Suchergebnisse

The history of polio in Italy is relatively short because the particular social and demographic history of the country has actually compressed the most dramatic history of the polio epidemic into only 40 years, from the first severe epidemic just before World War II to the early 1980s, when the epidemic vanished thanks to an effective and country-wide vaccination campaign. The epidemic, however, had a formidable impact on medicine, public health, social attitudes and culture. An analysis of this case study can illustrate the impact of an epidemic of a severe disease on individual and collective life, and at the same time the efficacy of public health measures against it, and the importance of the social structure, state and private, in coping with the consequences of the epidemics. In this period, the attitude towards the handicapped changed from stigma and isolation to social integration, thanks especially to the changes in health legislation, social action and the initiatives of the patient' associations.

The history of polio in Italy is relatively short because the particular social and demographic history of the country has actually compressed the most dramatic history of the polio epidemic into only 40 years, from the first severe epidemic just before World War II to the early 1980s, when the epidemic vanished thanks to an effective and country-wide vaccination campaign. The epidemic, however, had a formidable impact on medicine, public health, social attitudes and culture. An analysis of this case study can illustrate the impact of an epidemic of a severe disease on individual and collective life, and at the same time the efficacy of public health measures against it, and the importance of the social structure, state and private, in coping with the consequences of the epidemics. In this period, the attitude towards the handicapped changed from stigma and isolation to social integration, thanks especially to the changes in health legislation, social action and the initiatives of the patient' associations.

The Italian experience on the eradication of malaria is particularly significant, owing to the high endemicity of malaria in a large part of the territory of the newly formed Kingdom of Italy, the scientific level of the Italian research centres and medical structures, the efficacy of the legislative and institutional developments, the part played by the Italian School of Malariology (Bastianelli, Bignami, Celli, Fermi, Golgi, Grassi, Marchiafava, Missiroli, Raffaele) in the discovery of the transmission mechanisms and in the clarification of the ecology and epidemiology of malaria. A global approach, which combines the different antimalarial measures with the bettering of the sanitary structure and a constant activity of a high level of scientific and medical research is the key to understand the reason of the success of the antimalarial campaigns in Italy. Key words: Malaria - Endemicity - Antimalaria campaigns

Resentment has a history. Paintings such as Géricault's Le Radeau de La Méduse, nineteenth-century women's manifestos and WWI war photographs provide but a few examples to retrace the changing physiognomy of this emotion from the second half of the eighteenth century up to our contemporary society. The essays in this collection attempt to shed light on the historical evolution of this affective experience adopting the French Revolution as a ""gravitational force"", namely as a moment in which t

Looking at Open Science and Open Data from a broad perspective. This is the idea behind "Scientific data sharing: an interdisciplinary workshop", an initiative designed to foster dialogue between scholars from different scientific domains which was organized by the Istituto Italiano di Antropologia in Anagni, Italy, 2-4 September 2013.We here report summaries of the presentations and discussions at the meeting. They deal with four sets of issues: (i) setting a common framework, a general discussion of open data principles, values and opportunities; (ii) insights into scientific practices, a view of the way in which the open data movement is developing in a variety of scientific domains (biology, psychology, epidemiology and archaeology); (iii) a case study of human genomics, which was a trail-blazer in data sharing, and which encapsulates the tension that can occur between large-scale data sharing and one of the boundaries of openness, the protection of individual data; (iv) open science and the public, based on a round table discussion about the public communication of science and the societal implications of open science. There were three proposals for the planning of further interdisciplinary initiatives on open science. Firstly, there is a need to integrate top-down initiatives by governments, institutions and journals with bottom-up approaches from the scientific community. Secondly, more should be done to popularize the societal benefits of open science, not only in providing the evidence needed by citizens to draw their own conclusions on scientific issues that are of concern to them, but also explaining the direct benefits of data sharing in areas such as the control of infectious disease. Finally, introducing arguments from social sciences and humanities in the educational dissemination of open data may help students become more profoundly engaged with Open Science and look at science from a broader perspective.