Brief history of the medical and non-medical use of amphetamine-like psychostimulants.

The alkaloid ephedrine derived from Ephedra vulgaris is at the origin of psychostimulant-drugs as amphetamine. These drugs have been principally utilized for medical treatments in the past, while their utilization has been largely reduced from the 1970s when the high risk of addiction and abuse has been recognized. The first reported treatments were as anti-asthmatics and to contrast narcolepsy until their recreational stimulant and anorexic effects were reported. Benzedrine and Pervitin use were of great importance during the Second World War due to their abundant utilization among military troops. Nowadays the use of selective amphetamine-like drugs is limited to ADHD treatment.

Con los nervios de punta: de la medicalización a la psicologización de los quebrantos mentales en el trabajo. Bogotá y Medellín, 1898-1961 / With the nerves on the top: from medicalization to psychologization of mental breakers at work. Bogota and Medellín, 1898-1961

En este artículo se analizará el modo en que la neurastenia y la fatiga fueron objetivadas por la medicina dentro del ámbito laboral en las ciudades de Bogotá y Medellín, durante la primera mitad del siglo XX. De ahí la necesidad de tomar como referencia la identificación de los presuntos padecimientos ligados a la esfera del trabajo intelectual y físico. A la reivindicación de los comportamientos frugales para aminorar los efectos de aquellos padecimientos, se le vino a adicionar la creciente psicologización del mundo del trabajo promediando dicha centuria. Aquella psicologización se volvió una herramienta que amplió el espectro de la anormalidad, en medio de la metamorfosis experimentada por el aparato productivo y la diversificación de la estructura laboral a nivel nacional

In this article it will analize the way in which nervous exhaustion and fatigue were objectified by the medicine inside the labour environment in the cities of Bogota and Medellin, during the first half of twentieth century. From there the necessity of taking as reference identification of alleged hardship related to intellectual and physical work sphere. To the demand of frugal behaviours to minimize the effects of that hardship, it added the growing psychologization of world work in the middle of the century. That psychologization was turned into a tool that extended the spectrum of anormality, in the midst of the metamorphosis experienced by the productive system and diversification of labour structure nationally

Expertise, accidents and hernias in the context of the right to health, Colombia 1915-1946.

For most physicians, the assessment of disability in cases of work accident or occupational disease is very relative matter, and clinical judgments are subjective and unsatisfactory in legal settings. Work accident legislation gives them the task of deciding on any causal links between accident and disease and indicating any economic compensation that should be awarded. They must therefore reach beyond their scientific knowledge to understand the multitude of social factors that underlie these problems in the world of work. In this article, we analyze Colombian sources from the first half of the 20th century on the physiology of labor, fatigue, professional risk, work accidents, occupational diseases, among other issues. The aim is to advance understanding of how the field of medical knowledge established an ethical approach for experts in cases of occupational accidents, focusing on hernias, typical misfortunes of the world of work.

Alliances in Human Biology: The Harvard Committee on Industrial Physiology, 1929-1939.

In 1929 the newly-reorganized Rockefeller Foundation funded the work of a cross-disciplinary group at Harvard University called the Committee on Industrial Physiology (CIP). The committee's research and pedagogical work was oriented towards different things for different members of the alliance. The CIP program included a research component in the Harvard Fatigue Laboratory and Elton May's interpretation of the Hawthorne Studies; a pedagogical aspect as part of Wallace Donham's curriculum for Harvard Business School; and Lawrence Henderson's work with the Harvard Pareto Circle, his course Sociology 23, and the Harvard Society of Fellows. The key actors within the CIP alliance shared a concern with training men for elite careers in government service, business leadership, and academic prominence. But the first communications between the CIP and the Rockefeller Foundation did not emphasize training in human biology. Instead, the CIP presented itself as a coordinating body that would be able to organize all the varied work going on at Harvard that did not fit easily into one department, and it was on this basis that the CIP became legible to the President of Harvard, A. Lawrence Lowell, and to Rockefeller's Division of Social Sciences. The members of the CIP alliance used the term human biology for this project of research, training and institutional coordination.

