Filiation: A Historical Term the COVID-19 Outbreak Recalled in Turkey (original) (raw)
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Erciyes Medical Journal, 2020
Originally derived from the Medieval Latin word, fīliātiō (from fīlius, son), filiation literally means paternity, descent-fromfather, or line of descent. Concerning medicine, however, it refers to the connection of things resulting from one another, or contact tracing. The core idea behind filiation as a measure of precaution against outbreaks is to prevent the disease by interrupting the chain of transmission with a systematical tracing and isolation of susceptible individuals having contact with any confirmed cases. Filiation became a widely used medical term in the first quarter of the 19th century, primarily in French medical literature, soon adapted to English and some other languages. In the Ottoman Empire, it appeared in medical journals in the 1850s, used primarily by some European physicians practicing in the country. As part of various measures that have been taken to tackle the current pandemic of COVID-19, the method of filiation was also recalled by the medical community. Soon after the observance of the first confirmed case of COVID-19 in Turkey on March 11, 2020, the index case and its contacts were identified and the Turkish Ministry of Health launched the procedures of filiation at a national level with ad-hoc medical teams established around the country. Aiming to shed light on the etymological and historical aspects of filiation, the current review discusses the concept based on original resources.
The Lineage of “Bloodlines”: Synecdoche, Metonymy, Medicine, and More
John Z. Wee, ed., The Comparable Body, 2017
Wittgenstein calls us to join the “fight against the fascination which forms of expression exert upon us.” I will de-naturalize two ancient figures, so pervasive in English, and in other European languages, that we use them without noticing. “Lifeblood” is a very ancient synecdoche, found in many cultures. “Bloodline,” a metonym for lineage, is quite distinct, and truly strange. We overlook the strangeness of “bloodline,” because it is so pervasive, and also perhaps seduced by the apparent “naturalness” of the first notion, “lifeblood.” Only two generations past did we learn that it is DNA that embodies physical heritage: before that, thinkers were pressed to discover, or invent, a material link. I show that the notion of “bloodline” is deeply weird, that it was constructed at a particular time and place, and that it regularly operates within an aristocratic and traditionalist discourse. The two figures, initially distinct, were blended within Greek conceptual space in various ways, and the resultant blend flowed into Latin discourse, and thence into European discourse generally. Over the centuries, the effects of the two ways of speaking, especially when blended, have generated ever more overt and political effects, and those increasingly baleful, so that our fight against the fascination of this blended form of expression becomes political.
Family and Family Relations at the Time of COVID-19: An Introduction
2020
They do not come from another planet and they are not born out of thin air. The perpetrators of the next pandemic are already among us, they are viruses that today affect animals but that could at any moment make a leap of species – a spillover in technical jargon – and also affect humans...’ These words, taken from a review, feature in the blurb for the Italian translation of David Quammen’s Spillover . Animal Infections and the Next Human Pandemic , published by Adelphi in 2014 two years after the original English edition. Given the experience that the whole world is currently living through, it may sound like a self-fulfilling prophecy has transformed the projections of the near or distant future in many science-fiction films into reality. Instead, though, the sentences actually lead us back to a distant past in antiquity and the Middle Ages when social isolation and distancing were adopted as measures to contain and fight the plague, a long-term epidemic that spread throughout E...
