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Douglas Beattie's sense of adventure very nearly led him into the Vietnam War. The problems of dealing with clinical grading appeals as an Assistant Director of Nursing on secondment to Norwich Health Authority's district personnel department must seem like small beer compared with that hair-raising episode in the Sixties.

David James is a professional crisis manager. For almost 30 years, his job has been to rescue companies on the brink of bankruptcy. By the time he's called in, it's usually too late to save much for the shareholders. In almost every case, however, there is still a lot to salvage: Nearly all the companies James has managed continue to operate in some form. More than 2 billion Pounds have been repaid to banks and unsecured trade creditors. And more than 30,000 jobs have been saved. The key to preserving value, James has found, is to resist the urge to try to generate cash from operating the business. In most cases, these companies have taken on far too much debt to ever sell their way out. Indeed, trying to expand operations beyond what the market would bear was what got them into trouble in the first place. James argues against waiting until the company is dead to break it up. A more effective course is to sell off valuable assets while the company is still a going concern. In vivid and sometimes hair-raising detail, James recounts how he has discovered valuable assets in unexpected places, salvaging everything from airlines to soft-drink makers to Britain's Millennium Dome. He has a routine for accomplishing this, which involves locking up the checkbook on day one and, more often than not, firing the senior management. His is a cautionary tale for top executives who, it is clear, should be concentrating their efforts on never needing to call on him in the first place.

I have worked in all areas of nursing, from staff and head nurse positions to faculty and administrative positions, but my work as a parish nurse, particularly with our community of older adults, is one of the most challenging and rewarding areas of nursing practice I have ever experienced. Recently, one of our independent older adult parishioners, Marge, suddenly had a marked decrease in her ability to function, which was precipitated by two trips to the hospital and surgery. She went from living independently to living in a skilled care unit, no longer able to walk or perform activities of daily living without assistance. I had known Marge for only 2 years. When she became ill, I visited her weekly during the last 4 months of her life, as she had no family in the area. During my visit one evening as I helped Marge get ready for bed, she left me with a very poignant memory. After sharing some hair-raising stories about her care at this facility, she said, "Georgine, you're my best friend. You're the only one I can tell these things to and I know you understand."

1 ST-91, 2-(2,6-diethylphenylamino)-2-imidazoline hydrochloride produces in animal experiments bradycardia, and in larger doses, also hypertension, due to α-sympathomimetic activity and probable central sympathetic inhibition. 2 The effects of ST-91, after oral administration, were studied in 10 healthy volunteers. A dose-dependent, significant decrease of the heart rate was observed. On average the resting heart rate was reduced by 11-19 beats/min (15-29%). During exercise the decrease of the heart rate was less pronounced. After the largest dose there was a fall of the systolic blood pressure during exercise averaging at 14-15 mmHg (11-12%). Otherwise the blood pressure remained unchanged. 3 Eight out of the 10 test-subjects complained of hair-raising and goose-flesh after all doses, due to the α-sympathomimetic effect of the drug. No toxic effects were observed.

In some languages, the word for "business" is the same as the word for "negotiation." That's not really surprising: Every interaction--with customers, suppliers, and even partners and investors--entails negotiation. And some involve very high stakes: The breakdown in negotiations between Hewlett-Packard's management and its founding families, for instance, put the company's future in doubt. Dominick Misino is a man who knows about negotiating when the stakes are at their very highest. As a hostage negotiator for the New York Police Department, Misino successfully persuaded the hijacker of Lufthansa Flight 592 to lay down his gun and turn himself in. Misino spent the last six years of his career as a primary negotiator, handling more than 200 incidents and never losing a life. Since his retirement in 1995, he has taught negotiating skills to law enforcement officials, military personnel, and business executives. Anyone can become a crisis negotiator, Misino contends. It takes what he calls "applied common sense." Be polite. Listen. Acknowledge the other guy's point of view (no matter what it is). But it's clear that in dealing with hijackers, kidnappers, and child molesters, Misino is far from passive. Negotiation, he says, is really a series of small agreements, and he is adept at orchestrating those agreements from the start so that his adversary learns to trust him and come around to his point of view. In vivid and sometimes hair-raising detail, Misino demonstrates how he gets criminals to trust police officers enough to refrain from harming innocent parties and give themselves up. Many of the techniques he describes are surprisingly applicable to business negotiations, where the parties may seem equally intractable and failure is not an option.