"They Sweat for Science": The Harvard Fatigue Laboratory and Self-Experimentation in American Exercise Physiology.

In many scientific fields, the practice of self-experimentation waned over the course of the twentieth century. For exercise physiologists working today, however, the practice of self-experimentation is alive and well. This paper considers the role of the Harvard Fatigue Laboratory and its scientific director, D. Bruce Dill, in legitimizing the practice of self-experimentation in exercise physiology. Descriptions of self-experimentation are drawn from papers published by members of the Harvard Fatigue Lab. Attention is paid to the ethical and practical justifications for self-experimentation in both the lab and the field. Born out of the practical, immediate demands of fatigue protocols, self-experimentation performed the long-term, epistemological function of uniting physiological data across time and space, enabling researchers to contribute to a general human biology program.

The Power of Exercise and the Exercise of Power: The Harvard Fatigue Laboratory, Distance Running, and the Disappearance of Work, 1919-1947.

In the early twentieth century, fatigue research marked an area of conflicting scientific, industrial, and cultural understandings of working bodies. These different understandings of the working body marked a key site of political conflict during the growth of industrial capitalism. Many fatigue researchers understood fatigue to be a physiological fact and allied themselves with Progressive-era reformers in urging industrial regulation. Opposed to these researchers were advocates of Taylorism and scientific management, who held that fatigue was a mental event and that productivity could be perpetually increased through managerial efficiency. Histories of this conflict typically cease with the end of the First World War, when it is assumed that industrial fatigue research withered away. This article extends the history of fatigue research through examining the activities of the Harvard Fatigue Laboratory in the 1920s and 1930s. The Laboratory developed sophisticated biochemical techniques to study the blood of exercising individuals. In particular, it found that exercising individuals could attain a biochemically "steady state," or equilibrium, and extrapolated from this to assert that fatigue was psychological, not physiological, in nature. In contrast to Progressive-era research, the Laboratory reached this conclusion through laboratory examination, not of industrial workers, but of Laboratory staff members and champion marathon runners. The translation of laboratory research to industrial settings, and the eventual erasure of physiological fatigue from discussions of labor, was a complex function of institutional settings, scientific innovation, and the cultural meanings of work and sport.

Non-motor symptoms of Parkinson's disease A review from the past.

Although Parkinson's disease (PD) has been classically defined as a motor disorder, a range of non-motor symptoms (NMS) including cognitive, mood, autonomic and sleep disturbances occur with the passage of time. Although it seems that the non-motor aspect of PD is a recent observation, classic authors (James Parkinson, Charcot, Gowers, Oppenheim and Wilson) had described many NMS including pain, fatigue, bladder dysfunction, cognitive decline and delusion. In this review we have collated the classic literature of NMS in PD.

[Medicine and physical recovery. The care of fatigue in the 18th Century]. / Médecines et réfections corporelles. Les soins de la fatigue au XVIIIème siècle.

When in the 18th century, physicians became interested in people facing physically-demanding work, they founded their advice and warnings on theoretical models of tiredness and body weariness. These models refer to the elimination of "animal spirits", a substance convoyed by our nerves to contract muscles, to wearing down of solids destruction of body or else inertia of fluids which created weariness due to the blood stasis in the veins. Basing itself on these theories, medicine, helped by physiology in its considerations, intends thus to restore physical strengths. In this way, they put in place a therapy, which makes much of the correct functioning of the human machine whose outlines have been clearly specified.

The fate of a progressive science: the Harvard Fatigue Laboratory, athletes, the science of work and the politics of reform.

