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Published on February 16, 2014 00:30

February 15, 2014

Floods, storms, and climate change: the need for a longer-term perspective

By Robert Van de Noort

The United Kingdom is experiencing a period of extreme rainfall and an onslaught of Atlantic storms. This has resulted in extensive and prolonged flooding of the Somerset Levels and a rise in the levels of the River Thames not seen for over 60 years, flooding many homes for the first time since these were built.

Politicians and journalists want to know from scientists whether or not this period of unparalleled weather is linked to climate change. Responsible scientists reply that it is not possible to link a specific event to climate change, but note that there is a high probability that climate change will result in more intense and possibly more frequent extreme weather events such as the one we are experiencing now. Seeking to understand the link between climate change and weather addresses one facet of the reasons behind the floods in the United Kingdom. However, the way in which we have altered our landscape (and what this means for our resilience to floods) remains a largely underexplored issue.

We live in a cultural landscape. Over a period of six millennia, forests have been cut to make way for agricultural land, peat bogs and marshes have been drained and cultivated, rivers haven been canalized, coasts have been embanked, and bridges and quays have been constructed. All these activities have an impact on flooding, either by reducing the natural flood-retention capabilities of the landscape, or by restricting the natural flows of rivers and sea. Without an understanding of these longer-term developments, it is impossible to explain the floods.

David Cameron visited Somerset to see the impact of the floods and meet local residents, farmers and emergency teams. The Prime Minister’s Office. Crown Copyright via Flickr.

Thus, the floods in the Somerset Levels are directly linked to their past. Up till around 4500 BC, the Somerset Levels were an inland sea, but a coastal barrier prevented further sea incursions and extensive peatlands developed over the following millennia, raising the lie of the land above that of the sea. These peatlands have been drained for at least a thousand years, but this was initially done in a sustainable manner. However, the modern utilization of the Somerset Levels for peat cutting and farming have resulted in the creation of more drainage ditches that lower the water tables and this has caused (especially where combined with nitrate and phosphorous fertilization, which accelerate the oxidization of peat) the desiccation and loss of peat. As a consequence, the lie of the land has fallen in some places by as much as 4 m, and some 635 square kilometres of the Somerset Levels are now below sea level, making the landscape more susceptible to flooding.

Similarly, the River Thames has its origins towards the end of the Palaeocene and established its current course around 20,000 years ago, when its former northerly route was blocked by the ice sheets that covered much of northern Britain. Throughout prehistory, people have utilized to good effect the natural resources of the marshes and meadows without significantly altering the natural river. This changed with the urbanization of southern England and the need for more transport links, which encroached onto the floodplain of the Thames. The post-war housing shortage has led to an explosion of construction of new houses on the Thames floodplains, alongside industrial estates, roads, and other infrastructure. This reduction of the land available for flooding and the constriction of the natural course of the Thames are major factors behind the current floods.

The impact of climate change on extreme weather events and sea levels is becoming increasingly clear and our thinking of dealing with floods is changing, and not just in the United Kingdom. Understanding the past is a key component in this rethinking. Thus, the natural flood-retention capabilities of the landscape is being improved through the restoration of peat bogs, the de-canalization of rivers, the restoration of floodplains and (so-called) managed re-alignment schemes on the coast.

The impact of climate change on people, especially those living and working in flood-prone areas, is not so well understood. We, too, could benefit from a greater understanding of how our predecessors dealt with floods and changes in the weather and climate. I am not advocating a return to prehistoric housing and infrastructure, but using the past to strengthen the resilience of local communities by engendering: a sense of place specific to living in a floodplain; an understanding of past successes and failures in dealing with floods; and a better understanding of long-term interaction between floods, storms, and climate change.

Robert Van de Noort is Professor of Wetland Archaeology at the University of Exeter and chairs the South West Regional Flood and Coastal Committee, the executive committee through which the Environment Agency performs its flood and coastal erosion function in the South West of England. He is the author of Climate Change Archaeology: Building Resilience from Research in the World’s Coastal Wetlands.

