Good morning lovely ladies!
I've got some great cards and stamps to show you this morning.
Here is the first one:
The theme is Holland. Holland, or more precisely the Netherlands. I know that abroad my country is generally known as Holland, but the country is called the Netherlands (Nederland in Dutch) and only the two provinces in the west of the country are called Holland.
There is a South Holland, where I was born in Rotterdam. The government meets in South Holland, in The Hague (Den Haag in Dutch). North Holland has the capital Amsterdam.
As I'm on the subject, let me put something else straight. Some people think Dutch is the same as Deutsch. Dutch is the language spoken in the Netherlands and Deutsch is the language spoken in Germany. Deutschland=Germany, Deutsch=German.
The stamps are lovely. They show some typical Dutch things such as cows and gable houses. The large stamp on the left is about the province of Overijssel. Coincidentally it is the province that the arrow is pointing to on the above map.
This book is probably the reason why so many people outside the Netherlands think we all dress like this. No, we don't. This is the dress of one particular little village called Volendam. (Which is now a tourist attraction).
This:
The second stamp has the image of a tiger and is from the series: Save vanishing species.
US Postage Stamp Single 1961 Nursing Issue 4 Cents
In April 1898, during the Spanish–American War, Maass volunteered as a contract nurse for the United States Army (the Army Nurse Corps did not yet exist). She served with the Seventh U.S. Army Corps from October 1, 1898, to February 5, 1899. She was discharged in 1899, but volunteered again to serve with the Eighth U.S. Army Corps in the Philippines from November 1899 to mid-1900.[5]
During her service with the military, she saw few battle injuries. Instead, most of her nursing duties came in providing medical aid to soldiers suffering from infectious diseases like typhoid, malaria, dengue and yellow fever. She contracted dengue in Manila, and was sent home.
Shortly after finishing her second assignment with the army, Maass returned to Cuba in October 1900 after being summoned by William Gorgas, who was working with the U.S. Army's Yellow Fever Commission. The commission, headed by Major Walter Reed, was established during the post-war occupation of Cuba in order to investigate yellow fever, which was endemic in Cuba. One of the commission's goals was to determine how the disease was spread: by mosquito bites or by contact with contaminated objects.
The commission recruited human subjects because they did not know of any animals that could contract yellow fever. In the first recorded instance of informed consent in human experiments, volunteers were told that participation in the studies might cause their deaths. As an incentive, volunteers were paid US$100 (approximately $3,000 today), with an additional $100 if the volunteer became ill.[5]
In March 1901, Maass volunteered to be bitten by a Culex fasciata mosquito (now called Aedes aegypti) that had been allowed to feed on yellow fever patients. By this time, the researchers were certain that mosquitoes were the route of transmission, but lacked the scientific evidence to prove it because some volunteers who were bitten remained healthy. Maass continued to volunteer for experiments.
On August 14, 1901, Maass allowed herself to be bitten by infected mosquitoes for the second time. Researchers were hoping to show that her earlier case of yellow fever was sufficient to immunize her against the disease. Unfortunately, this was not the case. Maass once again became ill with yellow fever on August 18 and died on August 24. Her death roused public sentiment and put an end to yellow fever experiments on human beings.
It is right that she is honoured and that human subject research is now highly regulated. Human subject research legislation in the United States can be traced to the early 20th century. Human subject research in the United States was mostly unregulated until the 20th century, as it was throughout the world, until the establishment of various governmental and professional regulations and codes of ethics. Notable – and in some cases, notorious – human subject experiments performed in the US include the Tuskegee syphilis experiment, human radiation experiments, the Milgram obedience experiment and Stanford prison experiments and Project MKULTRA. With growing public awareness of such experimentation, and the evolution of professional ethical standards, such research became regulated by various legislation, most notably, those that introduced and then empowered the institutional review boards.