In the early twentieth century, fatigue research marked a site of conflicting scientific, industrial, and cultural understandings of working bodies. Many fatigue researchers understood fatigue to be a physiological fact and allied themselves with Progressive-era reformers in urging industrial regulation. Reformers clashed with advocates of Taylorism, who held that productivity could be perpetually increased through managerial efficiency. Histories of this conflict typically cease with the end of the First World War. I examine the work of the Harvard Fatigue Laboratory in the 1920s and 1930s to explore the impact that the introduction of biochemical methods had on the relationship between science and reform. The Laboratory developed sophisticated techniques to study the blood of exercising individuals. In particular, it found that exercising individuals could attain a biochemically "steady state," or equilibrium, and extrapolated from this to assert that fatigue was psychological, not physiological, in nature. In contrast to Progressive-era research, the Laboratory reached this conclusion through laboratory examination, not of workers, but of Laboratory staff members and champion marathon runners. I present the Laboratory's institutional history, scientific work, and finally how common cultural understandings of athletes and work lent plausibility to its efforts to make authoritative statements about industrial conditions.

[Work, momentum and fatigue in the work of Daniel Bernoulli: toward the optimization of biological fact]. / Travail, force vive et fatigue dans l'oeuvre de Daniel Bernoulli: vers l'optimisation du fait biologique.

The concept of mechanical work is inherited from the concepts of potentia absoluta and men's work, both implemented in the section IX of Daniel Bernoulli's Hydrodynamica in 1738. Nonetheless, Bernoulli did not confuse these two entities: he defined a link from gender to species between the former, which is general, and the latter, which is organic. In addition, Bernoulli clearly distinguished between vis viva and potentia absoluta (or work). Their reciprocal conversions are rarely mentioned explicitly in this book, except once, in the section X of his work, from vis viva to work, and subordinated to the mediation of a machine, in a driving forces substitution problem. His attitude evolved significantly in a text in 1753, in which work and vis viva were unambiguously connected, while the concept of potentia absoluta was reduced to that of human work, and the expression itself was abandoned. It was then accepted that work can be converted into vis viva, but the opposite is true in only one case, the intra-organic one. It is the concept of fatigue, seen as an expenditure of animal spirits themselves conceived of as little tensed springs releasing vis viva, that allowed the conversion, never quantified and listed simply as a model, from vis viva to work. Thus, work may have ultimately appeared as a transitional state between two kinds of vis viva, of which the first is non-quantifiable. At the same time, the natural elements were discredited from any hint of profitable production. Only men and animals were able to work in the strict sense of the word. Nature, left to itself, does not work, according to Bernoulli. In spite of his wish to bring together rational mechanics and practical mechanics, one perceived in the work of Bernoulli the subsistence of a rarely crossed disjunction between practical and theoretical fields.

The Harvard Fatigue Laboratory: contributions to World War II.

The war contributions of the Harvard Fatigue Laboratory in Cambridge, MA, were recorded in 169 Technical Reports, most of which were sent to the Office of the Quartermaster General. Earlier reports were sent to the National Research Council and the Office of Scientific Research and Development. Many of the reports from 1941 and later dealt with either physical fitness of soldiers or the energetic cost of military tasks in extreme heat and cold. New military emergency rations to be manufactured in large quantities were analyzed in the Fatigue Laboratory and then tested in the field. Newly designed cold weather clothing was tested in the cold chamber at -40 degrees F, and desired improvements were made and tested in the field by staff and soldiers in tents and sleeping bags. Electrically heated clothing was designed for high-altitude flight crews and tested both in laboratory chambers and field tests before being issued. This eye witness account of the Harvard Fatigue Laboratory during World War II was recorded by Dr. G. Edgar Folk, who is likely the sole surviving member of that famous laboratory.

[The medical history and the death cause of Young-Jo based on the Seungjeongwon Ilgi : royal secretariat logs)].

