Arlequine

Dice, Cards, Wheels

Gambling has been a practice central to many cultures throughout history. In Dice, Cards, Wheels, Thomas M. Kavanagh scrutinizes the changing face of the gambler in France over a period of eight centuries, using gambling and its representations in literature as a lens through which to observe French culture. Kavanagh argues that the way people gamble tells us something otherwise unrecognized about the values, conflicts, and cultures that define a period or class. To gamble is to enter a world traced out by the rules and protocols of the game the gambler plays. That world may be an alternative to the established order, but the shape and structure of the game reveal indirectly hidden tensions, fears, and prohibitions. Drawing on literature from the Middle Ages to the present, Kavanagh reconstructs the figure of the gambler and his evolving personae. He examines, among other examples, Bodel's dicing in a twelfth-century tavern for the conversion of the Muslim world; Pascal's post-Reformation redefinition of salvation as the gambler's prize; the aristocratic libertine's celebration of the bluff; and Balzac's, Barbey d'Aurevilly's, and Bourget's nineteenth-century revisions of the gambler. Dice, Cards, Wheels embraces the tremendous breadth of French history and emerges as a broad-ranging study of the different forms of gambling, from the dice games of the Middle Ages to the digital slot machines of the twenty-first century, and what those games tell us about French culture and history.

Teatro Arlequine

Anaphylaxis

Anaphylaxis is an immediate-type allergic reaction involving the whole organism. It is the most life-threatening allergic condition. Although there are few exact epidemiological data regarding prevalence, estimates regarding insect sting anaphylaxis range from 1-3% in the general population, but much higher values have been reported by some authors for food and drug-induced anaphylaxis. Anaphylaxis is the main acute killer of allergic individuals.Although anaphylaxis was discovered at the beginning of the 20th century, there are still many unresolved issues. These include non-IgE-mediated anap.