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Published on February 15, 2014 05:30

Portraying scientists: Galileo and perceptual portraiture

By Nicolas Wade

Perceptual portraits represent people in an unconventional style. The portraits themselves are not always easy to discern – the viewer needs to apply the power of perception in order to extract the facial features from the design which carries them. The aim is both artistic and historical. They generally consist of two elements – the portrait and some appropriate motif. The nature of the latter depends upon the endeavours for which the portrayed person is known. In some cases the motif is drawn specifically to display a phenomenon associated with the individual, in others it is derived from a figure or text in one of their books, or apparatus which they invented.

These portraits and motifs have themselves been manipulated in a variety of ways, using graphical, photographical, and computer graphical procedures. I believe that such perceptual portraits both attract attention and engage the spectator’s interest to a greater degree than do conventional representations. It is hoped that this visual intrigue enhances the viewer’s desire to discover why particular motifs have been adopted, and in turn to learn more about the persons portrayed: it is intended to be an instance of art serving science.

The renaissance of anatomy by Nicholas Wade
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Andreas Vesalius (1514-1564), whose 500th anniversary will be widely celebrated this year, is shown in his diagram of the base of the brain.

Galileo’s world by Nicholas Wade
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We should keep our eye on February 15th, 2014 which marks the 450th anniversary of Galileo’s birth in Pisa. This is marked symbolically in the final image; it is a combination of Galileo’s statue that stands at the rear of the Aula Magna Storica at the University of Pisa and a detail of his painted portrait. He holds the world in his hand and examines it with his eye.

Galileo’s vision by Nicholas Wade
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Galileo’s piercing eye by Nicholas Wade
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The perceptual portrait below emphasises Galileo’s eye. The detail of his right eye is derived from Sustermans’ portrait of him and it is piercing the title page of Sidereus nuncius.

Galileo’s allegory by Nicholas Wade
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Galileo was attuned to art and distinguished artists were among his friends so it was deemed appropriate to present his visage in a variety of ways. In addition, Galileo displayed an acute awareness of visual phenomena like contrast effects as well as appreciating the deceptions of the senses. It was not only the telescope that he used with such skill but his eye also.

Nicolas Wade is co-author, with Marco Piccolino, of Galileo’s Visions: Piercing the spheres of the heavens by eye and mind. They have also presented a broader spectrum of perceptual portraits that trace the history of neuroscience from the sixteenth to the twentieth century.

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Image credit: Nicolas Wade and Marco Piccolino

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Published on February 15, 2014 03:30

Soldiers’ experiences of World War I in photographs

The confident grin of an ace fighter pilot, the thousand yard stare of a young soldier taking a smoke break in a subterranean shelter, a howitzer glowing in an open field, sailors framed in moonlight off the deck of a submarine pointed towards an empty horizon — The Great War: A Combat History of the First World War by Peter Hart resurrects in language and photographs the soldiers’ experiences of World War I. In the slideshow below, explore a rare and beautiful collection of photographs taken from almost every angle of the battlefield, from the Allied’s to the Central Power’s trenches, to the ghostly space in between.

Franz Ferdinand
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Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife Sophie photographed shortly before their assassination in Sarajevo,
28 June 1914.

Gavrilo Princip
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Gavrilo Princip,
the Bosnian Serb
whose pistol shots
triggered the start of
the Great War. He
himself would die in
prison of tuberculosis,
28 April 1918.

Belgian Infantry
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A rear guard of Belgian infantry take aim with their rifles from a railway bridge that engineers are about to
destroy in order to slow the German advance in Termonde, 18 September 1914.

Middlesex Regiment
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Soldiers from the 1st Middlesex Regiment under shrapnel fire from German artillery on the Signy-Signets
road during the Battle of the Marne, 8 September 1914.

Howitzer
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German 5.9-inch howitzer battery on the Western Front, 14 November 1914. These superb guns gave
the Germans a very real advantage in the Battle of the Frontiers, easily out-ranging the British and French
field artillery.

Argonne 1914
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French troops manning a ditch in the Argonne, 1914. Ditches like this soon became full-scale trenches,
after which second lines and communications lines were added as trench warfare developed.

