Taking the office of the coninc der ribauden in Ghent as a case-study, this article reconstructs the enforcement of urban sanitation and preventative health practices during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. The coninc managed a wide range of issues perceived as potentially polluting, damaging or threatening to health. Banning waste and chasing pigs as well as prostitutes off the streets, the office implemented a governmental vision on communal well-being. Health interests, as part of a broader pursuit of the common good, therefore played an important yet hitherto largely overlooked role in medieval urban governance.

In the late eighteenth century, the Ecole vétérinaire d'Alfort was renowned for its innovative veterinary education and for having one of the largest natural history and anatomy collections in France. Yet aside from a recent interest in the works of one particular anatomist, the school's history has been mostly ignored. I examine here the fame of the school in eighteenth-century travel literature, the historic connection between veterinary science and natural history, and the relationship between the school's hospital and its esteemed cabinet. Using the correspondence papers of veterinary administrators, state representatives and competing scientific institutions during the French Revolution, I argue that resource constraints and the management of anatomical and natural history specimens produced new disciplinary boundaries between natural history, veterinary medicine and human medicine, while reinforcing geographic divisions between the local and the foreign in the study of non-human animals. This paper reconstructs the Ancien Régime reasoning that veterinary students would benefit from a global perspective on animality, and the Revolutionary government's rejection of that premise. Under republicanism, veterinary medicine became domestic.

Some marble, appropriately worked, comes to constitute a statue: constitution is the relation between the resulting statue and the marble it is made of. Some recent authors use the concept of constitution to explicate or at least provide an analogy for the doctrine of the Trinity. I argue that this won't do, because there is no viable candidate for the role the marble plays in the statue's case.

An exploration of cabinet leadership in Mexico has always provided insights into political recruitment trends for leading policymakers. An examination of the present cabinet from 2012 through 2016 is valuable for four reasons. First, to what extent does the current leadership reflect changes in compositional patterns of the most influential policymakers as a result of a democratic electoral process dating from 2000? Second, does the return of the PRI reflect traditional patterns established by the last two PRI presidential administrations, or has the present cabinet taken on features that can be attributed to the two previous PAN administrations? Third, have significant patterns emerged, reflected in recent appointments, that suggest influential characteristics exercising broader influences in the future? Fourth, will the most influential cabinet figures under the PRI presidency reestablish their dominance as leading contenders for their party’s presidential election in 2018?