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In what way is Nietzsche's infamous late aphorism, ‘God is dead’, related to a general attack on theology and its intellectual practices? In Twilight of the Idols, he remarks: ‘I'm afraid we're not rid of God because we still believe in grammar.’ Reason, he decries, has become mired in linguistic rules long determined by the requirements of scholastic philosophy, whether of medieval theology or of Immanuel Kant. Nietzsche dismisses these as die Sprach-Metaphysik (‘metaphysics of language’). In this essay I examine Nietzsche's attack on theology via his long-term struggle with the ideas of Luther, once the idol of Goethe's German enlightenment, and now, Nietzsche insists, its arch-enemy. To do this, I re-examine Luther's theology of language, especially in the early Lectures on Romans (1515–1516). Luther's own attack on scholasticism is founded on a theology of reading which has unexpected affinities with Nietzsche. By placing this in a revised genealogy of hermeneutics from Nietzsche to Heidegger, it is possible to see theology as less deterministic and metaphysical.

Background: Neonatal practice involves complex decision-making that prioritizes different ethical principles than adult care, with a particular focus on beneficence and the best interests standard, while respecting parental autonomy. Prioritizing autonomy and best interests are facilitated through shared decision-making (SDM). Decision aids (DA)s are educational, evidence-based tools designed to facilitate SDM between patients, caregivers, and healthcare professionals. The development and evaluation of existing neonatal DAs have been variable, with as yet unestablished effectiveness and generalizability. The purpose of this review is to examine existing published neonatal DAs with the SUNDAE and SDP frameworks to describe where standards are met and identify opportunities to improve future neonatal SDM using DAs. Methods: Standardized frameworks allow neonatal DAs to be evaluated for completeness and elucidate areas of opportunity to better promote the ethical goals of SDM. DAs were included in analysis based on a comprehensive search strategy focusing on neonatal topics, and then evaluated for compliance with both the Standards for UNiversal reporting of patient Decision Aid Evaluations checklist (SUNDAE) and the Systematic Development Process (SDP). Results: Compliance with SUNDAE and SDP were inconsistent in currently published neonatal DAs. SUNDAE evaluation revealed gaps in visual and numerical probability factors, values clarification exercises, and provision of tailored information to meet parental needs, overall limiting the potential of informed and adaptable SDM. SDP evaluation showed gaps in longitudinal engagement of steering committees, a lack of preliminary alpha testing with clinicians and beta testing with both clinicians and parents. Conclusions: In order to maximize SDM and support ethical decision-making honoring parental autonomy and best interests standard in neonates, a holistic framework for DA development and reporting is needed to maximize their clinical impact.

The chapter discusses the widespread practice of using writing as form of body art. This begins with the modern example of the Iranian artist Shirin Neshat, who transfers images of Persian and Islamic writing onto photographs of human subjects including herself. This opens out into a wide-ranging discussion of the history of the tattoo: its use as a stigma (and confusion with branding) in Jewish and early Christian culture; its reclamation in Japanese culture; and its ambiguous status in the anthropology of the Polynesian islands, from Captain Cook onwards. At stake is how far writing suggests internalization or externalization: this culminates in a discussion of the politics of inscription in the theoretical writings of Foucault, and in the history of the Inquisition up to the time of Goya.

The issue at the heart of this chapter is how writing relates to the visual arts. It opens with Magritte’s ‘revolutionary surrealist’ manifesto deconstructing the antithesis of ‘les mots et les images’ (1929). This antithesis nonetheless lies at the heart of art theory. G. E. Lessing in the German Enlightenment argued that painting and poetry are completely different arts. Partly he was drawing on Lutheran Protestant tradition. While not iconoclastic (like other Protestant movements) Luther’s theology drew attention to a conflict of signification between word and image. The chapter veers between these poles, discussing both the modernist revival of written media in artistic representation (for example in Braque); and iconoclastic movements in Byzantium, Russia, and in Islamic and Jewish traditions. Rather than a divorce between the two, the chapter argues for a mutual anxiety over signification.

Shakespeare’s Folio continues to take centre stage in this chapter. The book has become a modern fetish, not only of the book as such (the most studied individual edition in history) but of authorship and of subjectivity. The theory of the fetish is traced from Marx’s Kapital to William Pietz. The chapter also considers the history of the word by way of European colonialism, and links this to the colonial presence of Shakespeare in Africa, China, and elsewhere. The argument then transfers to artistic representation of book fetishism in modern China, before suggesting that the ‘cult of the book’ has found a modern home in commodification and digitization. As books move from sacred to secular, they also move into a world of ambiguous economic value in which, like art works, they are modern relics.