Poison Gas
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British troops move off into the attack through a cloud of poison gas on the opening day of the Battle of
Loos, 25 September 1915. This photo was taken from the trench they had just left by a soldier of the London
Rifle Brigade.

French to the Front
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French soldiers of the 3rd Infantry Regiment resting by the roadside near Houthem on their way to the
front, 10 September 1917.

Ypres Salient
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Men of the 16th Canadian Machine Gun Company holding the line in the Ypres Salient, November 1917.
This picture reveals the awful conditions in the morass of the Ypres Salient.

Top German Aces
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Five of the top German aces of Jasta 11 including from left to right: Sebastian Festner, Karl-Emil Schäffer,
Manfred von Richthofen, his brother Lothar von Richthofen and Kurt Wolff. The ‘Red Baron’ (Manfred von
Richthofen) welded these men into a deadly force.

American Machine Gunners
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American machine gunners of the 77th American Division under training from the British 39th Battalion,
Machine Gun Corps near Moulle, 22 May 1918. The Americans were keen but needed the accumulated
expertise of their British and French Allies.

Firth of Forth
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An aerial photograph of British ships at anchor in the Firth of Forth, taken from the R.9 Airship, 1916.

German Submarine
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The German Submarine U-35 cruising in the Mediterranean by moonlight, April 1917. The failure of the
High Seas Fleet meant that the U-boats were the only chance to defeat Britain at sea.

Allies Fraternising
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British, Belgian and French troops fraternising happily in a French village, 15 October 1914.

French Dugout
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French soldiers of 68th Infantry Regiment in their dugout at Artois. The French had to endure a terrible
ordeal as they attacked the German lines time and time again in an effort to break through.

Peter Hart is the author of The Great War: A Combat History of the First World War. He is the Oral Historian of the Imperial War Museum in London. He is the author of The Somme: The Darkest Hour on the Western Front, 1918: A Very British Victory, and Gallipoli.

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Image Credit: All images courtesy of the Imperial War Museum in London.

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Published on February 15, 2014 00:30

February 14, 2014

Contradictions in Cold War-era higher education

By Caitlin Tyler-Richards

Cold War Cover

This week, managing editor Troy Reeves wears his Badgers pride proudly in an interview with historian Matthew Levin. Levin, who received his PhD in History from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, is the author of Cold War University: Madison and the New Left in the Sixties (UW Press, 2013). Cold War University offers a long view of the 1960s, charting the UW-Madison’s transition from a center for military research to a hotbed of dissent, to unpack what Levin calls “the contradictions of cold war era higher education.”

In addition to talking about his book, Levin describes working with oral histories as a scholar from outside the field, dispels the George L. Mosse Humanities Building myth, and discusses the difficulties of bringing oral history training into his high school classroom. There is also a nice shout out to the UW-Madison Archives, so you should definitely have a listen. On Wisconsin!

Matthew Levin teaches high school social studies in McFarland, Wisconsin. He received his PhD in history from the University of Wisconsin–Madison.

The Oral History Review, published by the Oral History Association, is the U.S. journal of record for the theory and practice of oral history. Its primary mission is to explore the nature and significance of oral history and advance understanding of the field among scholars, educators, practitioners, and the general public. Follow them on Twitter at @oralhistreview, like them on Facebook, add them to your circles on Google Plus, follow them on Tumblr, listen to them on Soundcloud, or follow the latest OUPblog posts via email or RSS to preview, learn, connect, discover, and study oral history.

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Published on February 14, 2014 05:30

An anti-Valentine’s Day playlist

Compiled by Taylor Coe

Feeling angsty about Valentine’s Day? The OUP staff is here to help! We have pulled together a wide-ranging list of “anti-Valentine’s Day” music – exactly opposite the treacly, mincing pop that you may encounter otherwise on this most-exclusive of holidays.

“I Hate Everything About You” – Three Days Grace

“Got relationship rage? This song has you covered. While I am now happily married, I still love this wonderfully angry song. Also, it brings me back to being an emo kid in middle school.”

