In the increasingly polemical abolitionist and pro-slavery literature of the eighteenth century, John Locke’s thought was often tokenized. Both sides appealed to him in their respective defenses. Abolitionists centralized the anti-slavery elements inherent to his social contract theory – natural liberty, self-ownership, and the necessity of express consent – while pro-slavery apologists foregrounded his entanglements in colonial politics, specifically his role in composing the Carolina constitution. Things changed rather dramatically in the nineteenth century. Right around the time England abolished the slave trade in 1807, a string of successful vindication narratives helped to liberate Locke from his linkages to slavery. As a result, not only did prominent slavocrats begin to ridicule the Carolina constitution, but they also came to see Lockean natural law thinking as much more fundamentally incompatible with their worldview. This is the tradition Louis Hartz called the “reactionary enlightenment.” Leading nineteenth-century defenders of slavery in America, like John Gillies, George Fitzhugh, Henry Hughes, Albert Taylor Bledsoe, and Robert Dabney, dedicated a great deal of energy to refuting Locke’s ideas of natural liberty and express consent. They believed Lockean natural right principles had contaminated America at its founding and that Locke’s fetishization of individual liberty had become an obstacle to the development of a pro-slavery society. These attacks demonstrate the centrality of Locke’s influence in nineteenth-century humanitarian and liberatory movements.

Background: Digital pathology facilitates remote pathology consultations. Pediatric pathologists in Canada formed a nationwide digital pathology consultation network, mostly for second opinion review of pediatric cancer cases. Validation of such a large network for clinical use is challenging. Here we report our unique validation process of this digital pathology network.Method: This study was designed in keeping with the College of American Pathologist (CAP) guidelines, and included 14 pathologists from 9 hospitals across Canada. All cases are pediatric pathology cases. Each pathologist reviewed multiple digital cases and the corresponding glass slide cases. For each review, intra-observer concordance (diagnosis on digital case versus diagnosis on glass slide case) was recorded, creating a data point.Result: The study generated 269 valid diagnostic data points. Out of the 269 data points, 257 were concordant (95.5% concordance), exceeding the CAP recommendation of 95% concordance. Thus, the network was successfully validated.Conclusion: This is a unique validation study for a large nationwide digital pediatric pathology network. The study involved all pathologists/hospitals in the network, closely emulating real world clinical process. The network was successfully validated.

This paper corrects Maurice Cranston's account of Locke's involvement in the slave trade by providing new evidence about how he came into possession of shares in the Royal African Company (RAC) and the Bahamas Adventurers (BA). Rather than direct personal investment, all the shares he came to own were transferred from third parties. Beginning in February 1672, Locke recorded in his personal ledger numerous payments made on his behalf to these companies by Thomas Stringer, Ashley Cooper's steward. Evidence from Locke's unpublished manuscripts suggests he was probably paid in RAC shares as compensation for his work for the Lords Proprietors of Carolina and the Bahamas. He may also have received shares as reimbursement for disbursements made from his personal funds while serving as Treasurer for the Council of Trade. This paper also examines the context of Locke's abrupt divestment. It is puzzling that he sold all his shares just when the RAC was poised to become profitable. Three factors may explain his decision to divest: financial pressures caused by the stop of the Exchequer, political conflict with Charles II, or moral misgivings about racialized slavery.

This paper seeks to extend Morgan Godwyn's bibliography by bringing to light two of his early-career letters that have not received as much attention as they deserve. While these texts have been intermittently cited in recent years, they have not yet been included in his entry with the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Beyond helping to extend our biographical understanding of Godwyn, these texts also illuminate how his anti-slavery arguments evolved throughout the 1670s and 1680s. These documents reveal that his thinking developed in three phases. In the first phase of his early letters, he focused on the corruption of vestry power in Virginia, of which slave baptism was a secondary issue (1672). This subsequently gave way to criticisms of slave master absolutism after witnessing slave master brutality in Barbados (1680). Finally, after years of failed reforms, Godwyn began to attack the moral character of those in England who remained ambivalent about settler immorality (1685). This more robust accounting of Godwyn's development helps to illuminate broader trends in anti-slavery thinking in the seventeenth century. Godwyn's entry into the anti-slavery discourse reflected a common strategy whereby reformers sought to attack the very idea of slavery, redefining it in such a way as to make it compatible with slaves' rights, ultimately transmuting it a lesser type of servitude.