This chapter begins with a discussion of the genizah, the place of disposal for holy books (and often other writing, too) in Jewish societies. This leads to an analysis of the extraordinary Taylor-Schechter collection in Cambridge, the largest survival of texts in medieval Hebrew. Why are Hebrew letters considered sacred objects in themselves? And how does this relate to the history of the tetragrammaton, the idea that God’s name should never be spoken or written down? The genealogy of Hebrew script (in synagogue scrolls and also in amulets and talismans) is examined in parallel with that of Arabic in Islam, leading to a more general discussion of the idea of writing as a place of unmentionable secrets, including within modern arguments about biography and privacy.

The assimilation between the book and the human body reaches its apogee in the worldwide phenomenon of book burial. The sūtras in Mahāyāna Buddhism were buried in a stūpa (burial mound), as if they were themselves relics of the Buddha. In China, Japan, and Korea, traditions grew of ritual chanting of the text, character by character, with each character drawn inside a stūpa. Comparable traditions are found in Judaism, Islam, Christianity, and Sikhism. The ritualized disposal of sacred texts suggests a profound connection between the book and the body. This is not only a matter of sacred transference but also a deep metaphor of the idea of writing conveying contents in terms of human subjectivity.

In Auschwitz, as retold by Primo Levi, the idea of language is represented by the metaphor of Babel, a tower of words on the point of oblivion. The chapter surveys the literature and imagery of Babel from the Bible to the present. It surveys the myriad depictions of Babel in the Renaissance, especially in Pieter Bruegel, and how simultaneous optimism and scepticism represented in the visual arts, at once utopian and apocalyptic, reflects the new age of print. McLuhan’s concept of the ‘Gutenberg Galaxy’ is reappraised via a reflection on the idea of liberty in Milton’s Areopagitica, contrasted with the practice of censorship and persecution in relation to heresy from Augustine to Luther. The chapter ends with modern allegories of Babel in Borges, and in Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451.

This chapter formulates a theory of writing in order to explain the historic acts of destruction. It uses Lévi-Strauss’s assimilation of writing with slavery to reconsider the place of writing in philosophy. At the heart of the discussion is Hegel’s ‘master–slave dialectic’, which is examined through his reading of Luther; Enlightenment theories of language in Rousseau and Kant; and the early history of slavery in the Americas. The Hegelian argument is then traced in twentieth-century psychoanalysis and literary theory, especially in Freud, Lacan, and Derrida, in order to investigate the book as the dialectical object of anxiety and liberation, power and violence. The chapter ends by positioning the mimetic promise of writing as lying at the dangerous heart of its mystery.

The metaphor of the book as body is one of the oldest known, but is it a metaphor? Stories abound of books being punished as if they were human bodies, or alternatively of books acting as miraculous saviours in relation to human injury or death in war. While these cases reach back to the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century wars of religion (and long before) they are also found in the twentieth century, in the First World War, from which prayer-books have survived with bullet holes. The chapter argues for a mimetic relationship between the book as container and its human owners. This is investigated finally via the Ragyndrudis Codex from the Carolingian era. It acts as a martyred book, in place of the saint, but it also suggests what Roland Barthes called ‘book-life’, the capacity of a book to frame human subjectivity.

This chapter is centred on the origins of the modern alphabet in ancient Greece. It opens with a philosophical discussion of the account of the invention of writing in Plato’s Phaedrus. Plato attacks writing as the source of a pharmakon—a medicine that is also a poison. This is traced, as it is in Plato, back to hieroglyphics in ancient Egypt. The history of their decipherment by Champollion in the Napoleonic period is introduced in order to initiate a discussion of the status of the alphabet as the iconic script of modernity. This story is examined both from the point of view of philology and mythology, as Greek adapted Phoenician forms of writing from northern Africa around the same time as the Homeric poems were being written. Why does the alphabet still signify such a powerful ideology?

The chapter opens with the famous story of Petrarch’s mountain walk on which he carried a copy of Augustine’s Confessions in his pocket. What is the significance of a book’s portability? The key question in the chapter concerns an obvious but little-observed correspondence between the pages of a codex and a pair of hands. The book creates a prosthetic relationship with the body, acting in a triangle between hand, eye, and mouth. In the midst of this opens out a longstanding philosophical quarrel about orality and the written (and about silent reading) in literary history, from classical times to Nietzsche. The argument here is for a more open acknowledgement of the book as a transitional object, including analysis of books in works of art, and finishing with a discussion of reading in Cicero and in Dante.

