The history of tuberculosis sanatoria in North America is in some instances well researched, but a gap in this knowledge concerns the first institution in Canada dedicated solely to the prevention of impending tuberculosis. The institution admitted mainly persons from the poorer social strata of metropolitan Montréal who had not yet been recognized. This institution was the “Brehmer Rest Preventorium”, which opened in 1905 in the mountain village of Sainte-Agathe-des-Monts, Québec. It was the first institution of its kind in North America and thus prototypical (also the first which took in women and children). The facility in the Laurentides was named after Hermann Brehmer (1826-1889), a Silesian physician who opened Europe’s first pulmonary sanatorium in 1854, curing patients at high altitude according to an often-copied dietary-psychological treatment concept. The Canadian physician Arthur Richer (1868-1922) was a visitor (and presumably a patient) at his institution and took Brehmer’s ideas back to Québec. The structure of this first preventorium still exists today.

This is a survey of the early publications by Aurel Babeş (alone or together with Constantin Daniel) and by George Papanicolaou on the cytologic method for cervical cancer diagnosis, against the background of the 19th and early 20th century history of the tension between histopathology and cytopathology aims to add a new dimension to a priority dispute.

This paper describes the potentials of a retrospective visualization of data from a standard encyclopedia of NS-historiography that so far has only been available in printed form. Stephanie Bujak and Klaus Hentschel pursue the goal of creating geo-temporal maps from a text-based data corpus that has been available for some time – the “Handbuch deutschsprachiger Emigration” – applying analysis and visualization techniques from the digital humanities. These maps provide a quick overview of the scale and direction of emigration flows from German-speaking countries after 1933 for a wide variety of people and occupational groups. In this article, professionals in the humanities and social sciences, the clergy, and politics are selected as examples. The maps of emigration routes were created with the web-based visualization tool “Palladio”, which can display points as well as routes on global maps. These connecting lines between points of origin, transit, and destination visualize the geographic transfers (for many emigrants often multiple ones) recorded as locations and times only in texts or tables. In addition to this general overview, “Palladio” maps also provide the option to filter intelligently and examine geo-temporally the implemented data according to various criteria.

The French clergyman Gerbert of Aurillac, later to become Pope Sylvester II, is said to have represented all numbers with only “nine symbols” on his abacus and is therefore regarded as the one who brought the Arabic numerals to Europe. In his own writings, however, he only used the Roman numerals. Early illustrations of Arabic numerals appear in Europe around the year 1000 in the Abacus treatise of Bernelinus of Paris, who was probably a pupil of Gerbert. In two manuscripts of his “Liber abaci” the number “3” is displayed in a peculiar shape, reminiscent of the sign for “three” in Roman shorthand. Since Gerbert used this shorthand, the sign in question could be an indication of his role in the introduction of the new numbers. In the further course of the study an attempt is made to retrace the possible course of the transmission of Arabic numerals from Muslim Spain to Europe.

Numerous fragments of ancient Greek medical writings otherwise lost have been transmitted in the Byzantine medical compendia by Oribasius (4th cent. AD), Aetius (6th cent. AD) and Paul of Aegina (7th cent. AD). Sometimes, in the compendia by Oribasius and Aetius one single chapter heading does not only indicate one, but two sources, using formulae like “from Antyllus and Heliodorus”. As these double quotations have been misunderstood in the past, this paper attempts to examine their exact meaning by considering all available data, e. g. scholia with author indications (the so-called R2 scholia in Oribasius), parallel Arabic versions of Greek texts and stylistic criteria. The result attained by this process is that in the Greek medical compendia double quotation formulae always indicate that the following chapter is a cento from different passages of the authors mentioned. This does not mean that the same text occurs in both authors or that there is a textual dependency between them, as it has been claimed in the past. Since, in general, changes of authors in such compound passages are either not completely marked by scholia or are not indicated at all, they can only be traced by means of a stylistic analysis and/or parallel (e. g. Arabic) versions of the text in question. The different approaches of identification are comprehensively discussed in the present paper. A comparison between parallel passages in Oribasius’ Medical Collections, the Eclogae and Aetius suggests that the R2scholia to Oribasius’ Medical Collections must have been written prior to Aetius’ lifetime (first half of the 6th century AD).

