Suchergebnisse

Summary
By using both static or normative documents (licenses, official regulations, barber-surgeon's manuals) and more dynamic sources (trials of the Protomedicato), my presentation asks what was an expert on skin diseases in early modern Italy and how the loose category of "skin diseases" came into being under the influence of medical theory, surgical practice, patient demand, and civic regulation of medical practice. I argue that by the late seventeenth century "skin disease" became an independent category, the surface of the body an independent object, and the empiric surgeon an expert of such surface. As human skin as a surface acquired autonomy as an object of knowledge and practice, a class of experts emerged following a path which is in large measure independent from the transformations of Galenic theoretical medicine and the rise of mechanistic medicine which are typically described as central in this period. I argue that empirical surgeons and barber-surgeons became experts on skin through the licensing system and by inverting the classical path of medical knowledge – not from the inner body to its surface as manifestation of internal humoral imbalances, but rather from the surface to the knowledge and the treatment of the inner body.

Economic inequality has increased in many EU countries in the last decades. Yet, efforts assessing economic disparities across the EU regions mostly concentrate on convergence in average per capita incomes, offering little evidence on how regional income is distributed. Using data from Luxembourg Income Study (LIS) over the 1989-2013 period, this study contributes to fill this gap, focussing on whether there has been convergence of income inequality among EU regions, and on to what extent regional initial conditions and the Cohesion Policy funds affect the convergence process. Cross-section and panel convergence regressions, after a number of robustness checks, offer three findings. First, NUTS2 regions are converging to higher level of income inequality, so becoming equally more unequal. Second, this process is significantly faster when regions share similar structural characteristics, such as similar levels of governance quality. Finally, in regions eligible for Cohesion Policy funds the pace of inequality convergence has been significantly faster, suggesting therefore that they may be driving the convergence process. ; Revised in December 2020