— Christie Loew, Assistant Marketing Manager

“Everything I Once Had” – The Honorary Title

“I tend to err on the side of ‘really sad’ for anti-Valentine’s Day songs. ‘Everything I Once Had,’ by the now-defunct and super-sad band The Honorary Title, is made up of 100% clichés, but it’s pretty great to indulge in when you’re alone on Valentine’s Day: ‘February, Valentine’s Day / Did my best to avoid the red clichés / So you dumped me on the subway / On my way to work at 9 in the morning.’”

— Lauren Hill, Publicity Assistant

“Goodbye to Love” – The Carpenters

“In the 90s I shared an apartment with a gay couple, Ken & Didier, I affectionately called ‘The French’ in Hoboken, NJ. These boys had strange tastes. They mixed their red wine with Pepsi and played my Carpenters Gold CD often, a band I knew well from my father’s 8-track collection from the 60s & 70s. While I’ve had my share of lovers, I’ve never really been lucky at sustaining love. I’m not looking for sympathy, I don’t hate love and I don’t think an “anti-Valentine” song needs to be sad or angry. In sharp contrast to most love gone bad songs, The Carpenters’ ‘Goodbye to Love’ is a joyful resignation that resonates with my realization that love is not mine and so I say, ‘Goodbye.’”

— Christian Purdy, Director of Publicity

“My Love Is Real” – Divine Fits

“’My love is real/Until it stops.’ Bleak stuff. But man, those synths. Divine Fits draw a lot on gothic minimalist pop from the ‘80s – think ‘Tainted Love.’”

— Owen Keiter, Associate Publicist

“All My Ex’s Live in Texas” – George Strait

“I’m going to with George Strait’s ‘All My Ex’s Live in Texas’. This poor singer has a long, dramatic, wonderful history of Valentine’s Days gone terribly wrong.”

— Norm Hirschy, Music Editor

“Creep” – Radiohead

“Nothing to me screams anti-Valentine’s Day more than a guy pining for a girl who wants nothing to do with him since, according to himself, he’s a big weirdo and just not that special. I think we can all relate to a Valentine’s day or two being single, feeling like an outcast from all the happy couples in society. Now, as a married person, I use the holiday as a good excuse to obtain free chocolate while continuing to be a weirdo.”

— Penny Freedman, Marketing Coordinator

“Wannabe” – The Spice Girls

“If there was any push towards romantic independence in my adolescence it was definitely this song. There’s nothing like five women ranting about standards and demands that inspires a type of self-worth you didn’t know you had. I hope everyone can spend Valentine’s day with the people who inspire that same sort of feeling.”

— Sarah Hansen, Publicity Assistant

“When Did You Stop Loving Me, When Did I Stop Loving You” – Marvin Gaye

“With this song off his 1978 album Here, My Dear, Gaye captures the questions, notions, and emotions that come from lost love. Although it has moments of high romance, avoid playing this record for your beloved on the 14th.”

— Stuart Roberts, Editorial Assistant

“Threnody for the Victims of Hiroshima” – Krysztof Penderecki

“This is a piece of music that many people know because it was excerpted in the soundtrack for The Shining – not exactly your standard Valentine’s Day fare (neither is Hiroshima, for that matter). For best results, check out the YouTube video that matches the music with an episode of the Care Bears, commercials for Bratz dolls included.”

— Lisbeth Redfield, Assistant Editor

“Best Thing I Never Had” – Beyoncé

“Beyoncé can rock a sassy break-up song like no other. I’m pretty sure this song has inspired many broken-hearted girls to sing angrily into their hairbrush microphones. No? Just me then.”

— Annie Leyman, Assistant Product Manager, ELT

“Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right” – Bob Dylan

“This is the perfect anti-Valentine’s Day song because it’s sarcastic and spiteful, but still smart and heartfelt. Plus, “You just kinda wasted my precious time” is the perfect disdainful insult.”

— Erin Ganley, Senior Marketing Manager

“Feb 14” – Drive-By Truckers

“It might not get any more apt than Patterson Hood’s put-down of the Hallmark holiday, especially with an opening like ‘Flowers flying cross the room / Vases smashed against the floor / Said, ‘I’d rather be alone / Take your chocolates and go home.””

