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The objective of this study was to compare the effects of isradipine and placebo on blood pressure (BP) at the end of the dosing interval (‘trough'). Following a three-week placebo period, 187 patients who had previously shown a response to treatment with isradipine (based on office BP measurements) were randomized to double-blind treatment with 2.5 mg isradipine twice daily or placebo for six weeks. Four of these patients withdrew from the study during the double-blind phase because of adverse events (one taking isradipine and three taking placebo). Blood pressure during the double-blind study was always measured 12 h after drug administration (trough values). The rate of normalization [defined as diastolic BP (DBP) ≤ 90 mm Hg] was 52/96 (54%) in the isradipine-treated group compared with 30/87 (33%) in the placebo group. A further 12/96 (12%) patients taking isradipine showed a fall in DBP of ≥ 10 mm Hg, although their DBP was still not < 90 mm Hg, compared with 5/87 (6%) patients receiving placebo. This difference was statistically significant (P = .003). Thus, isradipine in a dose of 2.5 mg twice daily lowers blood pressure over 24 h. Am J Hypertens 1991;4:131S-134S

This article reconstructs the Birmingham civil rights mass meetings of 1963 as one setting for reengaging the theoretical tensions between canonized and marginalized rhetorics. I consider how Ralph Abernathy's May 3rd speech epitomizes one way blacks used religious oratory to destabilize the boundaries that proponents of standardized writing have traditionally attributed to African-American discursive strategies. After summarizing the history of the mass meetings from Montgomery to Birmingham, I advance the claim that during his speech Abernathy functions as a folk preacher and a “revisionist historian.”

This article focuses on Fred Shuttlesworth, founder and president of the Alabama Christian Movement for Human Rights and the one who convinced Martin Luther King Jr. to participate in the Birmingham civil rights campaign of 1963. A folksy preacher and an exceptional leader, the article examines his use of the precept hermeneutic in his rhetoric. Like King, Shuttlesworth falls within the African American jeremiad tradition of David Walker, Frederick Douglass, and Sojourner Truth. Unlike King, the author argues, Shuttlesworth utilizes the precept hermeneutic to repudiate segregation but not simply because of his fundamentalist worldview; he deployed this form of exegesis to foreground larger principles of progressive patriotism, religious activism, and racial egalitarianism. As a result, Shuttlesworth constructs a rhetorical strategy that, drawing upon a canonized view of scripture, paradoxically deconstructs, disrupts, and dismantles canonized perspectives on racial, religious, national and international identities.

This essay blends critical race theory and Eduardo Bonilla-Silva's sociological theory of color-blind racism to interrogate color-blind rhetoric. It uses the Kennedy–Nixon Presidential Debates as a site that, while illustrating the widely presumed duplicitous nature of political discourse, paradoxically romanticizes and concretizes the concepts of freedom and equality as race-neutral categories. Tracing the term “color blindness” to the Plessy Versus Ferguson case, the paper exposes the rhetorical and material limitations of legal language, from the Brown Versus the Board of Education decision to current controversies surrounding affirmative action, which advocate race neutrality rather than progressive color consciousness.

A total of 190 patients (mean age 57 years; range 21 to 89 years), with a supine diastolic blood pressure (sDBP) of 100 to 120 mm Hg after a 3-week placebo phase, entered a double-blind parallel-group study to receive placebo (n = 62), or slow-release isradipine (SRO) at 2.5 mg (n = 64) or 5 mg (n = 64) once daily for 4 weeks. Blood pressure was always measured between 23.5 and 24.5 h after the previous drug administration. Before and after the 4-week treatment period, blood pressure profiles were recorded from measurements taken immediately before drug administration ('trough') and repeated at 2, 4, 6, and 8 h after administration. A 'peak:trough' ratio was assessed from the data of 156 patients who completed the 4 weeks of active treatment, and for whom blood pressure profiles were available both before and after treatment. A supine DBP ofor = 90 mm Hg at trough was achieved by 28%, 35%, and 47% of patients receiving placebo, 2.5 mg, and 5 mg SRO, respectively. If patients who achieved a reduction in sDBP of at least 10 mm Hg are included, the total response rate becomes 42%, 66%, and 61% in the three treatment groups, respectively. The reduction in sDBP immediately before drug administration (trough effect) was 37% of the 'peak' effect (6 h after administration) with the 2.5-mg dose and 74% with the 5-mg dose. Adverse events were reported by 14.5%, 9.4%, and 17.2% of patients taking placebo and SRO at 2.5 mg and 5 mg, respectively.(ABSTRACT TRUNCATED AT 250 WORDS)

We report the results of an intervention in a high-risk surgical patient undergoing rotational atherectomy in a bifurcating lesion. The use of fractional flow reserve (FFR) was especially helpful due to the inability to visualize clearly the angiographic anatomy both before and following intervention.

In the critically acclaimed movie 8-Mile, Future, a host for the rap battles held in a Detroit neighborhood, proffers the above encouragement to his charge, an aspiring white rapper, played by recording sensation Eminem. Aside from the connections, real and imagined, between the emergence of Bunny-Rab bit, the character Eminem portrays, and his actual rise in the hip-hop community, the movie evokes a number of interesting quandaries about discursive strategies? voices historically ascribed to and inscribed by African Americans. Facets of Eminem's language appear to resonate with that of African American rappers, not to mention the larger oral tradition from which hip-hop discourse derives, though his existen tial experience surrounding that language cannot. Moreover, rappers speak of neigh borhoods plagued by economic disenfranchisement, disenfranchisement that some whites, like Eminem, have experienced as well. Still, Future's exhortation raises at least two questions: can a language performer (irrespective of genre) of one race truly participate in the discursive community of another? Given the material op pression that has accompanied the socially constructed denigration of African phe notypic features, can the sound of blackness be ultimately divorced from the sight of blackness?1