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Medicine aims toward restoring, maintaining, and improving human health, and engineering aims toward restoring, maintaining and improving human wellness. Both disciplines apply knowledge from science and technology at large to accomplish such objectives. Bioengineering, also called biomedical engineering, is defined as the application of engineering principles and techniques to problems in medicine and biology (always with restoration, maintenance, and improvement in mind), which now also includes veterinary medicine, and the environment in general.

Medical science developed in tandem with the evolution of biological species and their associated diseases. Because of the close interaction between humans and other animals, even those in the wild, taking care of the former also means caring for the latter. Several scientific forerunners delved into animals' anatomical and physiological secrets in their quest to better understand animal biology and functions, thereby laying the foundation for animal medicine. Here, I briefly explore the long and complex road that led to the current state of veterinary science and provide a few examples of its present standing. (Contributions from the ancient world and eastern countries are not considered, as they represent a different area of interest.).

Music has been prevalent in different societies and cultures since ancient times. It is an expression of human deeds, identity, wishes, understanding of the world, the culture and norms of each society, as well as interpersonal relations within the family and with the external world. The sounds different musical instruments produce affect human well-being. Moreover, music is also a human need, and, like language, it is another inborn communication means, very close to the basic physiological drives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Arthur Schopenhauer (1788?1860), a transcendental German philosopher, is best known for his 1818 work The World as Will and Representation or, in German, Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung (expanded in 1844), wherein he characterizes the phenomenal world as the product of a blind and insatiable metaphysical will. Such a phenomenal world is the world as it appears to human beings, who are structured by their own understanding. It is the world as experienced, as opposed to the world of things-in-themselves. In turn, the metaphysical will tries to explain the fundamental nature of being and the world of experience. The main objective of this article is to find in Schopenhauer?s momentous opera magna, already more than 150 years old, any element historically and/or epistemologically related to the current concepts of bioengineering or biomedical engineering and/or biotechnology. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Music, along with its attached rhythm, has been with man for centuries, developing and evolving along with him. Its influence on human behavior and mood can reach levels whose limits are still unknown, especially in everything related to perception, where the whole nervous system is involved. Thus, physiology and psychology become strongly connected areas, while technology, through, for example, the production of music by electronic means, appears as a new unexpected ingredient that traditional composers and musicians of older times could not imagine. Obviously, bioengineering and its multiple branches are not absent either [1]?[4]. The literature is enormous with several specialized journals. When one looks back in time at the evolution of this complex area, the appearance of some kind of sudden jump (as a step function), which took place within a relatively recent short interval, is evident: music is now much more than what it used to be, and rhythm has made a step forward as if resurrecting and renewing the ancient Indian or African drums. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]