion of subjective importance to individuals. The model described in this paper applies health services research and Delphi consensus-building methods to an idea orginally proposed 30 years ago. The hypothesis is that, first, large amounts of potentially-important information are distilled down to discrete information domains. These are then, secondly, rated by key stakeholders in multiple iterations, so that core information of agreed importance can be defined. We argue that this scientific approach is key to identifying information important to all stakeholders, which may otherwise be communicated poorly or omitted from discussions entirely. Our methods apply systematic review, qualitative, survey and consensus-building techniques to define this ‘core information’. We propose that such information addresses the ‘reasonable patient’ standard for information disclosure but, more importantly, can serve as a spring board for high-value discussion of importance to the individual patient. The application of established research methods can define information of core importance to informed consent. Further work will establish how best to incorporate this model in routine practice. (shrink)

As the world population is growing and government directives tell us to consume more fatty acids, the demand for fish is increasing. Due to declines in wild fish populations, we have come to rely more and more on aquaculture. Despite rapid expansion of aquaculture, this sector is still in a relatively early developmental stage. This means that this sector can still be steered in a favorable direction, which requires discussion about sustainability. If we want to avoid similar problems to the (...) ones we have experienced with livestock farming, we need to generate knowledge of the biology, profitability, environmental aspects, consumer awareness, and product appreciation of particular fish species. However, the discussion about a sustainable aquaculture also raises the question how we should treat fish. This moral question is regularly addressed as a problem of applied ethics with a focus on tailoring ethical principles to practical questions. In this article we do not deny the importance of the practical accounts, but we start from the fundamental question whether and why fish matter in our moral deliberations, i.e., from the discussion on moral status. We elaborate the distinction between moral considerability and moral significance in order to show both the importance and the limitations of the discussion about moral status for practical problems in aquaculture. We illustrate these points with a case-study about the farming of a specific fish species, the African catfish. (shrink)

Cicero is one of the most important and influential thinkers within the history of Western philosophy. For the last thirty years, his reputation as a philosopher has once again been on the rise after close to a century of very low esteem. This Companion introduces readers to 'Cicero the philosopher' and to his philosophical writings. It provides a handy port-of-call for those interested in Cicero's original contributions to a wide variety of topics such as epistemology, the emotions, determinism and responsibility, (...) cosmopolitanism, republicanism, philosophical translation, dialogue, aging, friendship, and more. The international, interdisciplinary team of scholars represented in this volume highlights the historical significance and contemporary relevance of Cicero's writings, and suggests pathways for future scholarship on Cicero's philosophy as we move through the twenty-first century. (shrink)