Many western industrialized countries are currently suffering from a crisis in health human resources, one that involves a debate over the recruitment and licensing of foreign-trained doctors and nurses. The intense public policy interest in foreign-trained medical personnel, however, is not new. During the 1960s, western countries revised their immigration policies to focus on highly-trained professionals. During the following decade, hundreds of thousands of health care practitioners migrated from poorer jurisdictions to western industrialized countries to solve what were then deemed to be national doctor and nursing 'shortages' in the developed world. Migration plummeted in the 1980s and 1990s only to re-emerge in the last decade as an important debate in global health care policy and ethics. This paper will examine the historical antecedents to this ethical debate. It will trace the early articulation of the idea of a 'brain drain', one that emerged from the loss of NHS doctors to other western jurisdictions in the 1950s and 1960s. Only over time did the discussion turn to the 'manpower' losses of 'third world countries', but the inability to track physician migration, amongst other variables, muted any concerted ethical debate. By contrast, the last decade's literature has witnessed a dramatically different ethical framework, informed by globalization, the rise of South Africa as a source donor country, and the ongoing catastrophe of the AIDS epidemic. Unlike the literature of the early 1970s, recent scholarship has focussed on a new framework of global ethics.

Christopher Wren's figure of the brain 'viewed from below' in Thomas Willis's Cerebri anatome (1664) set a precedent, not only for subsequent images of the brain, but for scientific illustration. The image is the visual proof of a Baconian experiment conducted by the Oxford dissection team, in which dye was pumped into the carotid arteries of animal and human specimens in order to imitate the natural flow of blood, thereby applying William Harvey's theory of circulation to the brain. Usually described as engravings, Wren's images are in fact etchings (produced by the acid process), significant because etching for book illustration was then in its infancy in England. In addition to considering Wren as an experimental etcher, this article frames our understanding of Wren's contributions to Willis's project in terms of his virtuosic talents as amateur draughtsman, natural historian, anatomist, and his use of optical and draughting instruments.

It would have been better for Christopher Wren's reputation as "that rare and early prodigy of universal science", in the words of his friend the diarist John Evelyn, if he had not subsequently proved to be an architect of genius. The towering presence of his St Paul's cathedral and magnificently varied London churches, erected in the wake of the 1666 fire, overshadow his achievements in a wide range of sciences that include mathematics, astronomy, microscopy, instrument design, natural philosophy, natural history, anatomy and physiology.During his years at the University of Oxford, UK, the precocious Wren was part of the circle of thinkers, investigators and experimentalists who were to lay the foundations of the Royal Society. They intended that no part of the natural world or the cosmos should escape systematic analysis, with a precision that can broadly be called mathematical. It is obvious how astronomical studies should fit within this description, but less clear how the results of anatomical dissection could match that ideal. Wren's illustrations for Thomas Willis's 1664 book Cerebri Anatome (The Anatomy of the Brain) demonstrate how this could be accomplished (see example, pictured right).A good sense of how the seventeenthcentury concept of 'curiosity' fitted with the precise sciences is provided by Bishop John Wilkins, who chaired the founding meeting of the Royal Society. Evelyn, that most assiduous chronicler of his contemporaries, described how Wilkins had constructed "transparent apiaries, which he had built like castles and palaces, and so order' d them one Mapping the cerebral globeA detailed sketch by architect Christopher Wren reveals his surprising contribution to neuroscience, explain Martin Kemp and Nathan Flis.upon another so as to take the honey without destroying the bees".Wilkins also exhibited a "wide variety of shadows, dyals, perspectives, and many other artificial, mathematical, and magical curiosities". Most of the devices were contrived by Wilkins himself, but others were credited to "that prodigious young scholar Mr Christopher Wren, who presented me with a piece of white marble, which he had stain'd with a lively red very deepe, as beautiful as if it had been natural".One of Wren's mathematical inventions was a perspective machine, or perspectograph, an ingenious device that allows a draftsman, squinting through a sight, to trace the lineaments of any object or landscape. One result was his drawing entitled 'Prospect of Windsor Castle from the North' , engraved by Wenceslaus Hollar for Elias Ashmole's 1672 book Institution, Laws and Ceremonies of the Most Noble Order of the Garter.Wren's perspectograph was probably used to trace the topography of the brain, its nerves and blood vessels, just as he used a telescope coupled to a micrometer to map the heavens and create the first lunar globe. However, it would be wrong to think that Wren used his instruments and great skill as a draftsman to create the equivalent of a photograph of a dissection -his representations are a succinct sy...

This paper examines several aspects of the complex relationship between the city and the Victorian lunatic asylum. The first part of the paper demonstrates that the urban-ness of the public mental hospital has been a point of some degree of ambiguity. Mental hospitals were Janus-like—looking forward to the emerging urban world and yet, at the same time, looking back to a romanticized, rustic past. The second part of the paper adopts a quantitative approach and reveals that, far from the receptacle of strictly urban dwellers, the mental hospitals received a remarkable number of mentally ill from rural regions of the province. This finding, derived from one of the largest database studies of mental hospital patients ever undertaken, revises an important and longstanding argument in the historiography of the North American mental hospital.

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