Contemporary philosophy of science places the origins of the predominant attributes of the term ‘gene’ in the year 1900 when Gregor Mendel’s work was rediscovered. After that, his phrase of discrete units of heredity, which he had developed on purely statistical and formal grounds, was replaced by that of morphologically definable and experimentally verifiable factors on chromosomes. Yet it was the speculative biology of the second half of the 19th century that opened up the epistemic sphere for a new conception of heredity: heredity as the transmission of particulate, hereditable material units with a tendency for self-preservation. This approach helped the then young discipline of biology get geared towards pure science with the aim of dissociating its terminology, which was deduced a priori, from the preconceptions of natural philosophy. In the early 20th century, the era of classical genetics, experimental systems were developed which, by means of experiments on model organisms, defined the hereditary particles, which had been speculatively assumed and the terminology for which had been developed in strict argumentations in the 19th century, more precisely and, in the 1940s, associated them with nucleic acid: physically detectable, material units without any final causality. They were said to be stable and, at the same time, mutable as well as capable of self-reproductivity, self-selectivity and memory. The term ‚code mechanism‘ paraphrases this dimension formerly unknown to physics. DNA epitomizes the perfect biological principle. The gene is declared the reason for the spontaneity and the specificity of organic matter. Still this concept includes components that have been framed by the biology of the 19th century. The most recent conception of the gene is not free from teleological anthropomorphisms. The sheer physical automatism gives the picture of molecular initial conditions that would contain the causes for the outcome of the development of the organism with all its variability, conceptualized by the term memory.

The son of a renowned Milan physician, the Italian physician, alchemist, prophet, and founder of a sect, Giuseppe Francesco Borri (1627–1695), was educated by Jesuits in Rome. After experiencing an epiphany of St. Michael he became a prophet and founded a sect. Persecuted by the inquisition and condemned to death, he fled to Strasbourg, later to Amsterdam, Hamburg and Copenhagen. In each place he started with the highest protection but was later expelled. On his last journey from Copenhagen to Istanbul he was taken captive in Austria and extradited by the Emperor to the Pope in Rome, where he died a prisoner. In Amsterdam Borri cut open the eye of a dog, expressed the lens together with the aqueous and vitreous, instilled a liquid and showed that the eye regained its shape and the humors were reformed. He later repeated his experiment in Copenhagen on a goose. Borri’s experiment was widely discussed by the 17th century scientific community, e.g. by Thomas Bartholin, Ole Borch [Olaus Borrichius], Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Johann Daniel Major and Theophile Bonet. In Copenhagen he also claimed that it was possible to aspirate the lens through a cannula, after mashing it up with a brush of metal wires, which was to be inserted into the eye through the cannula. Thus, Borri was one of the first to show that the three humours – aqueous, lens and vitreous – were not needed for seeing. He envisaged the techniques of small incision lens removal after intraocular lens destruction and of lens replacement by surgery, ideas that were realized 300 years later by Charles Kelman and Sir Harold Ridley.

Little is known about the people who suffered from toothache or other dental illnesses in the 19th century. This is, in part, due to the lack of sources describing individual experiences with such ailments. The patient journals of the homoeopath Clemens Maria Franz von Bönninghausen (1785–1864), who practiced in Münster in Westphalia between 1829 and 1864, offer the possibility of learning more about patients in the field of dental care and medicine. Whilst practising, Bönninghausen treated more than 27,000 patients. The entries he made about 14,266 of them were transcribed in a database which provides a rich source of information about the clientele the homoeopath had, their illnesses and their behaviour during medical treatment. 785 patients told the homoeopath that they had problems with their teeth. Some only vaguely said that they had some kind of ache, whilst others described pulling, stabbing, searing or even burning and itching sensations. The majority of these people also had tried other cures before. In some cases, teeth already had been pulled out without improving the situation. Therefore the entries in the patient journals are proof of the demand for dental care and treatment and the growing awareness of people towards their dental health. But during their search for a cure, they not only consulted the trained dentists who could, in most cases, only offer unsuccessful treatments. This clashed with the attempts by these trained specialists to improve their social status and professionalisation.

The anonymously transmitted Speculi almukefi compositio is one of the most original works that the Middle Ages brought out on conic sections and construction of parabolic mirrors. The author is suspected to have been an unknown monk of the 13^th/14^th century. Based on source documents that were previously left unconsidered, this article assigns the tract to the Venetian Johannes Fontana. The diversely interested doctor of arts and medicine practiced as a physician in Udine in the 1430s, a time during which he wrote about geometric subjects. The close relationship to practical application is typical for the scientist Fontana. It is expressed in an excursion on the conditions of a good steel. The rich text, still to be evaluated from a technical-historical point of view, is published here in a German translation for the first time.

This essay provides an overview of the scientific literature regarding the history of the Faculty of Medicine at the University of Wittenberg, Germany. The University of Wittenberg was the domain, where Martin Luther and Philipp Melanchton worked; in the 16th century it was one of the greatest universities of the Holy Roman Empire. There has been a controversial discussion on the history of the Faculty of Medicine since the mid-19th century. Since the 1980s, it is an accepted and studied field of research on its own. The various publications on the topic can be subdivided into three specific areas: 1. Reformation and medicine, 2. biographic works on professors of medicine, and 3. historical works regarding social and librarian fields of research. The results of those works can be interpreted and merged in view of the Faculty of Medicine. However, for a revalidation of the faculty's role within an European scientific scene further scrutiny of sources is needed.