— Taylor Coe, Marketing Assistant

“Love Song” – Sara Bareilles

“I think this song speaks to what is least romantic about Valentine’s Day: it is by definition predictable, and celebrates love as performance and social conformity over love as inspiration.”

— Anna Hernandez-French, Assistant Editor, Journals

“Comes and Goes (In Waves)” – Greg Laswell

“My pick is ‘Comes and Goes (In Waves)’ by one of my favorite singer-songwriters, Greg Laswell. It’s perfect for those that are sad on Valentine’s Day and want to wallow in it.”

— Alyssa Bender, Marketing Associate

“You’re So Vain” – Carly Simon

“Kind of speaks for itself.”

— Kate Pais, Online Marketing Coordinator

Taylor Coe is a Marketing Assistant at Oxford University Press.

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Published on February 14, 2014 04:30

Love: First sights in Ovid

By Jane Alison

Among the myriad transformations in Ovid’s Metamorphoses—transformations of girls to trees or stars, boys to flowers or newts, women to rivers, rocks to men—the most powerful can be those wrought by erotic desire. Woods, beaches, and glades in Ovid’s poem are ecologies of desire and repulsion: one character spots another through the trees, and you can almost see the currents of desire flow as one figure instantly wants what he sees—and the other starts running away.

And Sight is what first lights passion. Sometimes Cupid is there with his quicksilver arrows to inject love or loathing, and when it happens, it’s instant. Yet at that mercurial moment of first sight, Ovid often lingers. He dilates the scene or freezes the image altogether into ekphrasis. Why? Narrative artists always modulate time—rushing, skipping, slowing—and Ovid was one of the earliest. But why, exactly, at moments like this?

Perseus and Andromeda, fresco, last decade of 1st BCE. Image copyright © The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Image source: Art Resource, NY

Here, for instance, is Apollo seeing Daphne, early in the poem:

He stares ablaze at eyes

like sparkling stars; looks at her mouth, and just looking

won’t do; praises her fingers and hands and wrists

and arms that are bare almost all the way up;

what’s hidden he’s sure is better. But she flits off

quick and light as wind . . . .

Yet this suits her, too. The wind bares her body,

breeze flowing through her fluttering dress,

light air streaming the hair out behind her—

more lovely even leaving.

Perseus as he flies near Andromeda, chained to a cliff in sacrifice to a sea-beast:

The instant Perseus saw her, chained by the arms

to rugged rocks (if a breeze hadn’t riffled her hair

and a slow-motion teardrop not rolled from her eye,

he’d have sworn she was marble), he inhaled love

unaware and stared, so entranced by the image he saw

that he almost forgot to keep beating his wings.

Or Salmacis as she spots Hermaphroditus in her mossy glade, pondering whether to swim in her pool:

He couldn’t wait: lured by the water’s light touch

he slipped the soft clothes from his slender self.

This really stirred her: the boy’s naked body lit

Salmacis with lust. . . .

He slapped his body briskly with open palms

and leapt into the pond. Arms stroking in turn

he gleamed in that translucent pool like a figurine

of ivory or white lilies encased in glass.

Diver diving from a rock, Tomb of Hunting and Fishing, 520-510 BC. Alfredo Dagli Orti / The Art Archive at Art Resource, NY

Or Narcissus, in another glade, as he crouches to drink and is startled by his reflection:

Amazed by himself, he holds his face rapt

and sits still, like a figure of Parian marble.

Lying down, he gazes at twin stars, his eyes,

and hair that could belong to Apollo or Bacchus,

the peachfuzz cheeks, ivory neck, delectable

mouth, and snowflake paleness tinged by a blush—

he admires everything for which he’s admired.

Yes, Ovid wants the reader to gaze at the beautiful girl or boy, to take part in this (parodic) gaze; and yes, this beauty is part of an equation with art—this boy is so beautiful he must be art itself. But Ovid’s stilled moments of first sight do something else narratively, for it isn’t only the love-object who is fixed before the reader’s eyes, but both object and observer: the whole moment of entrancement is caught. It’s a little like watching a laboratory experiment: there, in a glass dish, is one chemical; now we add another; and look, upon contact, one singes black at the edges, it begins to smoke . . .