Until the nineteenth century, it was the law in England to swear the truth of evidence by kissing the Bible. This practice long outlasted a Protestant suspicion that it was based on superstition. People kiss books still today. What is the metaphysical relationship so intended? The chapter explores the place of the book in the cult of the saints from the late antique period onwards. It also examines the physical make-up of books in Christianity, in calligraphy, in bindings, and in boxes called ‘book shrines’. The discussion builds on that in chs 9 (on Islamic books) and 10 (Jewish books). It surveys famous examples such as the Book of Kells and the Lindisfarne Gospels, before also examining the parallel traditions of kissing books (and eating them), and of kissing in general, before tracing attacks on such practices from before the Reformation onwards.

Bibliophobia is a personal meditation on the 5,000-year history of writing and of books, from the perspective of the smartphone. Its starting point is the contemporary idea of ‘the death of the book’, embodied not only in the replacement of the physical book by digital media, but in the accompanying twenty-first-century experience of paranoia and of literary apocalypse. It traces a twin fear of omniscience and oblivion right back to the origins of writing in ancient Sumeria and Egypt, and then forwards to the age of Google. It covers examples of bibliophobia from the first Chinese emperor to Nazi Germany, alongside a parallel story of bibliomania and bibliolatry within world religions and literatures. Using examples from six continents, it discusses topics such as the origins and decipherment of different kinds of human script; the development of textual media such as scrolls, codices, printed books, and artificial intelligence; the collection and destruction of libraries; the use of books as holy objects, talismans, and shrines; and the history of slavery, heresy, blasphemy, censorship, and persecution. Originating as the Clarendon Lectures in the Faculty of English at the University of Oxford, the methods of Bibliophobia range across book history; comparative religion; philosophy from Plato to Hegel and Freud; and a wide range of global literature from ancient to contemporary. Richly illustrated with manuscripts, printed objects, and art works, at its heart is the power that books always (and continue to) have in the emotional, spiritual, bodily, and imaginative life of readers.

The global argument of the book now moves eastward. It opens with Hangul, the innovative script invented in Korea. Korea is also the birthplace of moveable type, building on the longstanding Chinese tradition of woodblock printing. The chapter considers the extraordinary literary culture of the Korean court, which is then compared more briefly with the writing system and book history of Japan. The main part of the chapter is centred in China. The argument between ideogrammatic and phonetic interpretations of Shang characters leads to a discussion of Chinese as the most sophisticated as well as long-lasting writing system in the world. The place of calligraphy both in books and in monumental landscape settings is described in various imperial guises, before a conclusion places writing in the context of the Cultural Revolution (Mao’s ‘Little Red Book’) and the Beijing Olympics of 2008.

The chapter considers the recent idea of ‘the death of the book’, by which it is believed that the digital age spells the end of the book as a physical object. However, the history of the book has always been marked by changes in media, in which apocalyptic prophecies are made about the end of knowledge. The chapter uses Walter Benjamin on the concept of ‘aura’, and Freud on the ‘magic memory tablet’, to trace through a philosophical idea of the book as containing a sense both of power and of threat and danger. Different types of physical book in history (clay tablet, scroll, codex, printed book, e-book, smartphone) are compared in order to open up a question about how books are valued and also damaged, from ancient Babylon to the Holocaust, and to ask what the status of books is today and into the future.

The central image of censorship in modernity, and perhaps in history altogether, is the book-burning in Nazi Germany in May 1933. A description of the fires and their origins prompts a discussion of their meaning. It is argued that they functioned not as an action of political censorship of ideas so much as a rite of purgation. Functional destruction gives way to a pathological attitude towards culture. What does this tell us about the concept of censorship? The history of the term is reviewed from the Enlightenment (in Spinoza or Locke) to the twenty-first century, and from the Papal Index to Soviet Russia, and is contrasted with an alternative model of violence towards literature as motivated by a hatred of representation and mimesis itself.

