From the softest caress to the harshest blow, touch lies at the heart of our experience of the world. Now, for the first time, this deepest of senses is the subject of an extensive historical ...exploration. The Deepest Sense: A Cultural History of Touch fleshes out our understanding of the past with explorations of lived experiences of embodiment from the Middle Ages to modernity. This intimate and sensuous approach to history makes it possible to foreground the tactile foundations of Western culture--the ways in which feelings shaped society._x000B__x000B_Constance Classen explores a variety of tactile realms including the feel of the medieval city; the tactile appeal of relics; the social histories of pain, pleasure, and affection; the bonds of touch between humans and animals; the strenuous excitement of sports such as wrestling and jousting; and the sensuous attractions of consumer culture. She delves into a range of vital issues, from the uses--and prohibitions--of touch in social interaction to the disciplining of the body by the modern state, from the changing feel of the urban landscape to the technologization of touch in modernity._x000B__x000B_Through poignant descriptions of the healing power of a medieval king's hand or the grueling conditions of a nineteenth-century prison, we find that history, far from being a dry and lifeless subject, touches us to the quick.
It is a commonly held belief that medieval Catholics were focussed on the 'bells and whistles' of religious practices, the smoke, images, sights and sounds that dazzled pre-modern churchgoers. ...Protestantism, in contrast, has been cast as Catholicism's austere, intellective and less sensual rival sibling. With iis white-washed walls, lack of incense (and often music) Protestantism worship emphasised preaching and scripture, making the new religion a drab and disengaged sensual experience. In order to challenge such entrenched assumptions, this book examines Tudor views on the senses to create a new lens through which to explore the English Reformation. Divided into two sections, the book begins with an examination of pre-Reformation beliefs and practices, establishing intellectual views on the senses in fifteenth-century England, and situating them within their contemporary philosophical and cultural tensions. Having established the parameters for the role of sense before the Reformation, the second half of the book mirrors these concerns in the post-1520 world, looking at how, and to what degree, the relationship between religious practices and sensation changed as a result of the Reformation. By taking this long-term, binary approach, the study is able to tackle fundamental questions regarding the role of the senses in late-medieval and early modern English Christianity. By looking at what English men and women thought about sight, hearing, smell, taste and touch, the stereotype that Protestantism was not sensual, and that Catholicism was overly sensualised is wholly undermined. Through this examination of how worship was transformed in its textual and liturgical forms, the book illustrates how English religion sought to reflect changing ideas surrounding the senses and their place in religious life. Worship had to be 'sensible', and following how reformers and their opponents built liturgy around experience of the sacred through the physical allows us to tease out the tensions and pressures which shaped religious reform.
Dr Matthew Milner is a Postdoctoral Fellow in Early Modern Studies and Digital Humanities at McGill University, Canada
Contents: Introduction: towards thinking about sensation in Tudor religion; The senses and sensing in 15th-century England; Religiosity and sensing in pre-Reformation England; The senses and worship: provision for liturgy in late-medieval England; Sensing pre-Reformation English liturgy; Sensory landscapes of Reformation England; Perception, polity, and gostly thynges in Reformation England; Sensible reformation in mid-Tudor England; Sensing and worship in Elizabethan England; Epilogue; Bibliography; Index.
Patients undergoing radiation therapy for the head and neck are susceptible to a significant and often abrupt deterioration in their oral health. The oral morbidities of radiation therapy include but ...are not limited to an increased susceptibility to dental caries and periodontal disease. They also include profound and often permanent functional and sensory changes involving the oral soft tissue. These changes range from oral mucositis experienced during and soon after treatment, mucosal opportunistic infections, neurosensory disorders, and tissue fibrosis. Many of the oral soft tissue changes following radiation therapy are difficult challenges to the patients and their caregivers and require life‐long strategies to alleviate their deleterious effect on basic life functions and on the quality of life. We discuss the presentation, prognosis, and management strategies of the dental structure and oral soft tissue morbidities resulting from the administration of therapeutic radiation in head and neck patient. A case for a collaborative and integrated multidisciplinary approach to the management of these patients is made, with specific recommendation to include knowledgeable and experienced oral health care professionals in the treatment team.
Oral complications of radiation therapy to the head and neck can result in acute and long‐term deterioration in oral soft tissues and dentition. The presentation, prognosis, and strategies to manage the dental and nondental morbidities of radiation therapy to the head and neck are discussed in this manuscript.
fall-related injuries constitute major health risks in older individuals, and these risks are projected to increase in parallel with increasing human longevity. Impaired postural stability is a ...potential risk factor related to falls, although the evidence is inconclusive, partly due to the lack of prospective studies. This study aimed to investigate how objective measures of postural sway predict incident falls.
this prospectively observational study included 1,877 community-dwelling individuals aged 70 years who participated in the Healthy Ageing Initiative between June 2012 and December 2015.
postural sway was measured during eyes-open (EO) and eyes-closed (EC) trials using the Wii Balance Board. Functional mobility, muscle strength, objective physical activity and cognitive performance were also measured. Participants reported incident falls 6 and 12 months after the examination.
during follow-up, 255 (14%) prospective fallers were identified. Division of centre of pressure (COP) sway lengths into quintiles revealed a nonlinear distribution of falls for EO trial data, but not EC trial data. After adjustment for multiple confounders, fall risk was increased by 75% for participants with COP sway lengths ≥400 mm during the EO trial (odds ratio OR 1.75, 95% confidence interval CI 1.09-2.79), and approximately doubled for sway lengths ≥920 mm during the EC trial (OR 1.90, 95% CI 1.12-3.22).
objective measures of postural sway independently predict incident falls in older community-dwelling men and women. Further studies are needed to evaluate whether postural sway length is of interest for the prediction of incident falls in clinical settings.