Mary Kingsley was an archetype, if not the archetype, of the formidable Victorian lady. Despite her physical frailty she managed to face the most hair-raising encounters in remote West Africa with an unshakeable aplomb that almost defies belief. She also made a number of not inconsiderable contributions to biology.

The relationship between music and medicine is generally understood in the benign context of music therapy, but, as this chapter shows, there is a long parallel history of medical theories that suggest that music can cause real physical and mental illness. During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the idea of music as an expression of universal harmony was challenged by a more mechanistic model of nervous stimulation. By the 1790s, there was a substantial discourse on the dangers of musical overstimulation to health in medicine, literature, and etiquette books. During the nineteenth century, the sense of music as a pathogenic stimulant gained in influence. It was often linked to fears about sexuality, female gynecological health, and theories of hypnosis and degeneration. In the twentieth century, the debate on the medical perils of the wrong kinds of music became overtly politicized in Germany and the Soviet Union. Likewise, the opponents of jazz, particularly in the United States, often turned to medicine to fend off its supposed social, moral, and physical consequences. The Cold War saw an extensive discourse on the idea of musical "brainwashing," that rumbled on into the 1990s. Today, regular media panics about pathological music are mirrored by alarming evidence of the deliberate use of music to harm listeners in the context of the so-called War on Terror. Can music make you ill? Music therapy is a common if perhaps rather neglected part of medicine, but its diametric opposite, the notion that music might lead to real mental and physical illness, may seem improbable. In fact, over the last two hundred years, there have been many times when as much was written about the medical dangers of music as about its potential benefits. Since the eighteenth century, fears about music's effects on the nerves and the mind have created a remarkably extensive discourse on pathological music based on a view of both music and the causation of disease as matters of nervous stimulation (Kennaway, 2010, 2012a). From concerns about young ladies fainting from excessive stimulation while playing the keyboard in the Georgian period and Victorian panics about Wagner to the Nazi concept of "degenerate music" and Cold War anxieties about musical brainwashing, the debate on the medical dangers of music has generally combined a theoretical and terminological basis in the medicine of the period concerned with broader agendas about gender, sexuality, race, and social order. Each generation has tended to regard the music it grew up with as the epitome of rationality and healthy mindedness while ascribing hair-raising medical consequences to newer music. This debate has continued right up to the present day, with the depressing difference that, with the systematic use of music in torture in the so-called War on Terror, the idea that music can be bad for you has become a much more realistic prospect. Although the debate about music's ill effects has largely been bogus, there are ways in which music can in fact adversely affect health. Most directly of all, there is of course the power of sheer volume to cause psychological strain and hearing damage. It was only really with the advent of the modern age, with its industrial noise, expanded orchestras, and amplified sound systems, that this became a widespread concern. Although the high-decibel sound can include music, it is not its character as music that causes health problems, so it falls rather outside our purview. Medical problems that do relate to specifically to music itself include the rare conditions of arousal-related arrhythmia and musicogenic epilepsy, but in both of these contexts, music is essentially a trigger rather than a fundamental cause of sickness (Sharp, 1997; Viskin, 2008; Wieser et al., 1997). There is a long history of medical accounts of musical hallucinations, which are certainly sometimes associated with serious medical conditions, but they are by no means always experienced as pathological (Berrios, 1990; Evers and Tanja, 2004). It should also be remembered that it is quite possible that many of the accounts of music causing disease refer to real physical symptoms and suffering, albeit generally with a psychosomatic rather than direct physiological explanation. This kind of psychological impact of music has meant it has been linked to a variety of culturally bound syndromes. Having said that, it is also clear that the most of the discourse on pathological music is basically fallacious. Over and over again, fundamentally moral objections to music relating to sexuality, gender, social order, and self-control have been clear beneath a veneer of medical language.