Young-Jo, 83 years old, was the longest lived king of the Chosun Dynasty. Seungjeongwon Ilgi gives more detail about the diseases and prescriptions of Young-Jo. We could close look at what the Annals of the Chosun Dynasty just described that king received medical attention. In inspecting Jung-Jo`s constitution, to examine his medical history is very important. Yong-jo had a weak constitution, but he was always concerned about health care. Youn-jo complained of colic syndrom and heart fire when young; ascris and shoulder pain since middle age; severe fatigue and gait disturbance caused by edema in his latter years. During his last 20 years, he had taken and resorted to Ken-GongTang, the reason was not psychological disposion, but physical disease. Also, Yong-Jo's condition just before death could be assumed in Seungjeongwon Ilgi and Jonhyeongak Ilgi. According to continuous complaints such as edema of the lower limbs, faint(lethargy) and eating disorder caused by abnormal rising of GI (anorexia), we could presume that the cause of death was uremia. In addition, it has significance to correct feasible misconceaption about the cause of death grounded on The Annals of the Chosun Dynasty.

The Medical History and the Death Cause of Young-Jo Based on the Seungjeongwon Ilgi (Royal Secretariat Logs) / 의사학

Young-Jo, 83 years old, was the longest lived king of the Chosun Dynasty. Seungjeongwon Ilgi gives more detail about the diseases and prescriptions of Young-Jo. We could close look at what the Annals of the Chosun Dynasty just described that king received medical attention. In inspecting Jung-Jo's constitution, to examine his medical history is very important. Yong-jo had a weak constitution, but he was always concerned about health care. Youn-jo complained of colic syndrom and heart fire when young; ascris and shoulder pain since middle age; severe fatigue and gait disturbance caused by edema in his latter years. During his last 20 years, he had taken and resorted to Ken-GongTang, the reason was not psychological disposion, but physical disease. Also, Yong-Jo's condition just before death could be assumed in Seungjeongwon Ilgi and Jonhyeongak Ilgi. According to continuous complaints such as edema of the lower limbs, faint(lethargy) and eating disorder caused by abnormal rising of GI (anorexia), we could presume that the cause of death was uremia. In addition, it has significance to correct feasible misconceaption about the cause of death grounded on The Annals of the Chosun Dynasty.

A fadiga e seus transtornos: condições de possibilidade, ascensão e queda da neurastenia novecentista / Fatigue and its disturbances: conditions of possibility and the rise and fall of twentieth-century neurasthenia

Analisa alguns dos elementos sociohistóricos que configuraram condições de possibilidade para a emergência da neurastenia como categoria nosológica, na segunda metade do século XIX, bem como os aspectos que influenciaram seu declínio em meios médicos e leigos. Propõe breve apresentação dessa categoria médica e discussão mais detalhada sobre alguns debates em que ela encontra sustentação, tais como a ideia do desgaste do suprimento nervoso, os estudos e as preocupações novecentistas sobre a fadiga e a pressuposição da somatogênese da doença. Analisa, por fim, o processo de declínio da categoria ressaltando alguns elementos que alteraram seu estatuto e sua utilidade como diagnóstico.

The article first analyzes some of the social and historical components underlying the conditions of possibility that allowed neurasthenia to emerge as a nosological category in the latter half of the nineteenth century and then explores the elements that influenced its demise in medical and lay circles. It offers a brief introduction to this medical category and a more detailed discussion of some supporting debates, including the idea of nervous exhaustion, twentieth-century studies and concerns on fatigue, and the malady's presumed somatogenesis. The concluding analysis of how the category met its demise highlights elements that altered its status and its diagnostic usefulness.

[Fatigue and its disturbances: conditions of possibility and the rise and fall of twentieth-century neurasthenia]. / A fadiga e seus anstornos: condições de possibilidade, ascensão e queda da neurastenia novecentista.

The article first analyzes some of the social and historical components underlying the conditions ofpossibility that allowed neurasthenia to emerge as a nosological category in the latter half of the nineteenth century and then explores the elements that influenced its demise in medical and lay circles. It offers a brief introduction to this medical category and a more detailed discussion of some supporting debates, including the idea of nervous exhaustion, twentieth-century studies and concerns on fatigue, and the malady's presumed somatogenesis. The concluding analysis of how the category met its demise highlights elements that altered its status and its diagnostic usefulness.