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The human experience of survival from a plague is about distinguishing the sick from the healthy as quickly as possible, establishing a barrier to stop the infection, and protecting healthy people. Nevertheless, the various quarantine rules and the acceptance and compliance of the population are a kind of battle between policy implementers and the public. This paper tries to understand how Chinese cultural attitudes (Henderson, 1984) unconsciously influence the Chinese people to be most cooperative with the strict containment and quarantine measures to confront the COVID‐19 pandemic. This article begins with the Chinese characters, exemplified by the four characters of disease and plague, to discuss how the pictograph nature and spatial structural way profoundly shaped the cultural mind. Then, through plague‐related Chinese legends, stories and folklore, the paper sets out the Chinese cultural attitudes which are also manifested in the analogical associations between disease, plague and seasons, the balance of the five elements of the universe and ghosts, gods and the government bureaucrats in the Kingdom of the Heaven. All of these approaches are well in line with Jung's method of associative amplification as a way to locate the archetypal wisdom that assures survival. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is a matter of some irony that psychiatry's most trenchant critic for over four decades is himself a psychiatrist. I refer to Thomas S. Szasz. Szasz's core thesis may be succinctly rendered: mental illness is a “myth”, a “metaphor” which serves only to obscure the social and ethical “problems in living” we face as human beings. This paper reconsiders the conceptual bases of Szasz's assault on psychiatry and assesses recent counter-arguments of his critical interlocutors. It presents a defence of the Szaszian conception and emphasises the continuing relevance of his earliest work. Additionally, the paper discusses Szasz's thesis in light of the work of the influential French philosopher of medicine, Georges Canguilhem. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Today organ transplantation is considered a routine surgical procedure. The idea of transferring tissues from one person to another has been inspiring to the minds of artists depicting the Saints Cosmos and Damian and also writers such as Mary Shelley. Early attempts at tissue transplantation were unsuccessful but in the last 50 years medical research has brought it into reality. The present paper looks at the subject from the realms of fantasy through the works of fiction and finally into everyday fact. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Dorfman is eulogized as the creator and curator of the definitive account of Veblen's life and work. He argued that Veblen was the archetypal marginal man and that this explains his dissenting contribution. Dissemination of Dorfman's pathography of Veblen led to its hegemony - until now. Andrew Veblen was the first to challenge Dorfman's portrait of his younger brother's life in the mid 1920s. He asserted that his family were not linguistically, socially or economically deprived. However, it was not until Dorfman's private papers became publicly available in the 1990s, that his flawed view of Veblen became more widely and comprehensively contested. An alternative appreciation of Veblen is advanced with reference to his experiences in general and the works of Bellamy, Morris and Ibsen in particular. Data sources include Dorfman's original tome, Andrew Veblen's extensive correspondence with Dorfman, and Veblen's own writings. It is concluded that Veblen's radical views are entirely congruent with his life experiences during an era of capitalist transformation. The moral of this saga is that a dose of Veblenian scepticism is essential to intellectual health. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]