This paper seeks to provide a framework to understand how institutions of bondage were perceived in the seventeenth century, focusing centrally on the ambiguities and nascent distinctions that arose in the wage-labour discourse. Many assumed that the emergence of wage labour was simply a novel reiteration of classical institutions of bondage. While there was a great deal of ambiguity around how institutions of domination were characterised, there was widespread agreement that wage-compensated labour was a form of bondage. There were meaningful differences to be made between captive slavery and wage labour, but these were almost universally understood to be differences in degree rather than in kind. This paper identifies three interrelated literatures that help to illuminate how wage labour was perceived in this period: texts on political economy and legal treatises; servant manuals and devotional literature, and finally, natural law theory. These discourses help to show that wage-compensated labour was understood to be a lesser form of bondage, one bound by different terms and conditions than captive slavery. Despite its differences to other forms of servitude, wage labour was clearly located on the same spectrum of bondage by degree.

This paper seeks to argue that Locke proposes a coherent theory of restorative justice regarding historical crimes. In two cases that he sets out in the Second Treatise, that of the Greek Christians living in the Ottoman Empire and Englishmen living in the wake of William I's conquest, the preliminary standard of historical redress is whether the descendants of the conquerors and conquered possess equal political rights. Conquered peoples cannot simply be subsumed or annexed into an existing political order. They must have some say in articulating or agreeing to the laws that govern them. In this respect, Locke's theory of historical redress emphasizes the redemptive power of contract to overcome historical crimes. Furthermore, the disposition a community has to reimagine its body politic, to enfranchise the dispossessed by forming one body of people, speaks to the degree to which historical injustice is likely to occur.

Diagnosing rare diseases in pediatric patients is challenging due to high phenotypic and genetic heterogeneity. Genome wide sequencing, including genome sequencing (GS) and exome sequencing (ES), have emerged as promising strategies for achieving timely diagnosis of rare diseases with improved diagnostic yields compared to conventional genetic testing. ES performed within provincial clinical genetics laboratories is publicly funded in Ontario, Canada as of 2023. A funding recommendation for GS is pending collection of further evidence.

In 2013, the SickKids-Caribbean Initiative (SCI) was formalised among The Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto, Canada, the University of the West Indies, and Ministries of Health in six Caribbean countries (Barbados, The Bahamas, Jamaica, St. Lucia, St. Vincent and the Grenadines, and Trinidad and Tobago). The aim was to improve the outcomes and quality of life of children (<18 years) with cancer and blood disorders in the partner countries. Core activities included filling a human resource gap by training paediatric haematologists/oncologists and specialised registered nurses; improving capacity to diagnose and treat diverse haematology/oncology cases; developing and maintaining paediatric oncology databases; creating ongoing advocacy activities with international agencies, decision makers, and civil society; and establishing an integrated administration, management, and funding structure. We describe core program components, successes, and challenges to inform others seeking to improve health service delivery in a multidisciplinary and complex partnership.

This paper explores the tension between the role the magistrate plays in Locke's letters on toleration and the theory of sexual morality he develops in his analysis of the case of incest at the church at Corinth in his "Paraphrases" on Paul's Epistles. A son had married his father's ex-wife, a practice decried as "heinous" by seventeenth-century commentators. Contrary to the political uses of this case by members of the Anglican Church, Locke argues that moral communities should police themselves through private censure. At first glance, this sits uncomfortably with the view that the magistrate should punish adulterers and those who engage in "heinous enormities." This paper seeks to reconcile these two visions by showing how the incentive structure of the civil law was meant to supplement the maximalist moral commitments of the religious communities that make up society.

This paper seeks to show that due to the transformations of the working class in seventeenth-century England, a discursive tradition emerged in devotional literature and servant manuals that valorized a specific form of servitude. By embodying the will of their masters, servants were free. By resisting their master's will, they resembled either African slaves forced to toil on the plantations or galley slaves compelled to row for Muslim masters. These racialized forms of slavery were designed to generate a powerful intuition of idealized servitude. Servants who complained or those who sought to become hirelings, or independent free labourers, risked becoming worse than a slave. In short, the imagery of plantation and galley slaves was strategically utilized to construct a pliable and obedient working class in England. In short, by accepting one's station and willingly submitting to a master English servants performed Christian liberty.

This article argues that Hobbes was actively engaged in the debates about population size as a component of his broader approach to political economy. By the seventeenth century, beliefs about economic well-being routinely turned back onto the question of population size. This article situates Hobbes's arguments about populations in and among the common arguments for the movement of people in the seventeenth century. Hobbes rejected the natural law tradition of hospitality, which required that states take care of foreigners, and populationist arguments, which assumed that economic progress was predicated on rapid population growth. Specifically, this article will show that Hobbes held a view common to the late Tudor period; namely, a wise sovereign should be actively engaged in regulating population inflows and outflows. Not only did this require careful management of domestic procreative policies, but it also had implications for colonization and war-making.

