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Under the severe rule of Louis Philippe of Orleans (1830-1848) a brief interval of peace in France was favorable for the development of some medical arts, like pediatrics. The Dr. Vanier, considering how difficult was for the students the access to a children's hospital, wanted to help their learning with a journal with clinical cases and conferences on children pathology, including several papers on muguet (the oral infection by Candida albicans in newborns), written by the famous Trousseau and the clinical investigators Valleix, Gruby and Berg, who became to the description of the etiological agent as "a vegetal parasite, a fungus similar to the mush-rooms".

In an era when it was not possible to achieve quality x-rays with short exposure times, the need to obtain chest images without movement led the French doctor Emré Hyacinthe Guilleminot to construct a machine that repeatedly emitted x-rays only when desired during the respiratory cycle. His aim was to create a satisfactory radiograph from multiple short bursts performed at the moment of inhalation or exhalation, based on Charles Bouchard's research on heart disease. He extended his idea to radiography of the heart, creating a system that enabled images to be obtained disassociating the phases of heartbeat. This article seeks to explain the basic functioning of these mechanisms, and to recover previous research papers that led to their creation. We will also retrieve biographical and personal data of the two people involved - one directly, the other indirectly - in these novel inventions., (Copyright © 2018 SERAM. Publicado por Elsevier España, S.L.U. All rights reserved.)

This paper analyzes the contributions emerging from the discussions of the III Colloquium of Bonneval, France, on "The problem of the psychogenesis of neuroses and psychoses" carried out in 1946, and especially the debate between H. Ey and J. Lacan. These contributions gravitated on the conception that psychiatrists have about the reality of mental illness. After presenting the different meanings of the term psychogenesis and the antecedents on the notions of the normal and the pathological in the work of G. Cangilhem, the positions of H. Ey and J. Lacan are analyzed in detail.

Introduction: Under Charcot's leadership, La Salpêtrière was transformed into one of the world's top neurology centres. However, there is little information regarding the patient care facilities which Charcot would have encountered upon his arrival in 1862., Development: A paper published in 1860 by Spanish physician Pedro González Velasco following a visit to that famous hospital is a valuable testimony to the quality of patient care just prior to Charcot's arrival. Although it essentially praises the institution, the article also describes the largely unsatisfactory conditions endured by patients with severe mental disorders, epilepsy and paralysis, who were locked inside cages with simple straw pallets on the floor for beds and open holes for toilets. Rather than an alienist, Velasco was a well-known surgeon and passionate advocate of positivism. As a personal friend and hospital fellow of Jose Maria Esquerdo's, with similar political affiliations, he had first-hand knowledge of the struggle to improve neuropsychiatric care in Madrid., Conclusions: Publishing his paper ultimately provided Velasco with a pretext for denouncing the deplorable care conditions endured by similar patients in Hospital General de Madrid. Meanwhile, Charcot would go on to improve the living conditions of inpatients at La Salpêtrière and found the specialty of neurology., (Copyright © 2012 Sociedad Española de Neurología. Published by Elsevier Espana. All rights reserved.)

Aim: This study analyzes the productivity and visibility of Spanish publications in the area of clinical neurology in the period 2000-2009 and compared with those for Italy, France and Germany., Materials and Methods: We used the database Web of Science. The analysis (annual and in five-year) was restricted to the citable documents (original articles, reviews and proceedings papers). Bibliometric indicators used were the number of publications, citations received by publications and Hirsch's h-index. We also assessed the slope of the annual growth rate (b), the number of publications by language and the international collaboration., Results: In the period 2000-2009 there were 46,114 publications in neurology clinic of which 6,998 were Spanish publications (h = 75), 11,629 in Italy (h = 101), French 9,745 (h = 102) and 20,143 in Germany (h = 124). The rate of increase in the total number of publications in Spain (b = 15) was lower than that observed in Italy (b = 65), Germany (b = 61) or France (b = 34). In the case of publications in English, the growth rate was higher for Spain (b = 37) than for France (b = 36) but lower than for Germany (b = 54) and Italy (b = 65)., Conclusions: Although the total number of publications and the observed increase are lower in Spain compared to Italy, France or Germany, the Spanish publications in Clinical Neurology shows good trend indicators with regard to publications in English and international collaboration. This improvement was associated with greater visibility as showed by the five-year analysis of citations received by Spanish publications.

The paper undertakes the determination of parentage and users of assisted reproduction techniques in comparative law, particularly in three European Union countries: Italy, France and Spain. The idea of artificially conceived child protection, present in the Italian provision, is substituted, partially in French law, and totally in Spanish law, by an exclusively individualistic outlook, configuring a true ″right to maternity″ for married women and for those not living with a male partner (single women, divorced or widowed) or with a female partner (lesbians), and for women inseminated artificially by the semen of the husband before or after their death, and for women already having culminated their fertile life.

This paper reviews the scientific evidence on the relationship between consumption of alcoholic beverages and health, at the individual and population levels. This evidence is used to inform the health counselling on such consumption. We propose that during the individual clinical encounter, the counselling should be adapted to clinical characteristics of the patient (mainly age and cardiovascular risk), consider the patient preferences (because there are alternatives to alcohol for cardiovascular prevention for those who do not like alcohol), and prudent ('primum non nocere'). For the population, the advice should be: "if you consume alcohol, less is better".

In 1848, Claude Bernard discovered the lipolytic function of the exocrine pancreas. His experimental procedure was very original and he always said that it was easily reproducible. This paper reproduces the experiments that Bernard made on the digestion of fat. The work is original because the experiments were taken from Bernard's personal manuscripts that are unpublished. The paper also deals with Claude Bernard's personal papers. Our results were like Bernard's: his experiments and conclusions were very truthful as well as his ideas on reproducibility in experimental medicine. The surgical part was not simple, so Claude Bernard probably was very skillful.

The paper explores how Hannah Arendt's oppositions public-private and intimate-social can be used as an analytical tool to better understand a very concrete, extreme situation: the state of emergency triggered when an epidemiological outbreak hits a city, totally altering its inhabitants lives. Studied observation of what specific individuals (be they imagined or real) feel and think during times of epidemic is an underutilized tool that may prove helpful in studying epidemics themselves. Focusing on Camus' "The pest" and events in the city of Oran, the article looks at how victims of the plague felt about their public or private lives and their intimate and social ties.

The present paper tries to study some of the basic rudiments that contributed to the change of paradigm about mental deficiency produced in the first decades of the XXth century. Taking as main sources the Binet and Simon's contributions from France, and the Sante de Sanctis' from Italy, it's analysed the construction of the category "abnormal childhood", relating it to the new and privileged space of observation that supposed the obligatory School. It concludes with a reflection about the fallacious use of the "intelligence" as "prejudice" in order to establish social taxonomies and meritocracies that they don't make but to justify the human inequality.

The relationship between adult mortality and the proportion of orphans in France in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries is analyzed. Data are from a research project developed at the Institut National d'Etudes Demographiques [INED] and concern data for some 400 communes, together with life tables developed for the periods 1740-1749 and 1820-1829. "This paper is divided in two chapters. The first chapter examines the different proportions of orphans, observed in the above mentioned periods. The second one confronts these proportions with comparable values derived from mortality tables." Consideration is given to the relationship between parents' death and timing of marriage of, (excerpt)