In the initial wave of the opioid crisis, uninformed prescribing practices and lax oversight were the drivers of opioid addiction and death. Although opioid prescriptions have decreased by 44.4 percent between 2011-2020,1 the number of deaths linked to prescription opioids has decreased only marginally.2 The marked fall in opioid prescribing without a concomitant reduction in opioid-related deaths suggests that an at-risk population continued to receive prescription opioids, whether directly or indirectly, from a medical professional. Currently, illicitly manufactured fentanyl (IMF) is the culprit for the majority of the approximately 81,000 annual opioid-related deaths.3 This finding has been misleadingly used to suggest that prescription opioids for chronic pain are no longer (and never were) a relevant concern,4 while the reality is that their lethal consequences are simply dwarfed by the marked rise in IMF deaths.5

Within the turmoil of the Norman Conquest, did religious institutions affect the economic outcomes of their land? Exploiting historical data about the changes in holdings’ lordship that occurred after the Conquest, we compare the economic performance of estates controlled by different types of lords. Holdings controlled by Benedictine monasteries (vis-à-vis secular lords) experienced a better performance, although, once accounting for the unchanging upper level of the feudal structure, we cannot fully disentangle this effect from the persistence of Benedictine Overlordship. A comparison with Celtic monasteries, with a different organizational structure, suggests a role for the governance structure of Benedictine monasteries.

In this article Renate Ní Uigín, Librarian of the Honorable Society of King's Inns Library in Dublin, gives LIM an overview of the library's fascinating history and its collection, while also outlining the service it offers today.

In order to explore the ways knowledge travels across spatial and cultural boundaries, this article focuses on the intriguing case of the Edinburgh-trained Scottish surgeon James Esdaile (1808–59), who, after practising conventional surgery for almost fifteen years in British colonial India, quite unexpectedly turned to mesmeric anaesthesia in the last five years of his service. By following his career and his mesmeric turn, the article describes Esdaile's subsequent public experiments in mesmeric anaesthesia in collaboration with indigenous practices and practitioners of trance induction in the 1840s which led to the creation of a special mesmeric hospital in Calcutta. Although very successful, it eventually ceased to function, apparently victim to new and cheaper chemical anaesthetics. Mobilizing the insights of science studies scholarship into the processes of scientific experimentation, this article seeks to shed new light on the necessary professional, social and political investments for the making and mobility of scientific knowledge across social and cultural boundaries in a colonial setting.

L’évaluation de deux ouvrages récents sur l’histoire des Indiens d’Amérique du Nord, Indigenous Continent: The Epic Contest for North America de Pekka Hämäläinen (2022) et The Rediscovery of America: Native Peoples and the Unmaking of U.S. History de Ned Blackhawk (2023), qui se veulent rénovateurs, offre l’occasion d’un état des lieux. Les deux auteurs soulèvent deux des grandes questions qui animent le champ, celle de la capacité d’agir des Amérindiens, reconnue et acceptée de façon consensuelle par les historiens, et celle de leur raison d’agir, pour laquelle des visions contrastées se font jour. Dans cette note critique, nous nous demandons dans quelle mesure l’importance accordée par N. Blackhawk et P. Hämäläinen à la capacité d’agir des Autochtones n’a pas précisément pour effet d’enfouir la réflexion sur leur raison d’agir. Si P. Hämäläinen, à la différence de N. Blackhawk, insiste sur l’écueil de la téléologie et s’efforce de valoriser la variété des modes d’intrusion coloniale, les deux historiens se retrouvent dans leur renoncement à une forme d’anthropologie qui, par le passé, a été soucieuse de restituer l’intégrité culturelle des Autochtones. Le lexique analytique choisi, à l’exemple du terme « empire », conduit parfois à un effacement de la différence culturelle et à une torsion de l’histoire. Cette note plaide ainsi pour une complémentarité retrouvée entre histoire et anthropologie.

Riga and Odesa (Odessa) rank among the Russian empire's foremost nineteenth-century ports. These port cities, respectively located on the Baltic and Black Seas, enabled imperial Russia to trade huge amounts of goods, boosting its burgeoning economy in the second half of the nineteenth century. We argue that, despite the distance separating the two cities, it is only in relation to each other that their full significance emerges. This article explores the histories of Riga and Odesa, examining their situations within the Russian empire's economic geography and taking a closer look at the interrelationships between the two ports. In our view, this history is more than a narrative of competition for the premier position among the ports of the Russian empire; it is also a tale of local initiatives, engagement with the imperial center, lobbying for imperial financial support, relationships of economic interdependence, and an example of the crucial role that ports at the supposed periphery of an empire played in a globalized economy.

Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSS) positioning and integrity monitoring models and algorithms currently generically assume that measurement errors follow a Gaussian distribution. As this is not always the case, there is a trade-off affecting system safety and availability, emphasising the need for better error characterisation in mission-critical applications. Research to date has shown advantages of Generalised Extreme Value (GEV) distribution for mapping extreme events. However, it is more complex than the Gaussian distribution, especially in the error convolution process. This paper derives a distribution, referred to as the GEV-based Gaussian distribution, that benefits from the advantages of both the GEV and Gaussian distributions in mapping extreme events and simplicity, respectively. The proposed distribution is tested against Gaussian, GEV and Generalised t distribution. The results show that the proposed distribution can provide a better bound for extreme events than the tested distribution both for pseudorange and carrier phase errors.