Following domestication of the cat about 5000 years ago, it followed man into many areas of the world. The vast resources available in urban environments have led to increasing numbers of free-roaming cats on the streets. The high population density of these cats and, in many cases, the lack of suitable nourishment and veterinary care, is conducive to their poor condition of health. They are frequently perceived as a nuisance to human society. This article surveys the different methods of management of free-roaming cat populations, focusing on the urban environment, and discusses the animal welfare implications and the advantages and disadvantages of each method.

As soon as Adolf Hitler came to into power in 1933, four laws on racial segregation and race protection were edicted between 1934 and 1935. Schizophrenia, manic-depressive psychoses, epilepsy and alcoholism were regarded as hereditary mental illnesses. These laws were responsible for the sterilisation of 350,000 individuals who were thought to be at the source of the propagation of hereditary illnesses which might endanger the health and the future of the Aryan Germans. On September 1, 1939, Action T4 was launched: it required that all the mentally ill be exterminated. This action, which was run by the highest level of the Reich's chancellery with the help of psychiatrists coming from all backgrounds including university professors, was supposed to grant a serene death to all the mentally ill considered as untreatable. The death sentences were carried out by the medical staff in psychiatric hospitals specially equipped with gas chambers. Following protests, Action T4 was officially stopped on August 24, 1941, but, in reality, continued until the end of the war. The death sentences were carried out using either lethal doses of medication or food deprivation. One hundred and fifty thousand individuals fell victim to that therapeutic extermination which played an economic role as important as the one deemed to social protection. Many German academics, researchers, psychiatrists, geneticians and anthropologists played and active part in these murders which were carried out in the name of Nazi ideology based upon the supremacy of the Northern Germanic race and the necessity to protect it from miscegenation, especially from Jews. In the final part of this paper, the author gives an explanation of the perversion of ethics carried out by German psychiatrists.

The problem of contraception, sterilisation and the mentally ill is one of the key questions in medical ethics. Even if these two aspects bring into question a person's autonomy in two of the most intimate and fundamental aspects of life — sexuality and motherhood — they should not be confused as they differ greatly in terms of their reversibility. The essential question is rather one of individual freedom and its defence in situations where the subject is unable to defend himself either temporarily or in the long term. The fine line between individual and collective interests poses questions in terms of where to draw this line and the way in which it is defined in care situations. From this viewpoint, carers — that is, doctors and nurses, but also social workers and the patient's entourage — play an important role, not only in theory but also in day-to-day reality.

This article examines female sterilisation practices in early twentieth-century Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. It argues that the medical profession, particularly obstetricians and psychiatrists, used debates over the issue to solidify its moral and political standing during two political moments of Brazilian history: when the Brazilian government separated church and state in the 1890s and when Getúlio Vargas’s authoritarian regime of the late 1930s renewed alliances with the Catholic church. Shifting notions of gender, race, and heredity further shaped these debates. In the late nineteenth century, a unified medical profession believed that female sterilisation caused psychiatric degeneration in women. By the 1930s, however, the arrival of eugenics caused a divergence amongst physicians. Psychiatrists began supporting eugenic sterilisation to prevent degeneration – both psychiatric and racial. Obstetricians, while arguing that sterilisation no longer caused mental disturbances in women, rejected it as a eugenic practice in regard to race. For obstetricians, the separation of sex from motherhood was more dangerous than any racial ‘impurities’, both phenotypical and psychiatric. At the same time, a revitalised Brazilian Catholic church rejected eugenics and sterilisation point blank, and its renewed ties with the Vargas regime blocked the medical implementation of any eugenic sterilisation laws. Brazilian women, nonetheless, continued to access the procedure, regardless of the surrounding legal and medical proscriptions.

The physician and sexologist Albert Moll, from Berlin, was one of the main protagonists within the German discourse on the opportunities and dangers of social engineering, by eugenic interventions into human life in general, as well as into reproductive hygiene and healthcare policy in particular. One of the main sexological topics that were discussed intensively during the late-Wilhelminian German Reich and the Weimar Republic was the question of the legalisation of voluntary and compulsory sterilisations on the basis of medical, social, eugenic, economic or criminological indications. As is clear from Moll’s conservative principles of medical ethics, and his conviction that the genetic knowledge required for eugenically indicated sterilisations was not yet sufficiently elaborated, he had doubts and worries about colleagues who were exceedingly zealous about these surgical sterilisations – especially Gustav Boeters from Saxony.

L'évaluation d'un implant, en terme de contrôle qualité, ne peut se faire en définitive que par l'investigation clinique. Cette démarche ne devrait pas toucher seulement les nouveaux implants mais s'appliquer aussi à toute modification même légère d'un implant déjà existant et cliniquement éprouvé. L'investigation clinique prospective reste cependant une approche lourde, contraignante et longue. Elle n'est entreprise actuellement que pour de nouveaux implants ou lorsqu'une modification véritablement innovante est apportée à un implant déjà existant [1]. Dans le cadre du développement d'un nouvel implant articulaire et notamment lors de la conception d'une nouvelle géométrie ou lors du choix d'un nouveau procédé de stérilisation, il pourrait être intéressant de posséder un outil de test pré-clinique permettant de prévoir le comportement et les performances de cette prothèse avant d'investir des moyens lourds dans une étude clinique qui reste cependant indispensable à terme. Les essais tribologiques sur simulateurs offrent cette possibilité [2]. Cette étude porte sur la mise au point et la validation d'un simulateur pour prothèses totales de hanche. À travers nos résultats expérimentaux, développés sur tribomètre à trois unités, nous montrons l'importance des effets du procédé de stérilisation, ainsi que le rôle que peut jouer le milieu biologique et les couples de matériaux de friction (tête et cotyle de la prothèse) sur la tenue en service des prothèses totales de hanche (PTH). Les prothèses de hanche de diamètre plus élevé (Ø28 mm) et le choix du couple (CoCrMo/polyéthylène) semblent donner un taux d'usure plus faible, et en conséquence, une meilleure longévité des arthroplasties totales de hanche [3].