100 YEARS AGO

One result of the rapid growth of seismology is the suggestion of Dr. Mario Baratta that provision should be made by insurance against the damage to buildings caused by earthquakes in certain countries. He shows that, since the beginning of the seventeenth century, less than forty earthquakes have been responsible for deaths of more than 150,000 persons in Italy alone. Moreover, to take but one example, the great loss of life during the Ischian earthquake of 1883 was due to the fact that the buildings had already been damaged by the earthquakes of 1828 and 1881. Dr. Baratta points out some of the conditions that must determine the amount of the premium that should be demanded by insurance societies. The most important is the degree of seismicity of the district; but this would be modified by others, such as the nature of the surface-rocks, the character of the buildings, &c. One advantage of compulsory insurance against earthquakes in a country like Italy would be that partially damaged buildings would be at once rebuilt or repaired, and this would tend to diminish the loss of life in the future.

From Nature 14 September 1899.

50 YEARS AGO

Social Biology and Welfare By Sybil Neville-Rolfe…

In 1905, at the age of twenty, the widow of a naval officer announced to her relatives her intention “to study prostitution and venereal disease and try to get rid of them”. She knew of no organisation or senior friend under whose tutelage she could begin. With courage and energy, Mrs. Neville-Rolfe plunged into the obscurity and obscurantism surrounding the problems of sex irregularity; learning the hard way, but backed by the irrepressible gifts of her personality, she has given the last forty-five years to by no means unsuccessful efforts to induce the public and officials, both at home and abroad, to face squarely and openly some of the biological and social factors involved in healthy and unhealthy sex and family relationships in the community. … Unfortunately, the book itself is not a useful contribution to the campaign for a rational, humane and continuously constructive approach to the problems of social hygiene, the complexities of which grow the more we know about the field. … Mrs Neville-Rolfe's gifts are more those of a crusader than of a writer.

From Nature 17 September 1949.