The seeds of disease: An explanation of contagion and infection from the Greeks to the Renaissance
Medical History, 1983
THE SEEDS OF DISEASE: AN EXPLANATION OF CONTAGION AND INFECTION FROM THE GREEKS TO THE RENAISSANCE by VIVIAN NUTTON* "AN interesting problem, to which I hope to return." Thus, in 1915, Karl Sudhoff ended a brief note on Galen's views on "seeds of plague", but the hope was never fulfilled, and, despite citation in bibliographies, Sudhoff's little article, buried deep in the wartime pages of the Mitteilungen zur Geschichte der Medizin, excited no scholarly attention whatsoever.' This was hardly surprising, for Sudhoff himself appeared to distrust his own conclusion that Galen had in fact prefigured Fracastoro's celebrated theory of seeds of diseases and was prepared to countenance, at least briefly, the idea that some diseases were specific entities which propagated by means of their seeds. But Galenic scholarship has moved on, albeit slowly, since Sudhoff's day, and the modern picture of Galen is of a doctor far less logical, systematic and consistent than he once appeared, and more ready to accept for his own immediate purposes ideas and examples from others that did not always fit with his overall schema of humoral medicine. Thus, while supporting Sudhoff's observations, I shall also show in this paper how Galen's (and, indeed, the Hippocratics') general philosophical views militated against the further development of any ontological theory of disease. Galen wrote of seeds of disease in a context of contagion and communicable diseases, and this paper will also have to concern itself, although not at great length, with ancient ideas and perceptions of contagion. Historians have occasionally denied to the doctors of antiquity a knowledge of contagion on the grounds that they had no theory of seeds of disease or of germs, but this is to confuse an appreciation of contagion qua contagiousness with one explanation of its mechanics. A belief in a theory of seeds presupposes a belief in contagious (or communicable) diseases, but the reverse is not true, for there were always other possible hypotheses, like that of putrid air, to explain why, for instance, phthisis was easily caught. Usually, contagion was
Traditions of research on the definition of contagious disease
The conception of contagious disease that Girolamo Fracastoro provides in his work De contagione et contagiosis morbis (1546), marks the origin of modern epidemiology and microbiology. This conception puts into play the Galenic and Aristotelian traditions of research, faced with its own conceptual limitations of the growing mechanistic thought of the time. According to Fracastoro, epidemic diseases spread by invisible living germs called seminaria (seedbed), begotten by corrupted humours. Fracastoro resorted to the old notions of "sympathy" and "antipathy" to respond to questions about how seminaria is transmitted from one body to another, and what is the specificity that limits its transmission to certain species and organs. Like Galileo and Descartes, Fracastoro tries to establish a dialogue in the field of medicine between the Aristotelian vitalism and the modern mechanistic perspective. The purpose of this paper is to highlight the ideological, theoretical and conceptual assumptions, both philosophical and scientific, assumed by Fracastoro with regard to the problem of contagion.
Diseases in Turkey: A Preliminary Study for the Second Half of the 19th Century
Ottoman medicine-that is, the medical activities carried out in various parts of the Ottoman Empire from the 14th to the 20`h century-was essentially based on medieval Islamic medicine. The latter was itself formed by the grafting of the medical knowledge in Indian, Persian, Syrian and Central Asian Turkish sources on to a foundation of Greek medicine, and was elaborated by such physicians as al-Razi and Ibn Sina in the 9`h-11`h centuries. In the early centuries of the Ottoman Empire (14`h-15`h centuries), Ottoman physicians received their training both in the Anatolian hospitals (darussifa, sifahane) and medical centers outside Ottoman territories such as Cairo. The Suleymaniye Medical Madrasa founded in Istanbul in 1561 also contributed to the medical education until the mid-19th century. Ottoman physicians widely used the works of Ibn Sina (Avicenna) and other medieval Islamic physicians, their Turkish translations, commentaries and abridged versions as reference books for about five hundred years, that is up to the mid-19th century. While Ottoman physicians pursued the Islamic-medical heritage, knowledge of European Renaissance medicine started to filter in to Ottoman Turkey in the 15th and 16th centuries, transmitted by Spanish, Portuguese and Italian physicians of Jewish origin who took refuge in the Ottoman lands after 1492. Contacts between the Ottoman and European medicines increased in the 17th century when disease treatments (among which was syphilis) were introduced into Ottoman medicine as based on the works of European physicians, such as Jean Fernel, Louis Mercado, and Antonio Fonseca. The 17`h century also witnessed the introduction of
Journal of Forensic Sciences, 2014
Filicide occurs in every socioeconomic stratum around the world. This study was conducted to evaluate motives, psychopathological aspects, and socio-demographic factors of 74 filicide cases of women in Turkey. Mean age of mothers, most of whom committed infanticide, was 26 years, and breakdown of criminal offenses are as follows: “to get rid of unwanted babies” (24.3%), “acute psychotic-type filicide” (21.6%), “fatal child abuse and neglect” (17.6%), “to get revenge” (12.2%), “protect the lonely child from the harm and badness after suicide” (10.8%), and “pity” (9.5%) motives. Results showed that maternal filicide cannot be reduced to only mental instability or environmental factors and indicates deficiencies in the capacity of the mothers' role in connecting with their child and with parenting skills. Finally, with regard to defendants' motives, similar factors that contribute to committing maternal filicide should be considered while making an assessment of the data and determining employee risk groups.