COVID-19 has created unprecedented challenges for health systems worldwide. Since the confirmation of the first COVID-19 case in Ghana in March 2020 Ghanian health workers have reported fear, stress, and low perceived preparedness to respond to COVID-19, with those who had not received adequate training at highest risk. Accordingly, the Paediatric Nursing Education Partnership COVID-19 Response project designed, implemented, and evaluated four open-access continuing professional development courses related to the pandemic, delivered through a two-pronged approach: e-learning and in-person. This manuscript presents an evaluation of the project's implementation and outcomes using data for a subset of Ghanaian health workers (n = 9966) who have taken the courses. Two questions were answered: first, the extent to which the design and implementation of this two-pronged strategy was successful and, second, outcomes associated with strengthening the capacity of health workers to respond to COVID-19. The methodology involved quantitative and qualitative survey data analysis and ongoing stakeholder consultation to interpret the results. Judged against the success criteria (reach, relevance, and efficiency) the implementation of the strategy was successful. The e-learning component reached 9250 health workers in 6 months. The in-person component took considerably more resources than e-learning but provided hands-on learning to 716 health workers who were more likely to experience barriers to accessing e-learning due to challenges around internet connectivity, or institutional capacity to offer training. After taking the courses, health workers' capacities (addressing misinformation, supporting individuals experiencing effects of the virus, recommending the vaccine, course-specific knowledge, and comfort with e-learning) improved. The effect size, however, varied depending on the course and the variable measured. Overall, participants were satisfied with the courses and found them relevant to their well-being and profession. An area for improvement was refining the content-to-delivery time ratio of the in-person course. Unstable internet connectivity and the high upfront cost of data to access and complete the course online were identified as barriers to e-learning. A two-pronged delivery approach leveraged distinct strengths of respective e-learning and in-person strategies to contribute to a successful continuing professional development initiative in the context of COVID-19.

This paper argues that Locke offers qualified support for male-male intimacy. While one can find denunciations of sodomy and ‘debauchery’ in his work, these claims are embedded in a natural and divine law framework that did not formally specify how to define much less morally characterize these actions. At the very least, Locke makes it difficult to strictly condemn sodomy or other homosexual acts as inherently immoral. This paper will explore three areas of interest: 1) Locke’s Paraphrases of the Pauline epistles in which he argues that Paul’s interest in sexuality concerns temple idolatry rather than a trans-generational sexual ethic; 2) the empirical terms in which he appears to reject the viability of sodomy and his interest in native sexual practices show that he tolerated alternative conjugal frameworks; and 3) the curious case of his own sexuality, the passionate letters he shared with close male friends suggest that sexual obligations to society were not permanent and that as one ages alternative forms of love may be permitted.

Throughout the 1690s there were several high-profile parliamentary debates about lowering interest rates from 6 to 4 percent. Locke's involvement in these policy debates is significant. In this period, he circulated at least one important pamphlet on this issue to various Members of Parliament. The purpose of this article is to illuminate the links between Locke's arguments against interest rate reduction and immigration policy. Locke's essay "For a General Naturalization" (1693) employs some of the same pro-naturalization formulations that Josiah Child uses in A New Discourse of Trade (1693), a pamphlet that was ostensibly published in support of the parliamentary proposal for lower interest rates. Even though Locke had a long history with pro-naturalization arguments, the framework of his essay on naturalization is very likely an extension of those debates with Child about interest rates from 1691/2.

The humanist discourse of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries argued that stemming from the complex of reasons including right, charity, and necessity, civilians could be knowingly killed. These theorists did not rely on an appeal to intentions or one’s mental state. In fact, several commentators explicitly sought to bring the killing of the innocent into a proportionality framework. By the eighteenth century there were subsequent transformations to the humanist tradition. Specifically, the moral and legal positivism of the early utilitarians undermined the broad appeals to the natural law, which were common among the humanist theorists. By the nineteenth century one begins to see a discourse of military ethics that prioritizes the logic of self-preservation by way of an appeal to military necessity. While the humanist discourse also spoke of necessity, under utilitarianism this took on a different value. States were free to pursue a sufficient minimum of cruelty in order to prevent greater evils. It is significant that the notion of the ‘noncombatant’ emerged in this period. Rather than reflecting a bright line of immunity from direct harm, this category was part of a moral discourse that permitted moral trade-offs, including the intentional death of the innocent.