Explore the vast range of titles available.

Medical humanities and ethics are getting more and more important in Europe as essential disciplines of the core curriculum for health-care professionals. The idea of the physician as a technician shows itself to be unbearable because of the global historical changes we daily face in caring settings. We deal with chronic diseases, which require a sensitive physician/patient covenant and a good performance in communication skills1 because a whole life-style transformation is often necessary. Moreover, citizens are more informed about both the technological progress and their civil rights, so that a shared decision has to be prepared and implemented by exploring the emotional reactions to illness, by explaining the effects of different ways of treatment, and by revealing in advance the choices that could be taken.

This study addresses François Delsarte’s system of expression, known as Applied Aesthetics. It presents data related to François Delsarte’s career, such as personal and professional life and his theoretical background. It discusses the laws of gestural expression formulated by Delsarte – Trinity Law, the Law of Correspondence and the Nine Laws of Motion – as well as their dissemination and utilization in modern dance; this discussion mentions some pioneers of modern dance, such as Isadora Duncan, Ruth Saint Denis, Ted Shawn, Vaslav Nijinsky, Rudolf Laban and Mary Wigman.

I see two important turning points in environmental aesthetics. In a definitive article, 'Contemporary aesthetics and the neglect of natural beauty', R.W. Hepburn in 1966 laid out the field and its tasks; Harold Osborne demonstrated the problem of externality and its solution in his 1979 paper 'An intellectual crisis in aesthetics'. Within this framework, a dynamic and innovative field of research has developed and grown, the future of which lies in the interaction between theory and practice and co-operation between the various parties involved.

While visiting a recent exhibition of Meissen porcelain in Dresden, a relatively unassuming figure caught my eye.¹ This charming representation of what the exhibition’s curators titled “Actors as a Musical Shepherd Couple” was modeled by Johann Joachim Kaendler (1706–75), who upon completing work in February 1744 described it as “a very exacting small shepherd group, divided up and ready for molding. The shepherdess playing the lute sits under green trees next to the shepherd, who is singing from sheet music; both are most elegantly tricked out.”² As previous commentators have noted, the shepherdess is outfitted in the latest fashions

The title of this chapter couples two big terms around each of which a huge scholarly field has evolved over the past two decades. In brief, the concept of globalization signals a departure from the metanarrative of modernization, according to which ‘development’ would eventually render the second (socialist) and third worlds more or less similar to the first world, the modern West.¹ Globalization, with its vocabulary of flux and mix, diversity, fragmentation, multiple identities, postmodernity, and hybridity, registers a growing skepticism vis-á-vis such teleological narratives. Pertaining to the intensified encroachment of capitalism on the everyday lives of people all over

The Scots who emigrated to North America were never a homogeneous group: the diaspora consists of distinct streams carrying linguistic and cultural features specific to their place and moment in time. Neither the source communities in Scotland nor the transplanted communities in North America have been static but have developed certain aspects of their inherited traditions, embraced certain internal innovations, resisted certain impositions and been subject to certain assimilative pressures. The ways in which the encounters between these different lineages of Scottish tradition have been portrayed, and the ways in which contests over the authority to define tradition and authenticity