Perhaps the naturalist in Ovid wanted to study closely the first effect of desire—the Ovid who looked at a piece of coral and tried to understand what made it rigid. But he might have had other reasons beyond the scientific, the aesthetic, and the parodic for stilling that moment of sight, a tinge of something felt: what is it like when you first see the one who cuts into your heart and changes you forever? This moment of sight is compacted with potential, not only in narrative but in life.

Long before writing Metamorphoses, Ovid wrote Amores, poems whose speaker tells of his infatuation with Corinna, his delight, jealousy, cruelty, panic, loss—the life-cycle of his love. We don’t see the moment when he first sees this young woman who ravages him, whose very eyes make him blind, who lets him pound on her door at night and finally leaves him holding only the poems he’s written about her. But early on, he offers an image of Corinna, when she’s stolen into his bedroom one hot afternoon as he lies in shuttered light:

When she stood before me, her dress on the floor,

her body did not have a flaw.

Such shoulders I saw and touched—oh, such arms.

The form of her breast firm in my palm,

and below that firm fullness a belly so smooth—

her long shapely sides, her young thighs!

Why list one by one? I saw nothing not splendid

and clasped her close to me, bare.

Perfect beauty is not interesting. More interesting, maybe: should we believe—within the fiction—that Corinna has really stolen into the bedroom, or should we read with shuttered lids and see the moment as drowsy fantasy? Is this stilled, visual moment a way of almost having what is longed for by transmuting the beloved to phantasia, to imagination: to art?

Perhaps those pictorial moments that follow, years later, in Metamorphoses hold ghosts of a more earnest impulse; perhaps they offer a preemptive memorialization. The lover looks and longs and might not be able to clasp what he (or she) sees, but the image, the phantasia: this at least will stay in the eyes and be held. As long as the beloved is only an image, all is in the lover’s control, and that first still image, that moment of first sight, can become the most loved of all.

Jane Alison is author of Change Me: Stories of Sexual Transformation from Ovid. Her previous works on Ovid include her first novel, The Love-Artist (2001) and a song-cycle entitled XENIA (with composer Thomas Sleeper, 2010). Her other books include a memoir, The Sisters Antipodes (2009), and two novels, Natives and Exotics (2005) and The Marriage of the Sea (2003). She is currently Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Virginia.

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Published on February 14, 2014 03:30

Historical fashions we’d love to see make a comeback

Fashion weeks became the standard trade fair for the industry in the late 20th century, and the tradition continues biannually. New York Fashion Week has waltzed its way down the runway, and the fashion world is packing up their garment bags to head to Paris to fête the Fall/Winter 2014-2015 Ready to Wear collections. In the spirit of glamour, here are eight 1920s trends from Berg Fashion Library we’d love to see back on the runway soon.

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Printed, long sleeve blouse with asymmetrical neckline with three ruffled tiers. (c) House of Paquin, Fashion Museum, Bath and North East Somerset. Used with permission.

Blouse with ruffles at sleeve cuff, decorative V seams in the bodice, and a five button placket at centre front from 1928-29 (c) House of Paquin, Fashion Museum, Bath and North East Somerset. Used with permission.

Dropped waist blouse with draped cowl neckline, large bow tie and geometric seaming. (c) House of Paquin, Fashion Museum, Bath and North East Somerset. Used with permission.

Pink and grey dress or blouse. (c) House of Paquin, Fashion Museum, Bath and North East Somerset. Used with permission.

Draped style, below-the-knee manteaux d'après midi. (c) House of Paquin, Fashion Museum, Bath and North East Somerset. Used with permission.

Long sleeved blouse with pointed collar, pin tuck details at the shoulder seams, and decorative fan detailing at the sleeve cuff from 1925-1926. (c) House of Paquin, Fashion Museum, Bath and North East Somerset. Used with permission.

Short sleeved blouse for day wear with a pointed fold over collar trimmed with scalloped edging from 1925-1926. (c) House of Paquin, Fashion Museum, Bath and North East Somerset. Used with permission.

