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Study design Case report. Background Postpartum low back and hip dysfunction may be caused by an incomplete recovery of abdominal musculature and impaired neuromuscular control. The purpose of this report is to describe the management of a postpartum runner with hip and low back pain through exercise training via ultrasound imaging (USI) biofeedback combined with running-form modification. Case description A postpartum runner with hip and low back pain underwent dynamic lumbar stabilization training with USI biofeedback and running-form modification to reduce mechanical loading. Muscle thickness of transversus abdominis and internal oblique was measured with USI preintervention and 7 weeks after completion of the intervention. Additionally, 3-dimensional lower extremity joint motions, moments, and powers were calculated during treadmill running. Outcomes The patient's pain with running decreased from a constant 9/10 (0, no pain; 10, worst pain) to an occasional 3/10 posttreatment. Transversus abdominis muscle thickness increased 6.3% during the abdominal drawing-in maneuver and 27.0% during the abdominal drawing-in maneuver with straight leg raise. Changes were also noted in the internal oblique. These findings corresponded to improved lumbopelvic control: pelvic list and axial rotation during running decreased 38% and 36%, respectively. The patient's running volume returned to preinjury levels (8.1-9.7 km, 3 days per week) with no hip pain and minimal low back pain, and she successfully completed her goal of running a half-marathon. Discussion The successful outcomes of this case support the consideration of dynamic lumbar stabilization exercises, USI biofeedback, and running-form modification in postpartum runners with lumbopelvic dysfunction. Level of evidence Therapy, level 4.

Le mouvement féminin en Syrie s’est constitué sous le mandat français (1920-1946) comme une force politique autonome et originale. Malgré le faible nombre de femmes impliquées et son échec à obtenir le droit de vote féminin, il participa à une redéfinition du jeu et de la culture politique en Syrie. Les méthodes féminines de mobilisation collective et populaire réclamant des réformes furent pionnières. Leurs revendications sociales devinrent centrales dans l’arène politique. Jusqu’en 1946, elles contribuèrent à l’émergence d’un État-providence de type colonial en Syrie garant des droits légaux fondamentaux des travailleurs, des femmes et des familles. The women's movement in Syria emerged during the years of the French mandate (1920-1946) as an autonomous and innovative political force. Despite its small size, and despite its failure to win women the right to vote, it helped to reshape Syrian political culture. Women pioneered methods of collective and popular mobilization to demand reforms from the state. They also moved social issues and the demand for social rights to the center of the political arena. By 1946 they had helped to build a colonial variant of the welfare state in Syria that guaranteed fundamental legal rights to workers, women and families.

It is remarkable that the conceptual framework of public and private spheres has never dominated Middle Eastern women’s history. Given the media’s sensationalist fascination with Muslim women’s veils, one might have expected a vigorous scholarly critique of its simplistic dichotomies of public and private. While much has certainly been written about the current revival of veiling in Middle East, little has been written on the historical contexts that have defined the meaning of those veils. There has thus been virtually no debate about the usefulness of the terms “private” and “public” in defining those contexts. Why this suprising lacuna? It may simply reflect the thin ranks of historians who specialize in the Middle East. It also likely reflects postcolonial scholars’ general distrust of terms that carry the baggage of Western imperial hegemony. As Europeanists have also acknowledged, Habermasian public and private spheres are historically contingent categories that do not travel well through European history, much less the histories of other regions. So the lacuna may be a healthy sign that scholars of the Middle East have avoided normative European categories that might distort local experience. But avoidance may also incur steep costs to historical understanding. First, by not interrogating the terms public and private directly, scholars are unable to check their misuse—for the terms are widely used by non-specialists in contemporary debates about modernity, democracy, women’s status, and Islamic morality in the region. Second, rejection of universal categories in favor of localist terminology may encourage the cultural exceptionalism and essentialism that revisionist and feminist historians have sought to combat. A purely local focus denies the reality of transnational historical experience. This essay therefore argues, in likely contrast to others in this retrospective, for more extensive experimentation with public and private as lenses of historical analysis. It is only through the direct interrogation of the concepts in local historical contexts, and through direct scholarly debate about their merits, that we may succeed in redefining them in truly universal terms or in identifying new conceptual frameworks that foster comparative and transnational historical understanding. As a step toward that goal, this essay examines the tentative and often unexamined uses of the terms “public” and “private” in historical studies of gender boundaries in the Middle East. It aims to tease out areas of consensus and debate

