Kathleen Wilson

Inhibition of premature labor: A multicenter comparison of ritodrine and ethanol

A randomized controlled study was carried out at three medical centers to compare the efficacy and side effects of ethanol and ritodrine in the treatment of threatened premature labor. One hundred and thirty-five patients judged to be between the twentieth and thirty-sixth week of gestation and presenting with clinical symptoms of premature labor were included. Sixty-seven patients were treated with intravenous infusion of 10 per cent ethanol. Sixty-eight patients were treated with intravenous infusion of ritodrine for 12 hours followed by oral ritodrine. If labor recurred prematurely, up to two additional courses of ethanol or ritodrine were given. Delivery was postponed for more than 72 hours in 49 of 67 patients (73 per cent) with ethanol and in 61 of 68 patients (90 per cent) with ritodrine; this difference was significant. Patients in the ethanol group gained a mean of 27.6 days while patients in the ritodrine group gained a mean of 44.0 days. Fifty-four per cent of the ethanol group and 72 per cent of the ritodrine group carried their infants to 36 weeks of gestation. Five infants in the ethanol group and one infant in the ritodrine group died from respiratory distress syndrome. The most frequent side effect of ethanol were nausea and vomiting. The most frequent side effects of ritodrine were tachycardia and blood pressure changes which were easily controlled by lowering the infusion rate. Ethanol and ritodrine were both found to be effective inhibitors of premature labor with ritodrine giving the most favorable results.

Nutritional status of patients with untreated cervical cancer: II. Vitamin assessment

Prospective vitamin assessment was undertaken in 78 patients with untreated cancer of the uterine cervix. At least one abnormal vitamin level was present in 67% of patients while individual levels were abnormal in as many as 38% of patients. Significantly lowered levels of plasma folate, vitamin A, and vitamin C were present. Although most of these vitamins did not correlate with other parameters of protein-calorie malnutrition, the possible preventative and treatment effects of these vitamins require additional investigation.

Inventing Revolution: 1688 and Eighteenth-Century Popular Politics

The Revolution , the Glorious British Revolution, which the Americans have rejoiced in, and will ever rejoice in as the pride of the age in which it was brought about, and the admiration and blessing of succeeding times, must be looked up to with reverence as a precedent, the grandest precedent, that modern times have exhibited for the justification of any people insulted, plundered, or in the least manner oppressed by the unfeelingness of arbitrary power; it having legalized the natural right of resistance. [ Public Advertiser , November 1, 1788] Over a decade ago, Tom Nairn alleged that lack of a populist potentially revolutionary nationalism in England was due in large part to the effective co-option of seventeenth-century upheavals by ruling elites. From his perspective, the Revolution of 1688 constituted only an episode in the “long, successful counter-revolution of the propertied classes” against the subversive ideological potential of the first English Revolution that has continued to the present day. This provocative and unrepentant neo-Marxist reading of English history has, ironically, become part of the new orthodoxy on 1688 that has emerged in the revisionist, anti-Whig historiography of the past fifteen years. The series of events once heralded as the foundation of modern parliamentary democracy is now presented as but a troubled and confusing hiatus in patrician politics, unrelentingly “conservationist” in ideological and political effect, in which Whig and Tory leaders managed to rid themselves of an unacceptable monarch without recourse to the political or ideological extremism of Charles Is reign.

Nutritional status of patients with untreated cervical cancer. I. Biochemical and immunologic assessment.

A prospective nutritional evaluation of 78 patients with untreated cervical cancer was undertaken. Stage-related abnormal anthropometric measurements were present in 60% of patients. Abnormal biochemical nutritional measurements were found in 67% of patients. Thirty percent of these patients were anergic to usual skin test antigens. The overall incidence of protein-calorie malnutrition was 12.5%; however, the risk was stage-related. Measured parameters were usually adversely affected following a surgical procedure. Although surgical complications were few, the implications of these findings as to the appropriate method and timing of nutritional assessment as well as the possible benefit from nutritional support in malnourished patients with cervical cancer are discussed.

