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Health sciences libraries are found in hospitals, universities, and other health-related organisations. Some supply information that will be used in life and death situations, while others assist in the training of health professionals, support research or provide information to patients. These libraries, some of which are small, share their resources. In order to offer current information, the printed word co-exists with well-established data bases such as MEDLINE and newer such as CD-ROMs. What does the future hold for these libraries?

Introduction: Pre-clerkship procedural skills training is not yet a standard across Canadian medical school curricula, resulting in limited exposure to procedures upon entering clerkship. While simulated skills training has been documented in the literature to improve performance in technical ability, anxiety and confidence have yet to be investigated despite their documented impact on performance and learning. This study therefore aims to evaluate the effect of pre-clerkship procedural skills training on medical student anxiety and confidence. Methods: A procedural skills training program was designed based on an evidence-based near-peer, flipped classroom model of education. Ninety-two second-year medical students volunteered for the study. Fifty-six were randomized to the training group, and 36 were randomized to the control group. Students in the training group attended seven procedural skills tutorials over seven months. The control group represented the average medical school student without standardized procedural training. Student anxiety and confidence were assessed at the beginning and end of the program using the State Trait Anxiety Inventory and Confidence Questionnaires. Results: Students who participated in the procedural skills program demonstrated greater reductions in their state anxiety and greater improvements in confidence compared to the control group. Conclusion: Longitudinal procedural skills training in the simulation setting has demonstrated improvements in anxiety and confidence among pre-clerkship medical students. These added benefits to training have the potential to ease medical students’ transition into clerkship, while also contributing to a safer and more effective clinical experience. Therefore, future integration of standardized pre-clerkship procedural skills training within medical school curricula should be considered.

Obesity is now recognized by many medical associations as a pathological condition. In this article, I first focus on the construction of nosological entities before discussing the stages that led to the medicalization of obesity in the last century. I then examine the main approaches in the philosophy of medicine to determine whether they offer arguments in favor of, or against, the thesis that obesity is a disease. I argue that the naturalistic approach, which is more sensitive to biomedical data, fails to specify in what way obesity would be a disease ; and that if the normativist approach succeeds better, it is at the cost of a permissiveness from which we can fear the excesses. Nevertheless, the latter makes it possible to highlight the social and biological part of pathologies in their identification as pathologies. My conclusion will be similar to that of Hofmann : the reasons put forward for arguing that obesity is a disease in the proper sense are mainly pragmatic in nature.

Keywords: obésité, médicalisation, classification, maladie, santé, naturalisme, normativisme, obesity, medicalization, classification, disease, health, naturalism, normativism

This article aims to show that, to rethink the relationship between literature and the medical humanities, it will be necessary to revisit the terms of this relationship in order to improvise others following an important text written by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick in the late 1990s and marked by both her experience with cancer and her engagement with ACT UP (AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power). To the paranoid logic of criticism, Sedgwick opposes the logic of reparation. To read critically, Sedgwick explains, is to guard against, to beware of. It is a way to reduce the effects of surprise and attachment. Guided by an article by Georges Canguilhem, “Is a Pedagogy of Healing Possible?” (1978) and the memoir by Jean-Dominique Bauby, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, published the same year as Sedgwick's text, the present article explores how repair does not necessarily mean to turn back—for example, to deny the hermeneutic heritage—but perhaps to envision another relationship to time, to a before and an after, to time as a normative horizon, and in particular, to the time of healing. To protect oneself and to beware of is also, etymologically, to heal, explains Canguilhem. Bauby, for his part, did not and would not heal. At least, he did not heal in terms that meant a turning inward. He developed a pedagogy of the literary text in the time of reparation that stresses affect and surface.

AbstractAt the beginning of the 20th century, in the midst of the crisis of modernity, Quebec's Catholic Church was on the defensive as it confronted developments in the biological sciences, especially Darwinian evolution which gave a non-religious explanation for the origins and evolution of life. While the province's francophone medical establishment asserted itself by publishing in prominent journals, by organizing of international conferences, and by helping to prepare the new medical legislation of 1909, a physician from Saint-Gabriel- de-Brandon set out to popularize Darwinism. An uncle of André Laurendeau and respected by his peers for his commitment and contributions to the profession, this very active and non-conformist country doctor published the resulting book in 1911. La vie. Considérations biologiques (Life. Biological Considerations), was intended as a synthesis of the works of Lamarck, Darwin and Haeckel. Criticizing the lack of scientific training among Quebec francophones, the book recommended a radical reform of the programs of study offered in the province's classic colleges. J.-A. Archambault, bishop of the new diocese of Joliette, would condemn the book and its author.

SummaryMainly because of their easy use, cell culture has been and remains a useful material for cellular biologist. Nevertheless, these cells loose or gain specific properties when they are cultured in vitro. Moreover, they represent only part of tissue and, a fortiori, of organs, so that results obtained in cell culture cannot strictly reflect that exist in more complex conditions. As a consequence, researcher has to use animal models, the question being now the choice of the animal model. In this paper, the main existing models are described and examples were given to illustrate their contribution to cell biology.