Nicotine metabolism influences smoking behavior and differences in metabolism probably contribute to ethnic variability in lung cancer risk. We report here on the proportion of nicotine metabolism by cytochrome P450 2A6-catalyzed C-oxidation, UDP-glucuronosyl transferase 2B10 (UGT2B10)-catalyzed N-glucuronidation and flavin monooxygenase 3-catalyzed N-oxidation in five ethnic/racial groups and the role of UGT2B10 genotype on the metabolic patterns observed. Nicotine and its metabolites were quantified in urine from African American (AA, n = 364), Native Hawaiian (NH, n = 311), White (n = 437), Latino (LA, n = 453) and Japanese American (JA, n = 674) smokers. Total nicotine equivalents, the sum of nicotine and six metabolites, and nicotine metabolism phenotypes were calculated. The relationship of UGT2B10 genotype to nicotine metabolic pathways was determined for each group; geometric means were computed and adjusted for age, sex, creatinine, and body mass index. Nicotine metabolism patterns were unique across the groups, C-oxidation was lowest in JA and NH (P < 0.0001), and N-glucuronidation lowest in AA (P < 0.0001). There was no difference in C-oxidation among Whites and AA and LA. Nicotine and cotinine glucuronide ratios were 2- and 3-fold lower in AA compared with Whites. Two UGT variants, a missense mutation (Asp67Tyr, rs61750900) and a splice variant (rs116294140) accounted for 33% of the variation in glucuronidation. In AA, the splice variant accounted for the majority of the reduced nicotine glucuronidation. UGT2B10 variant allele carriers had increased levels of C-oxidation (P = 0.0099). Our data indicate that the relative importance of nicotine metabolic pathways varies by ethnicity, and all pathways should be considered when characterizing the role of nicotine metabolism on smoking behavior and cancer risk.

Given limits of time and space, I offer here an appraisal of what I see to be an important new trend: a number of scholars across disciplines and generations have taken what we have learned from the era of deconstructionist cultural analysis in the past twenty-five years and inaugurated an era of “reconstruction.” Some have moved beyond the “cultural turn” to consider how cultural forms of power interact with other forms of power—social, economic, political. They are finding new answers to the question, “How did colonialism matter?” Others have taken the next step, to reconstruct a new language of historical analysis free from Eurocentric assumptions of difference and superiority.

The reader plunges into the whirlwind of revolution in this study of the satirical press that circulated after the Young Turks reinstated the Ottoman constitution in 1908. The brave new world depicted in the more than one hundred cartoons reprinted in this work is headed in unknown and often paradoxical directions: we see starving peasants confront fur-coated revolutionaries; dragon-headed despots leading Lady Liberty by the arm; cadaverous cholera victims patrolling the streets; and a woman steering an airplane above the revolutionary city of the future. The 1908 revolution will never look quite the same to readers familiar with the (still scant) treatment of the subject in the English language. Palmira Brummett addresses her innovative study not only to revisionist historians of the late Ottoman period, but also to a wider community of scholars interested in the history of publishing and the construction of identity in the Middle East, Europe, and elsewhere.

The year 1844–45 in Damascus province was a dry one, aggravated by a brutal winter frost. Reports of ruined crops and disputes over precious water sources reached the city, where as yet there was still enough to eat. But the city was by no means immune to the drought. It was felt in varying ways, like rising prices and, of all things, a shortage of leeches. Barbers could not get enough of them to meet medical needs, and their prices had risen sharply. So the barbers began smuggling them. An Ottoman market official (mültazim), on noticing that government leech sales for that month had dropped from 45,000 to 7,000, ordered police (tüfenkçi) to confiscate the creatures from barbershops and sold them himself for profit. Conflict between the official and barbers exploded, and each side made its way, as rural peasants and tax collectors had in the crisis, to the ultimate court of appeal in the province, theMajlis Shūrā al-Shām al-ʿAlī, or high advisory council for Damascus province.

two explanations, but given the few pages dedicated to the possibility that it was a real leopard that did it, his implicit choice is clear. That this issue is not discussed explicitly is one of the few weak points of the book. What do we know about real leopards—the author calls them “bush” or “wild” leopards for unexplained reasons—in Nigeria during this period? Is it likely that one man-eater killed about 200 people in a few years’ time? Individual leopards did kill large numbers of people in India around 1900, but there is no reliable evidence that leopards ever killed people in Java, something that was probably related to differences in size. Elsewhere (p. 315) it is mentioned that only children were killed in a number of leopard attacks in the same region in the late 1940s. If that can be generalized, obviously real leopards cannot have been responsible for the deaths of all the adults among the 200 victims. As government was paying out rewards for leopards killed, there are probably statistics somewhere showing how many leopards were killed annually and how many humans were killed by leopards. Another weak point of the book is that the author is not always able to prove that all the political, economic, and social changes that he deals with at length really played a role in the killings, assuming for the moment that almost all murders had been committed by men thinly disguised as leopards. For instance, much is made of the manilla-shilling rate of exchange, but the author does have to admit that he does not know how exactly these pressures affected the man-leopard murders (p. 260). Something similar applies to the changing rules regarding bride-price refunds; the author states that the courts favored wife-takers over wife-givers, but he gives various examples of the opposite (pp. 246–251). However, these are really minor points given how much this well-researched and well-written book, a felicitous combination of historical and anthropological research, has to offer.