Most authors who work with moral status automatically dismiss the possibility that plants are the kinds of entities that have moral status. This dismissal coheres with our intuitions about common-sense morality: if plants do not have moral status then we do not have any direct moral obligations to plant life. An implication of such a view is that any suggestion otherwise commits one to be in favour of an absurd conclusion. However, given the recent literature and empirical evidence on plant (...) minds, there are reasons to accept a different perspective that finds the absurd conclusion plausible. (shrink)

This essay explores a tragic event that happened in China, which garnered much attention, the Li case: a young woman who was nine months pregnant and her baby died as a result of the failure to receive a medically necessary c-section due to the hospital having failed to secure her family's consent for the c-section. Differing from some critiques, this essay argues that the Li case should not be used to blame the Confucian family-determination model that has been applied in (...) Chinese society for thousands of years. Based on summarizing the reasons supporting the model, this essay indicates that it is an integral part of the model that, in emergency or special cases, the physician must take medical action to save the patient, without the need to secure the consent of a family member. In order to prevent tragic cases like the Li case from happening, we recommend that relevant Chinese laws be further developed and specified and that, most importantly, Chinese physicians must cultivate the Confucian virtue of benevolence in their practice of taking care of patients in a virtuous way, along with patients’ families. (shrink)

We extend the work of Ivancovsky et al. by proposing that in addition to novelty seeking, mood regulation goals – including enhancing positive mood and repairing negative mood – motivate both creativity and curiosity. Additionally, we discuss how the effects of mood on state of mind are context-dependent (not fixed), and how such flexibility may impact creativity and curiosity.

Felix Klein classified geometries by their group structure. It is pointed out that a similar program has been in place for particle physics and canonical quantum mechanics.

The healthcare crisis that has developed in the last two decades during China's economic reform has caused healthcare and hospital financing reforms to be largely experienced by patients as a crisis in the patient–healthcare professional relationship (PPR) at the bedside. The nature and magnitude of this crisis were epitomized by the "Harbin Scandal"—an incident that took place in August 2005 in a Harbin teaching hospital in which the family of an elderly patient hospitalized in the intensive care unit (ICU) for (...) 66 days paid over RMB ¥6 million. The news was publicized globally and ended in the firing of six top hospital administrators including the hospital president and the ICU director. This paper seeks to show that the Chinese healthcare crisis is ultimately linked to a conflict of interests between patients and healthcare professionals (HCPs), which is inherent in the reformed healthcare system of China. Hence the crisis is, at its core, a crisis of fidelity and confidence that must be restored to the PPR. At the "macro" level, it is simplistic to blame the crisis on the failure of the market system, and at the "micro" level, it is naïve to expect that a contractual understanding of the PPR will effectively restore the confidence of patients. This paper will show that the fiduciary relationship and medical professionalism share similar attributes, with fidelity being the core value of both. It concludes that the loss of medical fidelity implies the dissolution of the PPR and the demise of the medical profession and challenges Chinese HCPs to keep their fidelity as a means to both protect their patients’ interests and to preserve their profession's survival. (shrink)

In R. C. Flickinger's (3rd ed. second impression 1929) we read on pp. 171In the iambic trimeters written by Aeschylus a trisyllabic substitution (tribrach, anapaest or dactyl) for the pure disyllabic iambus occurs only once in about twenty-five verses.Tragic Drama of the Greekstrimeters’ lines like.

Rare genetic diseases collectively impact millions of individuals in the United States. These patients and their families share many challenges including delayed diagnosis, lack of knowledgeable providers, and limited economic incentives to develop new therapies for small patient groups. As such, rare disease patients and families often must rely on advocacy, including both self-advocacy to access clinical care and public advocacy to advance research. However, these demands raise serious concerns for equity, as both care and research for a given disease (...) can depend on the education, financial resources, and social capital available to the patients in a given community. In this article, we utilize three case examples to illustrate ethical challenges at the intersection of rare diseases, advocacy and justice, including how reliance on advocacy in rare disease may drive unintended consequences for equity. We conclude with a discussion of opportunities for diverse stakeholders to begin to address these challenges. (shrink)

It has frequently been observed that the Prometheus Vinctus shows certain Sophoclean characteristics of rhythm. In order to vary the rhythm of his iambics and to avoid monotony, Sophocles often knits consecutive trimeters closely together by placing at the end of one line some word which looks forward to the next line, and so precludes the reader from stopping for the natural pause after the sixth foot. Sometimes he uses in this way subordinating words which introduce a dependent clause in (...) the next line ; sometimes proclitics or quasi-proclitics. (shrink)

A frequently recounted episode in early modern medicine concerns the physician Helvetius's introduction of ipecacuanha to French medical practice after curing Louis XIV's son of dysentery using this medicinal drug. To this day, the Helvetius story remains riven with contradictions, obscurity, and confusion, even down to the nature of the drug involved. This article, challenging histories of “information” as homogeneous and neutral, explores how Helvetius's reputation as a physician and pharmaceutical entrepreneur was crafted through print and correspondence. Rather than seeking (...) to establish a definitive account of “what actually happened,” it addresses the ways in which different media shaped and mediated the politics of knowledge surrounding Helvetius and his drug. Considerations of intellectual and commercial property inflected medical knowledge in different ways, producing distinct strategies of publicity. While Helvetius capitalized on courtly connections to promote himself and his drug, rivals eyed the Republic of Letters as an alternate route for establishing natural knowledge-claims. Yet the arch-newsmonger of the Republic of Letters, Leibniz, elected to preserve the connection between Helvetius and ipecacuanha in print. I argue that Leibniz's actions stemmed from a view of the public domain that downplayed discovery and emphasized disclosure of medical secrets in the public interest. (shrink)