Histories

This manuscript examines how distinct epistemic attitudes toward singularity and generality have been articulated in medical writing across different historical contexts, offering a conceptual and meta-historical analysis of two enduring genres in biomedical literature: the individualized case report and the systematically aggregated clinical trial. Hippocratic case narratives are considered as a particularly lucid articulation of a mode of inquiry that privileges detailed observation of individual patients, while medieval Aristotelian natural philosophy exemplifies a contrasting emphasis on regularity, intelligibility, and general explanation. Renaissance medical and philosophical traditions are treated as a mediating moment in which attention to anomaly, wonder, and singularity was explicitly re-legitimized within learned medicine. These historically situated articulations are not presented as stages in a progressive narrative, but as recurrent epistemic orientations that are repeatedly reconfigured under different theoretical, institutional, and technological conditions. The paper argues that the tension between attention to exceptional cases and the pursuit of generalizable knowledge continues to structure modern biomedical writing, where case reports remain essential for identifying rare, novel, or anomalous phenomena, while clinical trials formalize strategies for producing reproducible, population-level evidence.

During the past decade, chatbots have been integrated into commercial platforms to facilitate second language acquisition (SLA) by providing opportunities for interactive conversations. However, SLA learner progress is limited by chatbots that lack the contextualization typically added by instructors to college and university courses. The present study focuses on a collaborative Digital Learning Incubator (DLI) project dedicated to creating and testing a chatbot with a physical form, or avatar chatbot, called Slabot (Second Language Acquisition Bot), in two upper-level university courses at the University of Tennessee, asynchronous online Spanish 331 (Introduction to Hispanic Culture), and in-person Spanish 434 (Hispanic Culture Through Film). Students in these two courses believe that their oral skills would benefit from more opportunities to speak in Spanish. To provide the students with more practice and instructors with a tool for assessing Spanish oral skills in online and in-person courses, the DLI project objective was to advance current avatar chatbot platforms by enabling Slabot to elicit student responses appropriate for evaluation according to the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages (ACTFL) standards. An initial test of Slabot was conducted, and the results demonstrated the potential for Slabot to achieve the project objective.

Medical history of psychopathology is, to some extent, the history of the overlapping traditions of Cartesian-Platonic dualism and physical reductionism looking for a taxonomic middle ground by means of diagnostic constructs. Building on such liminality, Freud first showed that traumatic memories could well be made of pure fantasy, a mind-only construct of experience, and still act traumatically on the patient’s body. Under that sway, Freud and Janet came to intentionally modify their patients’ memories to cure “hysterical” dysfunctional behaviours by means of hypnosis. The metaphorical practice of “writing new words in the human soul” has been adopted as a clinical device since the early days of psychotherapy, as the meaning of past experiences was clinically approached, verbally and emotionally negotiated, to remove somatic symptoms. Working on memory at the interdisciplinary level, we here show that what is nowadays referred to as the abstract mind, or psyche in medicine, is the historical precipitate of quite a unique cultural construction, resulting from the porous liminality between religious domain, philosophical theory and scientific method. We hereby address psychopathology, the philosophy of medicine and the frontiers between memory and fantasy—besides those between body and mind—to suggest how psychoanalysis can be considered more as a hermeneutic than as a science, or otherwise, how hermeneutics can be appreciated as a scientific, medical and therapeutic tool. Memory itself is addressed on the threshold between consciousness, organic life and intergenerational potential.