Evening cape with large leopard fur collar acting as the cape closure. (c) House of Paquin, Fashion Museum, Bath and North East Somerset. Used with permission.

Informed by prestigious academic and library advisors, and anchored by the 10-volume Encyclopedia of World Dress and Fashion, the Berg Fashion Library is the first online resource to provide access to interdisciplinary and integrated text, image, and journal content on world dress and fashion. The Berg Fashion Library offers users cross-searchable access to an expanding range of essential resources in this discipline of growing importance and relevance and will be of use to anyone working in, researching, or studying fashion, anthropology, art history, history, museum studies, and cultural studies. For more insight into Fashion Week, check out Berg’s article and blog post.

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Published on February 14, 2014 02:30

Advancing the field of cardiovascular medicine

Each year cardiovascular disease (CVD) causes over 4 million deaths in Europe and 1.9 million deaths in the European Union (EU). Although the rates of death attributed to CVD have declined over the years, the burden of the disease remains high and on-going research into cardiovascular medicine remains vital. Through clinical and scientific research, we can study a variety of risk factors, treatments, and outcomes. How does nationality contribute to a person’s risk of suffering a major cardiac event? How can temperature management contribute to post-cardiac arrest care? Meet some of the people behind the trials and studies with the European Heart Journal.

The CANHEART Study

Thomas Lüscher, Professor and Chairman of Cardiology at the University Hospital Zurich, speaks with Jack V. Tu, Professor of Medicine at University of Toronto, and Leslie H. Curtis, Associate Professor in Medicine at Duke University, about the CANHEART Study at the Annual Scientific Sessions of the American Heart Association, Dallas, Texas. The CANHEART STudy examined the 10-year incidence rates of major cardiovascular events in 697,690 immigrants to Ontario, Canada.

The TOPCAT Trial

Thomas Lüscher, Professor and Chairman of Cardiology at the University Hospital Zurich, speaks with Bertram Pitt, Professor of Medicine Emeritus at University of Michigan School of Medicine, and Marc Pfeffer, Dzau Professor at Harvard Medical School, about the TOPCAT Trial at the Annual Scientific Sessions of the American Heart Association, Dallas, Texas. The Treatment of Preserved Cardiac Function Heart Failure with an Aldosterone Antagonist (TOPCAT) Trial examined the impact of spironolactone on primary outcomes, hospitalizations, and survivals.

The Targeted Temperature Management (TTM) Trial

Dr Benjamin Abella, University of Pennysylvania and discussant at the American Heart Association, speaks with Dr. Niklas Nielsen, of Lund University, Sweden, about the Targeted Temperature Management (TTM) Trial for post-arrest care. The TTM Trials compared two target temperatures intended to prevent fever (therapeutic hypothermia) for unconscious survivors of out-of-hospital cardiac arrest.

The EHJ Today video series comes from the European Heart Journal, an international, English language, peer-reviewed journal dealing with cardiovascular medicine. It is an official Journal of the European Society of Cardiology and aims to publish the highest quality material, both clinical and scientific, on all aspects of cardiovascular medicine. It includes articles related to research findings, technical evaluations, and reviews. In addition it provides a forum for the exchange of information on all aspects of cardiovascular medicine, including education issues. Watch more cardiology videos from the European Heart Journal and Oxford University Press.

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Published on February 14, 2014 01:30

Is love real?

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In honor of Valentine’s Day today, the holiday that celebrates love, we’re sharing an excerpt from Emotion: A Very Short Introduction by Dylan Evans. Evans presents us with the differing opinions on romantic love. Some believe it to be an invention, while others classify it as a universal emotion hardwired into the brain. As we open heart-shaped boxes of candy today, is it possible that the romantic love we feel is something we learned from the romantic stories we read and watched throughout our life?

With some emotions, it is relatively easy to see where they are located on the innateness spectrum. There is much evidence to suggest that fear and anger are very basic, while it is clear that ‘being a wild pig’ is very culture specific. With other emotions, however, things are not so clear. One emotion in particular that has divided opinion is romantic love. Some maintain that it is a universal emotion, hardwired into the brain just like fear and anger. Others disagree, arguing that romantic love is more like the state of ‘being a wild pig’. La Rochefoucauld famously declared that ‘some people would never have fallen in love if they had never heard of love’. Those who think romantic love is a culturally specific emotion go even further: they claim that nobody would fall in love if they had not previously heard romantic stories.

