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In 2008, the American Medical Association Journal of Ethics dedicated an entire volume to ethical issues in sleep medicine. Texts published in the “Educating for Professionalism” and “Law, Policy, and Society” sections of this volume serve as theorical starting points to establish a correlation between lack of medical training in sleep disorders and ethical dilemmas encountered by expert witnesses during trials related to problematic automatic behaviours that occurred during REM sleep.

Keywords: droit criminel, éthique appliquée, éthique normative, expertise, parasomnies, responsabilité, sommeil, témoignage, criminal law, applied ethics, normative ethics, expertise, parasomnias, responsibility, sleep, testimony

Since the 1990s, the transformation of cord blood into a precious source of stem cells has given rise to a global cord blood bank industry, which is now competing with a large network of public cord blood banks. This article explores the sociocultural context surrounding the emergence of this industry and aims at elucidating the ethical and political concerns that this industry raises. Whereas public cord blood banks are purveyors of values such as altruism and national solidarity traditionally linked to the redistributive model of human blood and organ donation that emerged after World War Two, private banks engage very different forms of solidarity. It is indeed under the guise of family solidarity and mothers' moral responsibility to do their best to protect their children that they come to define private preservation as a form of “biological insurance” against potential risks to their children's health. By allowing mothers to invest their bodily tissues simultaneously in their children's uncertain future and in experimental cell therapies, these banks promote a new model of patient participation in the development of future therapeutic innovations. This article analyzes this model as embedded in the contemporary reconfiguration of biopolitics that sociologist Nikolas Rose (2007) envisions as constituting a new form of biocitizenship. The paper finally casts a critical eye on these personalized services, in particular because of the new forms of social coercion on mothers that are brought about in a social and political context characterized by an increasing moral accountability of individuals with regard to the “good management” of their own health risks. These services also appear ethically problematic in relation to political demands of distributive justice—e.g., the ideal of equal access to basic health care for every citizen.

AbstractCRIMINOLOGICAL AND PSYCHIATRIC STUDIES IN JAPAN Criminological development in Japan is largely the work of the Japanese Association of Criminology, founded in Tokyo in 1913. The year 1935 saw the debut of the publication Acta criminologia?: et medicinee legalis japonica. After an interruption of several years caused by the second world war, society made great strides, and important research could then be undertaken. There are now three State institutes of criminology in Japan: the General Research Institute of Forensic Medicine at the Tokyo University of Medicine and Dentistry, the Institute of Research, Practical and Clinical Training at the Ministry of Justice, and the Institute of Encephalographie Research of the University of Tokyo. Among the most important criminological and psychiatric research projects are: 1) Study of twins: Led by Yoshimasu, this could be considered as one of the most brilliant contributions of Japanese criminology to science. It is based on the rate of concordance between homozygotic and heterozygotic twins. For a clearer understanding of the phenomenon of concordance between the two partners, Yoshimasu used the following factors: age at first offence, age at the time of research, and number of relapses. The results of his analysis show a lesser rate of agreement than that of foreign studies, nevertheless this rate increased perceptibly after the second world war, which is explained by the influence of environment. 2) Research on recidivism by means of analysis of the life curve: In 1951, Yoshimasu discovered a new method for analyzing the criminal careers of recidivists (this method is defined in English as «the criminal life curve» and in German, die kriminelle Lebenskurve). It comprises three indices: a) age at the time of first offence: before or after 25 years; b) the type of offence: classified in accordance with the kind of crime, the sequence of crime and the kinds of crimes committed during any one episode, i.e. one, the same or different; c) interval between the offences: sequence, remission, intermission, suspension. Later on, various studies were added to this research. 3) Characteristics of various crimes: The studies undertaken dealt with homicidal women, homicidal girls, mass murderers (Massenmo'rder). These studies showed interesting results, because there is an intimate relationship between patricide and the family environment in the traditional Japanese atmosphere. Other researchers were interested in arsonists, sex criminals, persistent embezzlers, recidivists in crimes of violence. 4) Research on juvenile delinquency: In this field, Japan may well be proud of having several pioneers. We stressed the importance of the psychopathic personality, as much as the sheer asymmetry of psychic and physical maturity. 5) Criminality of the mentally disturbed with encephalitis due to anti-rabies vaccination: Studies undertaken after the massacre of 12 employees of the Teikoku Bank of Tokyo revealed that subjects suffering from this malady have a deviated personality of a mythomanie type with Korsakov's syndrome. Other studies show a seat of demyelinized fibres. Treatment could thus be applied to effectively fight this illness. 6) Amphetamine drug addiction and criminality: This problem took on the dimensions of a national crisis after the second world war, when amphetamine drug addiction rose to 200 000. The work undertaken on this problem revealed psychopathic personalities characterized by hyperthymic tendencies, hysterics, explosiveness or instability, as explained by Kurt Schneider. 7) Reactions to penal institutions and disciplinary infractions: With regard to these, a new method called infractiologie was used. It is concerned with the actual relationship which exists between crimes committed in society and infractions committed within the penal institution.

ABSTRACTThe author describes the main characteristics of Quebec's health system and explains how they are deeply rooted in a history, which in some cases extends as far back as the beginning of the century. He specifies the various , technical, economic, political, and social factors that best explain them. In particular, he points to the Federal Government's influence during the course of the century. Finally, he foresees possible trends in Quebec's health care system at the dawn of the twenty-first century.

AbstractUsing the empirical framework of the CONPHRAS-PROCOPE project, our aim is to gather bilingual (German-French) terms and expressions for writing and translating specialized texts. Focussing primarily on the areas of medicine and the institutions, we have adopted multiple designations to identify the three types of phenomena observed - phrase-terms, specialized phrasemes and phrase-texts - and have formulated hypotheses as to their overlapping roles. Collocations are identified electronically, assigned to lexicons, and envisaged from both a conceptual and discoursal standpoint. From a collocational point view, specialized language more closely resembles natural language than formal language. The implications for didactics as well as for dictionary-writing are therefore significant as this beckons the need to recognize the complementarity of everyday language and specialized language.

SUMMARYThe phenomenon of non-traditional therapies is firstly analyzed within the context of an increasing number of approaches in the therapeutic field in Quebec and the Western hemisphere and of the development of health care alternatives. The growth and diversity of alternative therapies legitimizes the need to establish an operational definition of this phenomenon, which is the framework of this article.

In postmodernity, the world is no longer conceived or described as a coherent whole, but as a fragmented complexity. The human body is a site of confrontation between techniques and their representations. Dispersed by the new technologies of the visual, the body is reconstructed as centre in film, and simulated in the virtual universe. After encountering this changed object, the subject can no longer be posited in the same way, following the principle of frontality, but must be thought of as a positioning that is "variable and enveloping" in Edmond Couchot's terms.