This chapter returns to the territory of iconoclasm but via extraordinary examples of attacks on books—with a knife—called here ‘biblioclasm’. The first case study is of a book of Catholic ritual which is subjected to savage violence in seven different attacks. The second case study is an attack on an apparently secular book—a Second Folio of Shakespeare’s Comedies, Histories and Tragedies (1632), where the whole of the play Measure for Measure is cut out with a razor by an English Jesuit in Spain. What do these cases tell us about an attitude to the contents of books, and of the human subjective realm felt to reside within them? The chapter considers questions of secularization and also theories in modern philosophy (such as Heidegger) of erasure.

The Nazi bonfires trace a history back to the Library of Alexandria as the model of destruction in antiquity. The story both of this collection and of how it came to an end are now legendary. These myths in turn are twofold: of the antipathy of Christianity and Islam, and of religion and secularity. The chapter demystifies this history to show how it tells us as much about the storytellers as the events in question. This leads to a parallel discussion of the libraries of European monasteries, their decline, and the myth of the ‘rediscovery of the classics’ (including Lucretius) by Poggio Bracciolini in the fifteenth century. The idea of the ‘classic’ is revealed as a political ideology, equally as questionable as the colonial and imperial designs of book-collection and knowledge retrieval.

What is the wider motivation for book-destruction, and what is the significance of rituals involving fire? The explicit model for the Nazi book-burnings in 1933 was the book-burning by Martin Luther at the Reformation in December 1520. Since this event is also saturated in mythology, the chapter examines in detail the processes that led up to it and its consequences. It is compared with other anti-heretical campaigns: the first known book-burning in history, in imperial China; the burning of the Talmud in Paris or of Avicenna in Isfahan; and persecutions of the medieval Manichaeans and Cathars. Writing emerges as the inalienable force of political and religious dissent, a source for the imagination which brings down vengeance in turn.

This chapter marks a move into the religious context of the history of writing. It examines the central place of script in Islam: in religious terms, but also in art, architecture, and culture. It examines the idea of writing in the Qur’an, and the development of calligraphy over several centuries as a carrier of the sacred. Multiple examples of Islamic manuscript are analysed in both the Baghdadi and the Mamluk traditions. The chapter then discusses the figurative meaning of writing, especially in the design and composition of the Alhambra in Islamic Andalusia. Writing is discussed as a form of artistic ornament in its own right, and also as a concept at the heart of a Muslim sense of the holy, as evidenced in the mosque, and the mihrab within it, but also in secular buildings.

Has writing and the book changed fundamentally with the invention of the eBook, the internet, or the smartphone? The chapter outlines Shoshona Zuboff’s theory of the ‘two texts’ in digital media, and the use of algorithmic methods in analysing reading. This leads to a discussion of the concepts of language and communication in artificial intelligence (discussing Alan Turing and J. R. Searle as well as Wittgenstein). The chapter examines ideas of ambiguity and translation in relation to the use of search terms in digital humanities and argues against the politics of communication arbitrarily deployed by media giants such as Google and Facebook. This leads to an examination of the public furore over Ed Snowden and the profound arguments about writing and privacy that it entails. The chapter concludes in a discussion of Kafka’s ‘In the Penal Colony’ as a modern parable of writing as machine, via Marx and Foucault.

From the future the book now veers backwards to the remote past, to the library of Ashurbanipal in Mesopotamia. Despite its antiquity, this library was organized systematically around subjects divided within different ‘shelves’, all collected in a kind of catalogue. The library was destroyed soon after it was made, but its destruction also ensured its long-term survival, by baking the tablets. 30,000 fragments survive, including some of the oldest literature in the world, such as the Epic of Gilgamesh. What does it tell us about the idea of the book today? The chapter considers the organization of knowledge in modern and post-modern libraries, and the recent destruction of libraries, such as at Mosul in Iraq in 2016, just a few miles from Ashurbanipal’s palace in Nineveh.

The chapter begins with a description of the futuristic annex of the British Library in rural Yorkshire, controlled by a robot, the books kept in a post-human environment. This opens out a discussion of the library as the ultimate storage device, ranging from the Library of Congress—the largest collection of books ever made—to the internet, that transcends all knowledge in a hyper-cloud. What are the limits of knowledge, in an age when nobody can comprehend the size of the human library? The chapter considers the concept of representation (‘mimesis’) within writing systems and within the invention of writing itself as an idea, especially through the imperial claims of the Roman alphabet, finishing by suggesting that this power is a magical illusion, waiting to be broken.

