This spotlight article reflects on President Xi Jinping's handling of the COVID-19 epidemic and evaluates its specificities by making a brief incursion into the history of Chinese official responses to epidemics. This analysis shows that Xi Jinping's response to the COVID-19 epidemic differs from official responses to the 2003 SARS epidemic and the cerebrospinal meningitis epidemic of 1966–1967, and is used to assert his legitimacy on both the local and the international stage. By sharing data, even if it was not (...) as accurate as claimed, Xi Jinping has presented himself as a trustworthy international partner, leading a country that is at the forefront of scientific research, capable of vigorously implementing epidemic preparedness measures, and destined to become a major player in global health. On the Chinese stage, he showed that the central government has regained control over local public health organizations and that public health is once again a key government priority. As part of his response, Xi Jinping also honored gods of the Chinese pantheon, in a seeming contradiction with communism and science. I argue that, by combining the most advanced technology with a religious heritage, Xi Jinping is skillfully creating an image of himself not only as powerful and modern, but also as a leader undeniably rooted in Chinese tradition. (shrink)

This book has been defined around three important issues: the first sheds light on how people, in various philosophical, religious, and political contexts, understand the natural environment, and how the relationship between the environment and the body is perceived; the second focuses on the perceptions that a particular natural environment is good or bad for human health and examines the reasons behind such characterizations ; the third examines the promotion, in history, of specific practices to take advantage of the health (...) benefits, or avoid the harm, caused by certain environments and also efforts made to change environments supposed to be harmful to human health. The feeling and/or the observation that the natural environment can have effects on human health have been, and are still commonly shared throughout the world. This led us to raise the issue of the links observed and believed to exist between human beings and the natural environment in a broad chronological and geographical framework. In this investigation, we bring the reader from ancient and late imperial China to the medieval Arab world up to medieval, modern, and contemporary Europe. This book does not examine these relationships through the prism of the knowledge of our modern contemporary European experience, which, still too often, leads to the feeling of totally different worlds. Rather, it questions protagonists who, in different times and in different places, have reflected, on their own terms, on the links between environment and health and tries to obtain a better understanding of why these links took the form they did in these precise contexts. This book targets an academic readership as well as an “informed audience”, for whom present issues of environment and health can be nourished by the reflections of the past. (shrink)

This book starts from a first general observation: there are very diverse ways to frame and convey scientific knowledge in texts. It then analyzes texts on mathematics, astronomy, medicine and life sciences, produced in various parts of the globe and in different time periods, and examines the reasons behind the segmentation of texts and the consequences of such textual divisions. How can historians and philosophers of science approach this diversity, and what is at stake in dealing with it? The book (...) addresses these questions, adopting a specific approach to do so. In order to shed light on the diversity of organizational patterns and rhetorical strategies in scientific texts, and to question the rationale behind the choices made to present such texts in one particular way, it focuses on the issue of text segmentation, offering answers to questions such as: What was the meaning of segmenting texts into paragraphs, chapters, sections and clusters? Was segmentation used to delimit self-contained units, or to mark breaks in the physical appearance of a text in order to aid reading and memorizing, or to cope with the constraints of the material supports? How, in these different settings and in different texts, were pieces and parts made visible? (shrink)

ZusammenfassungIm Verlauf der Ming- und anschließenden Qing-Dynastie stieg die Anzahl der im medizinischen Bereich tätigen Personen erheblich an. Und auch die Anzahl medizinischer Abhandlungen wuchs proportional zum Anstieg medizinischer Experten. In dieser Hochphase medizinischer Publikationen, in der das Fehlen eines institutionalisierten Zulassungssystems einem breiten Personenspektrum gestattete sowohl Medizin zu praktizieren als auch darüber zu schreiben, mussten sich die Autoren eine besondere Strategie zur Legitimierung und Aufwertung ihrer Bücher einfallen lassen, zumal seit dem 19. Jahrhundert Europäer mit der Verbreitung unterschiedlicher Techniken (...) und Kenntnisse begonnen hatten und dadurch die ohnehin schon starke Konkurrenz noch weiter anstachelten. Einen wichtigen Faktor dieser Strategie bildete das Vorwort. Was ein Autor über sich selbst und seinen Text aussagte, wen er bat, sein Vorwort zu schreiben und was diese Leute wiederum als wichtig zur Empfehlung eines neuen Buches erachteten, ist Gegenstand des Artikels. Diese Aspekte sollen ein Bild davon vermitteln, worauf im späten chinesischen Kaiserreich medizinische Autorität und Legitimation beruhten. (shrink)