The most famous proponent of this view was the writer C. S. Lewis, who argued that romantic love was invented in Europe in the early twelfth century. It was around this time that ‘courtly love’ became the central theme of much European poetry. In many of the poems a nobleman would fall in love with a lady at the royal court. He would become her knight and devote himself to her service, though his passion for her would rarely be consummated. The love of Lancelot for King Arthur’s wife, Guinevere, is perhaps the best-known story to emerge from this literary genre.

If romantic love really were an invention of some medieval poets, nobody could have felt this emotion before the Middle Ages. C. S. Lewis was quite happy to accept this consequence of his provocative thesis, and proclaimed that ‘no one falls in love in Homer or Virgil’.

By Frank Dicksee. 1884. Representing the famous balcony scene from Romeo and Juliet. Public Doman via Wikimedia Commons.

This must surely be among the front-running candidates for the most ridiculous idea of the twentieth century. It seems hard to believe that a sensitive man like C. S. Lewis could fail to detect the unmistakable passion expressed in the Song of Songs, a book in the Old Testament:

What a wound thou hast made, my bride, my true love.

What a wound thou hast made in this heart of mine!

And all with one glance of an eye,

All with one ringlet straying on thy neck!

Yet this text pre-dates the medieval poetry of courtly love by over a thousand years. In fact, romantic love probably goes back much further than this, perhaps even to the dawn of humankind. A hundred thousand years ago, while our ancestors were still confined to the African plains, their physical activities were very different from ours, but their emotional lives were probably very similar. The first humans spent much of their time scouring the terrain for edible plants and making temporary shelters, activities now completely absent from all but a few human communities. But many evolutionary psychologists have argued that they also spent a lot of time getting infatuated with one another, making love, feeling jealous, and getting heartbroken, just as we do today.

Romantic love can also be found in cultures separated from our own by space as well as time, in the remote preliterate societies studied by anthropologists. Yet, if romantic love were a European invention, it could not be experienced by peoples who had had no contact with Europe. This simple consideration allowed two anthropologists to put the cultural theory of romantic love to the test. First, they needed a working definition of romantic love, so they identified the following core features of the idea: a powerful feeling of sexual attraction to a single person, feelings of anguish and longing when the loved one is absent, and intense joy when he or she is present. They also listed other elements, including elaborate courtship gestures such as giving gifts and showing one’s love in song and poetry. They then examined the anthropological literature and counted the number of cultures in which this collection of features was described. To their surprise, they found that it was described in 90 percent of the cultures on record. If anthropologists have actually observed and noted down incidents of romantic love in 90 percent of the societies they have studied, it is a fair bet that this emotion exists in the remaining 10 percent too.

In the light of all this evidence, it seems hard to believe that anyone could doubt the universality of romantic love. However, there is a small grain of truth in the view of romantic love as a European invention. Even basic emotions differ from culture to culture, though only to a small degree. To return to the musical analogy, the symphony sounds slightly different when played by different orchestras, even though the score is the same. In a similar way, romantic love is played out slightly differently in different cultures. In the West it is marked by special features not found elsewhere. These special features include the idea that romantic love must take you by surprise, the idea that it should be the basis for a lifelong commitment, and the idea that it is the supreme form of self-fulfillment. So, while romantic love is a universal theme, it is a theme that admits of some minor variations.

Dylan Evans is the author of several books including Emotion: A Very Short Introduction.

The Very Short Introductions (VSI) series combines a small format with authoritative analysis and big ideas for hundreds of topic areas. Written by our expert authors, these books can change the way you think about the things that interest you and are the perfect introduction to subjects you previously knew nothing about. Grow your knowledge with OUPblog and the VSI series every Friday, subscribe to Very Short Introductions articles on the OUPblog via email or RSS, and like Very Short Introductions on Facebook.

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