The iconic case of book-burning in the late twentieth century is Salman Rushdie. The chapter begins by examining in detail the events of early 1989, and their ramifications for the history of censorship, blasphemy and ‘hate crime’. The case of Rushdie is then juxtaposed with the sixteenth-century persecution of the anti-Trinitarian Michael Servetus, which had profound meaning in the Enlightenment arguments of Voltaire and Rousseau. What is at stake in the argument between Servetus and Calvin, and what does it tell us about the power of the idea of the written book in the emergence of modernity? The chapter argues against a simple model of secularization to posit instead a deeper meaning in the concept of heresy, still alive today. The chapter ends with a discussion of Stefan Zweig and Paul Celan, and the idea of the ‘shibboleth’ in language.

The book is difficult to define, caught between a physical object, usually rectangular, made by tying together a stack of pages so that one side is bound and fixed, and the other free and loose; and an intellectual object, one that delimits a project that is self-sufficient and of reasonably substantial (though indeterminate) length. Clearly these physical and non-physical definitions are intimately related, yet they also involve considerable philosophical indeterminacy. A book is both finite and indefinite, open and restricted. This chapter considers both dimensions of the book, arguing that object and idea are inseparable. It discusses the 5,000 year history of the book from cuneiform to the Kindle, and theories of the book from Augustine to Petrarch, or from Freud to Heidegger. It is divided into five sections: the Book as Object; Contents; Metaphor; Technology; and Machine.

Cognitive philosophy in recent years has made conversation central to the experience of emotion: we recognise emotions in dialogue. What lesson can be drawn from this for understanding Erasmus’ Colloquies? This work has often been rifled for its treatment of ideas and opinions, but it also offers a complex and highly imaginative treatment of conversation, originating as rhetorical exercises in De copia. This essay reconfigures the Colloquies in such terms, especially those involving female interlocutors, drawing on the riches of ancient interest in conversation in Plato, Cicero and Quintilian, and also on the vogue for dialogue in Renaissance Italy from Leonardo Bruni to Castiglione.

In this paper, we propose an approximate Bayesian computation approach to perform a multiple target tracking within a binary sensor network. The nature of the binary sensors (\emph{getting closer - moving away} information) do not allow the use of the classical tools (e.g. Kalman Filter, Particle Filer), because the exact likelihood is intractable. To overcome this, we use the particular feature of the likelihood-free algorithms to produce an efficient multiple target tracking methodology.

This essay explores the impact of the Reformation on the structures of early modern memory culture. Starting from recent historiographical revisions of post-Reformation practices of commemoration, it examines the interplay of remembering and forgetting in antiquarian scholarship — a discourse which confronted directly the problems posed by the destruction of material and ritual means for commemoration. While antiquarian discourse in particular conceived of its project in terms of salvaging the material objects of England’s past from the grave of oblivion, some scholars developed complex notions of the constructive role forgetting might play in a larger, transcendental vision of immortality. Reading Browne’s Hydriotaphia, or Urne-Buriall (1658) against the background of antiquarian texts like Camden’s Britannia (1596; 1610), Stow’s Survey of London (1603), and Weever’s Ancient Funerall Monuments (1631) the essay charts the different strategies developed to come to terms with the painful memories of the Reformation, which constitute the thematic concern of these texts, as well as memory culture profoundly shaped by the forces of oblivion.