The body economic Gallagher, Catherine
2006., 20090110, 2009, 2005, 2006-01-01
eBook
The Body Economic revises the intellectual history of nineteenth-century Britain by demonstrating that political economists and the writers who often presented themselves as their literary ...antagonists actually held most of their basic social assumptions in common. Catherine Gallagher demonstrates that political economists and their Romantic and early-Victorian critics jointly relocated the idea of value from the realm of transcendent spirituality to that of organic "life," making human sensations--especially pleasure and pain--the sources and signs of that value. Classical political economy, this book shows, was not a mechanical ideology but a form of nineteenth-century organicism, which put the body and its feelings at the center of its theories, and neoclassical economics built itself even more self-consciously on physiological premises. The Body Economic explains how these shared views of life, death, and sensation helped shape and were modified by the two most important Victorian novelists: Charles Dickens and George Eliot. It reveals how political economists interacted crucially with the life sciences of the nineteenth century--especially with psychophysiology and anthropology--producing the intellectual world that nurtured not only George Eliot's realism but also turn-of-the-century literary modernism.
Neuronal and sensory toxicity of mercury (Hg) compounds has been largely investigated in humans/mammals with a focus on public health, while research in fish is less prolific and dispersed by ...different species. Well-established premises for mammals have been governing fish research, but some contradictory findings suggest that knowledge translation between these animal groups needs prudence e.g. the relative higher neurotoxicity of methylmercury (MeHg) vs. inorganic Hg (iHg). Biochemical/physiological differences between the groups (e.g. higher brain regeneration in fish) may determine distinct patterns. This review undertakes the challenge of identifying sensitive cellular targets, Hg-driven biochemical/physiological vulnerabilities in fish, while discriminating specificities for Hg forms.
A functional neuroanatomical perspective was conceived, comprising: (i) Hg occurrence in the aquatic environment; (ii) toxicokinetics on central nervous system (CNS)/sensory organs; (iii) effects on neurotransmission; (iv) biochemical/physiological effects on CNS/sensory organs; (v) morpho-structural changes on CNS/sensory organs; (vi) behavioral effects. The literature was also analyzed to generate a multidimensional conceptualization translated into a Rubik’s Cube where key factors/processes were proposed.
Hg neurosensory toxicity was unequivocally demonstrated. Some correspondence with toxicity mechanisms described for mammals (mainly at biochemical level) was identified. Although the research has been dispersed by numerous fish species, 29 key factors/processes were pinpointed.
Future trends were identified and translated into 25 factors/processes to be addressed. Unveiling the neurosensory toxicity of Hg in fish has a major motivation of protecting ichtyopopulations and ecosystems, but can also provide fundamental knowledge to the field of human neurodevelopment.
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•Neurological disruptions of iHg and oHg were unequivocally demonstrated in fish.•A hexa-dimensional conceptualization of neuronal/sensorial toxicity was conceived.•29 key factors/processes driving the Hg neuronal/sensorial toxicity were recognized.•Futures trends were identified and translated into 25 key factors/processes.•Knowledge translation of the mechanisms from mammals to fish needs prudence.
Abstract With the growing awareness of the presence of non-motor symptoms in Parkinson's disease (PD) has come the realization that these non-motor features play a tremendously important, and ...sometimes dominant, role in the management and even the diagnosis of the disorder. Despite this, a reluctance to formally address and treat the non-motor symptoms of PD remains and quality of life for PD patients suffers. This review provides an overview of the impact non-motor symptoms have on persons with PD, along with a brief description of some of the more common non-motor features of PD.
Neuroscience Fundamentals for Communication Sciences and Disorders, Second Edition is a comprehensive textbook primarily designed for undergraduate neural bases or graduate neuroscience courses in ...communication sciences and disorders programs (CSD). The text can also be used as an accessible go-to reference for speech-language pathology and audiology clinical professionals practicing in medical and rehab settings. Written with an engaging and conversational style, the author uses humor and analogies to explain concepts that are often challenging for students. Complemented by more than 400 visually rich and beautifully drawn full-color illustrations, the book emphasizes brain and behavior relationships while also ensuring coverage of essential neuroanatomy and neurophysiology in an integrative fashion. With a comprehensive background in the principles, processes, and structures underlying the workings of the human nervous system, students and practitioners alike will be able to better understand and apply brain-behavior relationships to make appropriate clinical assessments and treatment decisions.
The sensation of pressure allows us to feel sustained compression and body strain. While our understanding of cutaneous touch has grown significantly in recent years, how deep tissue sensations are ...detected remains less clear. Here, we use quantitative sensory evaluations of patients with rare sensory disorders, as well as nerve blocks in typical individuals, to probe the neural and genetic mechanisms for detecting non-painful pressure. We show that the ability to perceive innocuous pressures is lost when myelinated fiber function is experimentally blocked in healthy volunteers and that two patients lacking Aβ fibers are strikingly unable to feel innocuous pressures at all. We find that seven individuals with inherited mutations in the mechanoreceptor PIEZO2 gene, who have major deficits in touch and proprioception, are nearly as good at sensing pressure as healthy control subjects. Together, these data support a role for Aβ afferents in pressure sensation and suggest the existence of an unknown molecular pathway for its detection.
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