The rise of managerialism within healthcare systems has been noted globally. This paper uses the findings of a scoping study to investigate the management of poor performance among nurses and midwives in the United Kingdom within this context. The management of poor performance among clinicians in the NHS has been seen as a significant policy problem. There has been a profound shift in the distribution of power between professional and managerial groups in many health systems globally. We examined literature published (...) between 2000 and 10 to explore aspects of poor performance and its management. We used Web of Science, CINAHL, MEDLINE, British Nursing Index, HMIC, Cochrane Library and PubMed. Empirical data are limited but indicate that nurses and midwives are the clinical groups most likely to be suspended and that poor performance is often represented as an individual deficit. A focus on the individual as a source of trouble can serve as a distraction from more complex systematic problems. (shrink)

Mysteries: remains of a hidden life -- Words on paper -- In search of a person behind the words -- A France of broken families -- Families -- Politiques -- Breaking with his father -- Aristocratic Paris -- Libertine Paris -- A political education -- Gearing up for war: mathematical inspirations -- Breda -- Military engineering -- Meeting Isaac Beeckman -- The Holy Roman empire -- Anxious dreams -- Curious meetings -- War and diplomacy in Europe -- Into Bohemia -- (...) To Hungary and disaster -- The Baltic and return to the Netherlands -- Again in France -- Paris and the rosicrucian scare -- The Valtellina and Rome -- The struggle for France -- Problems with the cardinal -- The campaign for La Rochelle -- Confrontation and departure -- The meetings -- Confrontation and conversation -- Becoming a sectarian -- Feeling threatened -- Exile -- Not yet concluded. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Bernard Mandeville and the Therapy of “The Clever Politician”Harold J. CookAs the institutional authority of the learned physicians of Augustan London waned, new threats to the classical foundations of medical practice appeared. 1 Patients had more freedom to chose from a variety of practitioners and practices, giving both consumer demand and the advertising skills of suppliers an even more powerful hand in medical affairs. While the burgeoning medical marketplace (...) developed mostly because of the profound socio-economic and political changes of the late Stuart period, intellectual transformations were at play, too. The new science appeared to encourage empiricism and the development of new remedies based on experimentation, devaluing university education in medical classics, but conversely the new science could strengthen physicians’ claims to superiority over mere patients and practitioners. Medical materialists, for instance, could turn the classical advisor/client relationship into that of an expert contolling a passive recipient (patient) for his or her own good.One contemporary debate that shows the implications of materialism for medical relationships is the theory of the passions. The passions linked mind and body. According to most classical accounts, one could (or should) control the passions by applying reason, resulting in both a virtuous and a healthy life. But according to a strong version of materialism, the mind could not hope to control the passions. A doctor therefore could no longer appeal to patients’ reason; rather, he had to manipulate the patient’s passions for his or her own good. Hence for a materialist, the doctor was not an adviser to the patient but an expert therapist, not a teacher of health and virtue but a “clever politician” who ordered bodily passions. Some versions of the new science, then, favored [End Page 101] the expertise of physicians while undermining older views about learned authority. Such an outlook is clear in the work of Dr. Bernard Mandeville, whose famous Fable of the Bees shows how the “clever politician” played on passions to make the body politic run smoothly. Mandeville held coherent views on politics, economics, moral philosophy, and medicine. Like many doctors of his time, he fought to establish his expertise in the new science. His views are expressed most clearly in the theory of the passions. By examining his discussion of the passions in both his social commentary and his medical dialogues, we can note similarities among his various writings and glimpse one of his fundamental positions on medicine and humanity.The Fable and its CriticsTo many English minds of the early eighteenth century, no one exemplified materialism’s threat better than Dr. Bernard Mandeville. Mandeville’s famous slogan, the subtitle of his Fable of the Bees—“private vices, public benefits”—seemed to epitomize materialism’s inherent immorality. The book seemed to argue that what most people recognized as human vices were the main engines of the collective good. Mandeville’s famous book pictured human nature as animalistic, in which the passions held sway over reason. In Mandeville’s world, it appeared, reason became little more than the ability to rationalize, the instrument of hypocrisy, merely letting people cover their true motives (grounded as they were in the passions) with empty words pretending to more exalted ends.His Fable had begun as a little, anonymous, satirical poem in 1705, titled “The Grumbling Hive: or, Knaves Turn’d Honest.” It began by speaking of “A Spacious Hive well stockt with Bees, / That liv’d in Luxury and Ease.” Many of the bees were knaves, with no calling free of deceit, but while “every Part was full of Vice, / Yet [was] the whole Mass a Paradise; /... Such were the Blessings of that State; / Their Crimes conspir’d to make them Great.” Avarice, prodigality, luxury, pride, envy, vanity, folly, fickleness, and inconstancy employed millions, encouraging ingenuity and industry and creating pleasures and comforts “To such a Height, the very Poor / Liv’d better than the Rich before.” But many of the thriving bees complained, shouting for honesty and virtue. When Jove “rid / The bawling Hive of Fraud,” economic collapse followed, with the consequent end of arts and sciences as well; population declined; the hive’s territory decreased; and the remaining bees toiled long and... (shrink)

This chapter contains section titled: Upbringing English Works, Dutch Sources The Fable Last Work and Legacy.

Two overriding considerations shaped the development of early research on the biological effects of microwave radiation—possible medical application and uncertainty about the hazards of exposure to radar. Reports in the late 1940s and early 1950s of hazards resulting from microwave exposure led to the near abandonment of medical research related to microwave diathermy at the same time that military and industrial concern over hazards grew, culminating in the massive research effort known as ‘the Tri-Service program’ . Both the early focus (...) on medical application and the later search for hazards played important roles in dictating how this field of research developed as a science. (shrink)

This essay analyzes the view of evolution of Jan Lever (1922–2010), founder of the biology department at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, and compares his view with those of J.H. Diemer and H. Dooyeweerd. Together with Dooyeweerd, Lever wrote a series of chapters on the species concept inPhilosophia Reformata(1948–1950) in which species were defined as constant types. In his book,Creatie en Evolutie(1956), Lever still subscribed to Dooyeweerd’s philosophy but also suggested that it is possible that biological evolution occurred, including that of (...) human beings, and that scientific research can shed light on these processes. Influenced by his idea of individuality structures, Dooyeweerd criticized Lever and suggested that species are constant; that science cannot speak to the topics that Lever discusses. It is argued that Dooyeweerd’s views are influenced by the typological thinking of the time and that reformational thought would benefit from de-emphasizing this aspect of reformational philosophy. (shrink)

Examines the relationship between making objects and knowing nature in Europe from the mid-15th to mid-19th centuries.

SummaryThe medical career of Sir John Colbatch illuminates some of the ways in which experimental philosophy, social change, and medical entrepreneurialism together helped bring about the end of the old medical regime in England. Colbatch's career in Augustan England depended very much on a growing public culture in which the well-to-do decided matters of intellectual importance for themselves, becoming increasingly free not only from the clerics but from the physicians. In this new world, debates about the fundamental principles of the (...) new science took place increasingly in public, and in the English language, without the learned men of the university being able to enforce their authority. It gave people like Colbatch a new opportunity to make their way into the medical establishment. (shrink)