Introduction: The incidence of aggressive prostate cancer (PCa) and mortality is disproportionately higher in men of African-American (AA) ancestry. Treatment options for these patients are docetaxel or cabazitaxel alone or in combination with bevacizumab, thalidomide, and prednisone or immunotherapy. However, these chemotherapeutics typically only improve survival slightly (3-4 months). Further, majority of patients develop metastatic PCa over time, resistant to conventional chemotherapy (metastatic castration resistance PCa or mCRPC). Therefore, an understanding of the molecular mechanisms underlying the ethnic differences in disease aggressiveness and progression in PCa is needed. Methods: In this study, we performed mRNA and miRNA expression (RNAseq) analysis on PCa cell lines representing different tumor types (aggressive androgen receptor (AR) nonresponsive AR- vs. non-aggressive AR+) and derived from patients with European American/EA (PC3, PC3M, DU145, DUTXR, 22RV1, LNCaP, VCaP, LaPC4, C4, C4-2B) and AA (MDA-Pca-2b, RC77, RC165, RC43) ancestry to identify differentially expressed genes (DEG) associated with tumor aggressiveness and ethnicity. Next, we validated the top DEG signatures using an AA vs EA patient cohort dataset as well as in silico validation using The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA) database. For each miRNA, functional analysis was performed using miRBase datasets and mRNA-miRNA pairs and binding sites were predicted by TargetScan. Finally, IPA (Ingenuity Pathway Analysis) was performed to identify key regulators and downstream effects on biological and disease processes based on the expression patterns of DEGs. Results: We identified distinct mRNA and miRNA expression signatures associated with aggressive vs. non-aggressive PCa of EA vs. AA origin. The top DEGs that were associated with patient survival (p< 0.0001), stratified by Gleason scores, were PLAU, TGFB1, SERPINE1, MET, TIPM1, ITGA3, SERPINB5, PLAUR, MMPs, CDKN1A, and IGF1. The transporter genes SLC25A, SLC16A, and ABCB6 were also identified as important markers of aggressiveness. Notably, PLAU, MCAM, MET, TIMP1 were top DEGs in AA vs EA cell lines while SERPINE1 and MCAM were DEGs in AA vs EA patient cohort. IPA identified the activation of the angiogenesis pathway as a crucial factor for cancer aggressiveness. Top predicted miRNA-mRNA pairs included SERPINE1-let7, PLAU- mir181 which potentially influence differential gene expression in late-stage cancers. Finally, our immunoblotting results confirmed the protein expression changes of top DEGs. Next, we plan to perform CRISPR-based gene editing to functionally validate the molecular (mRNA/miRNA) signatures. Conclusion: An -omics-based approach was used to identify genetic signatures that provide insights into the molecular basis of PCa aggressiveness between men of EA vs AA ancestry. We believe this strategy will aid in developing effective targeted ethnicity-specific personalized treatment schedules for aggressive forms of PCa. This promises to address the known health disparity that is observed in AA men. Citation Format: Taraswi Mitra Ghosh, Jason White, Suman Mazumder, Joshua Davis, Grace Hurley, Brian Cummings, Gary Piazza, Amit K Mitra, Clayton Yates, Robert Arnold. Identification of distinct mRNA & microRNA signatures and mRNA-miRNA pairs associated with inter-ethnic differences in prostate cancer aggressiveness [abstract]. In: Proceedings of the AACR Virtual Conference: 14th AACR Conference on the Science of Cancer Health Disparities in Racial/Ethnic Minorities and the Medically Underserved; 2021 Oct 6-8. Philadelphia (PA): AACR; Cancer Epidemiol Biomarkers Prev 2022;31(1 Suppl):Abstract nr PO-126.

Background: Asthma is one of the most common conditions requiring admission to a pediatric intensive care unit. Dosing and weaning medications, particularly bronchodilators, are highly variable, and evidence-based weaning algorithms for clinicians are lacking in this setting. Methods: Patients admitted to a quaternary pediatric intensive care unit diagnosed with acute severe asthma were evaluated for time spent receiving continuous albuterol therapy, the length of stay in the intensive unit care unit, and the length of stay in the hospital. We developed an asthma pathway and continuous bronchodilator weaning algorithm to be used by bedside nurses. We then implemented two major Plan-Do-Study-Act cycles to facilitate the use of the pathway. They included implementing the algorithm and then integrating it as a clinical decision support tool in the electronic medical record. We used standard statistics and quality improvement methodology to analyze results. Results: One-hundred twenty-six patients met inclusion criteria during the study period, with 32 during baseline collection, 60 after weaning algorithm development and implementation, and 34 after clinical decision support implementation. Using quality improvement methodology, hours spent receiving continuous albuterol decreased from a mean of 43.6 to 28.6 hours after clinical decision support development. There were no differences in length of stay using standard statistics and QI methodology. Conclusion: Protocolized asthma management in the intensive care unit setting utilizing a multidisciplinary approach and clinical decision support tools for bedside nursing can reduce time spent receiving continuous albuterol and may lead to improved patient outcomes.

Prospero’s renunciation of his book in The Tempest acknowledges its power as a kind of ‘fetish’. This essay traces the idea of the book as ‘commodity fetish’ and as material text. The argument examines how post-Marxist thought, in a new reading of Louis Althusser, might be used to challenge the Shakespeare of late capitalism. It suggests how a complex reading of the fetish in historiography, combining a history of the material book in Shakespeare, with a theoretical reading of William Pietz, Stephen Greenblatt and Peter Stallybrass, sheds light on the First Folio, one of the most famous – and fetishized – books in history.