Corpus and cervix cancer: A nutritional comparison☆

Nutritional parameters of patients with cervical cancer and endometrial cancer were prospectively evaluated. Analysis of anthropometric assessments that were abnormal in as many as 52% of patients indicated little difference between organ sites in mean values or percentage of patients with abnormal values. Biochemical parameters included serum albumin, total iron-binding capacity, copper, zinc, and creatinine height index. An abnormal value was present in as many as 60% of patients. Multiple abnormal values were more likely to be present in patients with endometrial cancer. Abnormal vitamin levels were more commonly present in patients with cervical cancer. When compared to control values, levels of plasma folate, beta carotene, and vitamin C were significantly lower in patients with cervical cancer. Patients with endometrial cancer had significantly lower levels of beta carotene and vitamin C. Analysis of surgical complications suggested a correlation with specific nutritional deficits.

The Female Rake: Gender, Libertinism, and Enlightenment

If recent publishing lists on the eighteenth century are any indication, ours is an era of renewed fascination with the aristocratic rake and the fine lady. For the former, the Georgian decades are represented as having afforded a limitless playground for the pursuit of pleasure and sexual gratification, for the latter, new opportunities for social mixing and the occasional discrete liaison. Yet our absorption with the plenitude and vicissitudes of Hanoverian high life ironically not only mimics our historical subjects’ own sense of entitlement, but also reinscribes their gendered oppositional morality, as the male rake becomes the object of amused, if voyeuristic, admiration and his female counterpart of rueful embarrassment or even denigration. I have had personal experience of the continued vitality of these distinctions: after delivering a plenary lecture on the courtesan Teresia Constantia Phillips to the regional branch of an American eighteenth-century studies society (a forum which delights in papers on the exploits of a Hervey, Boswell or Wilkes), I was frostily informed by a participant that some people and some behaviours were not suitable for academic discussion (and neither, he implied, were some speakers).

Epilogue: Love and Death—The Royal Navy in the Atlantic World

The eighteenth-century navy ranged far and wide around the Atlantic Ocean, knitting together a British world between metropole, colonies, trading stations and shipping routes. This concluding chapter provides an overview of some of these activities, examining the navy from the perspectives of cultural history. Wilson reminds us that the popularity of this institution occurred through representation, as the navy became a symbol of virtuous self-sacrifice and an object of adoration for groups scattered around Britain’s expanding empire. But she also demonstrates that depictions or discussions of naval deeds did not always treat the navy or its officers with sheer adulation. And in all of these contexts, naval men came into close physical contact with all sorts, from enslaved and free coloured women to shopkeepers, merchants, planters and colonial governors: offering another reminder of how the navy helped to entwine the multifarious and deeply divided people who populated Britain’s Atlantic world.

Behind Closed Doors: At Home in Georgian England

When historians of the future come to write about the historiographical preoccupations of 21st-century Britons, they surely will observe our growing obsession with consumer behaviour and material culture. One particular trend in the last 20 years has been the widening of methodologies employed by historians, from the traditional text-based approaches to archival research, to a wider conceptualisation of all forms of historical evidence as artefacts, including the written and printed word. This has allowed a broadening of the traditional purview of the historian, opening up new possibilities for studying all manner of material goods which previously had been considered more within the milieu of the archaeologist or art connoisseur than the historian. But we have needed pioneers, historians skilled in rendering the discrete and often daunting specialist languages of diverse fields such as art history, design history and archaeology into workable tools. Underpinning historians’ reticence about using material culture has also been a certain political attitude regarding the ‘proper’ nature of research. Is interpreting an artefact in a museum as worthy as squirreling away in an obscure archive? A similar doubt hangs over the increasing availability of high-quality online resources. The Old Bailey Online project allows keyword searches to be performed in a matter of seconds: but is it somehow ‘cheating’?

The Sense of the People: Politics, Culture and Imperialism in England, 1715-1785.

Part I. The National Context: Introduction: The People, Towns and Politics of eighteenth-Century England: 1. Print, people and culture in the urban Renaissance 2. Loyalism abounding to the chief of sinners: the reconfiguration of opposition politics, 1714-35 3. Patriotic adventure: libertarianism, war and empire, 1736-62 4. Patriots apogee: Wilkite radicalism and the cult of resistance, 1763-74 5. The crisis: radicalism, loyalism and the American War, 1774-85 Part II. The Cases of Newcastle-upon-Tyne and Norwich: 6. Changing contexts: Newcastle and Norwich in the eighteenth century 7. The rejection of deference: Newcastle 8. Clientage and its discontents: Norwich Conclusions: the people, the state and the subject.