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Western armies have relied on surgical field manuals to help physicians deal with unfamiliar combat medical conditions from the Napoleonic wars to the present day, but there has been little discussion of whether these handbooks have been used or improved outcomes. Recent research shows that the Union Army’s American Civil War (1861–1865) surgical case fatality rates improved as the war progressed, much like the US Army’s experience in later wars, and were generally superior to comparable European results. These positive Civil War outcomes have been attributed to field experience, adoption of best practices, and enhanced communication, without consideration of New York surgeon Stephen Smith’s widely-used Hand-Book of Surgical Operations. The Army of the Potomac added Smith’s pocket-sized Hand-Book to its supply table in 1862. Northern medical journals applauded it, and Smith’s contemporaries documented its wide use. Smith’s handbook explained and demonstrated surgical techniques that were adopted as the war progressed, such as the use of general anesthesia and limb-sparing resection (debridement) of gunshot wounds. It offered pithy, well-documented advice from recognized experts along with numerous illustrations, which allowed untrained physicians to visualize anatomical relationships and see contemporary best practices in a way that no other wartime publication provided, making it an exemplar of a mass-media surgical improvement change agent.

The La Brea Tar Pits, the world's richest and most important Late Pleistocene fossil locality, offers unsurpassed insights into southern California's past environments. Recent studies at Rancho La Brea document that insects serve as sensitive and valuable paleoecological and taphonomic indicators. Of the thousands of fossil bird and mammal bones recovered from the Tar Pits, insect trace damage is thus far almost exclusively confined to the foot bones of large herbivores, especially bison, camel, and horse species. Our laboratory experiments with dermestid and tenebrionid beetles establish that the larvae of both consume bone, producing different characteristic feeding traces and providing the first documentation that tenebrionids consume bone. The presence of carcass-exploiting insects in the Rancho La Brea biota provides insight into the taphonomy of the asphaltic bone masses and the environmental conditions under which they accumulated. The succession of dermestids, tenebrionids, and indeterminate traces on many of the foot elements, combined with the climate restrictions and life cycles of these insects, indicate that carcasses could remain unsubmerged for at least 17-20 weeks, thus providing the most reliable estimate to date. Attribution of these traces also suggests that the asphaltic fossils only accumulated during warmer intervals of the Late Pleistocene. Forensic studies need to reevaluate the role of tenebrionids in carcass decomposition and other additional insects that modify bone.

Sexual dimorphism is widespread among carnivorans, and has been an important evolutionary factor in social ecology. However, its presence in sabertoothed felids remains contentious. Here we present a comprehensive analysis of extant Panthera and the sabertoothed felid Smilodon fatalis. S. fatalis has been reported to show little or no sexual dimorphism but to have been intraspecifically variable in skull morphology. We found that large and small specimens of S. fatalis could be assigned to male and female sexes with similar degrees of confidence as Panthera based on craniomandibular shape. P. uncia is much less craniomandibularly variable and has low levels of sexual size-dimorphism. Shape variation in S. fatalis probably reflects sexual differences. Craniomandibular size-dimorphism is lower in S. fatalis than in Panthera except P. uncia. Sexual dimorphism in felids is related to more than overall size, and S. fatalis and the four large Panthera species show marked and similar craniomandibular and dental morphometric sexual dimorphism, whereas morphometric dimorphism in P. uncia is less. Many morphometric-sexually dimorphic characters in Panthera and Smilodon are related to bite strength and presumably to killing ecology. This suggests that morphometric sexual dimorphism is an evolutionary adaptation to intraspecific resource partitioning, since large males with thicker upper canines and stronger bite forces would be able to hunt larger prey than females, which is corroborated by feeding ecology in P. leo. Sexual dimorphism indicates that S. fatalis could have been social, but it is unlikely that it lived in fusion-fission units dominated by one or a few males, as in sub-Saharan populations of P. leo. Instead, S. fatalis could have been solitary and polygynous, as most extant felids, or it may have lived in unisexual groups, as is common in P. leo persica.

Stephen Smith launched a 40-year effort to bring trees to New York City streets in 1872, the year he founded the American Public Health Association (APHA). Smith argued that street trees would mitigate the adverse health effects of Manhattan's summer heat and help purify the air. The young APHA endorsed Smith's position and gave trees a prominent role in urban sanitation, but public health turned away from trees and urban reform movements as it adopted a biomedical public health model in the late 19th century. Nevertheless, Smith wrote and campaigned for a successful 1902 law requiring the New York City Parks Department to assume management of street trees in the name of public health. He then led a 1914 campaign to force the department to uphold his law. New York's street tree program has had an erratic trajectory, but it now generally follows Smith's vision. Public health could play a bigger role in creating greener cities and mitigating climate change with more field research and the health in all policies approach that Smith used to bring trees to Manhattan's streets in 1914. ( Am J Public Health. Published online ahead of print October 31, 2024:e1-e9. https://doi.org/10.2105/AJPH.2024.307856).