No abstract

Cross-cultural folk beliefs about milk-suckling or milk-drinking amphibians and reptiles have long been noted by scholars. European dialectal folklore, for instance, has countless instances of cow-suckling and milk-stealing animals including butterflies, reptiles, batrachians, hares, hedgehogs and nocturnal birds. These creatures are regularly said to sneak into the domestic space at night to suck life-giving milk or blood from cattle and women. The early documentary evidence for this set of ideas, which relies, in great part, on the motif of breasts or udders suckled by a snake or similar animals such as toads or lizards, has not yet received the study it so richly deserves. Ideally, a comparative study of the milk-suckling reptile (both animal-human and animal-animal) would be carried out across the full gamut of relevant disciplines including ethnology, linguistics, philology, folklore and historicalreligious studies: this would naturally include pre-modern written references and an analysis of their transmission. This paper aims to open up new avenues for research on the traditional fondness of snakes for milk, a truly 'impossible biology'. It is built around several known and little known premodern literary and iconographic sources -examples can be found from much of Eurasia -and adopts an interdisciplinary and retrospective comparative method.

stiffness and pulse wave velocity / Aorta and carotid arteries 137 (0.94 to 1.01) p = 0.096; Obesity OR = 0.47 (0.29 to 1.77) p = 0.003 and Diabetes OR = 2.41 (1.15 -5.05) p = 0.020. Conclusions: According to the results obtained, genetic polymorphisms variables were not in the multivariate analysis equation to determine the increase of the PWV, which can be explained either by being included in the selected variables such as hypertension, or on the other hand, they may not have enough strength to remain in the equation. So, according to this study, PWV has much more to do with behaviors and traditional risk factors than the genetic heritage.P883 Endothelial dysfunction, pulse wave velocity and augmentation index are correlated in subjects with systemic arterial hypertension?

The aim of this paper is to provide evidence for three themes related to ‘botanical bosom serpents’, i.e. stories about plants growing in and on bodies. First, the sprouting of flowers from the body in medieval Christian tales, to be contrasted to ‘bottom flowers’ attested in Dutch profane paintings produced in the later Middle-Ages; second, the presence of botanical bosom serpent narratives in Japan; and, third, the topic of plants growing in, and on animals in oral traditions and works of natural history.

Scholars have long attempted to situate the ant-episode from the twelfth-century German poem Reinhart Fuchs in a broad folklore framework. Concerned with conventional matters such as origin, function and transmission, they have broken up this episode into different motifs and referenced folktales and legends from widely separate times and places. The aim of this paper is to reassess these earlier philological-folklore approaches. I will rely on a multi-source method and examine, in comparative terms, three interconnected semantic narrative units: the enmity between ants and lions; the lion’s sickness triggered by the revenge of the ant, which crawls into the lion’s head; and the stratagem for expelling the head-insect with a sweating cure.