Culture and History
Porphyrias have been detected in all races, multiple ethnic groups on every continent including Africans, Asians, Australian aborigines, Caucasians, Peruvian, Mexican, Native Americans, and Sami. There are high incidence reports of AIP in areas of India and Scandinavia and over 200 genetic variants of AIP, some of which are specific to families, although some strains have proven to be repeated mutations.
The links between porphyrias and mental illness have been noted for decades. In the early 1950s patients with porphyrias (occasionally referred to as "Porphyric Hemophilia") and severe symptoms of depression or catatonia were treated with electroshock.
Read more about this topic: Porphyria
Famous quotes containing the words culture and/or history:
“In society, in the best institutions of men, it is easy to detect a certain precocity. When we should still be growing children, we are already little men. Give me a culture which imports much muck from the meadows, and deepens the soil,—not that which trusts to heating manures, and improved implements, and modes of culture only!”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“What is most interesting and valuable in it, however, is not the materials for the history of Pontiac, or Braddock, or the Northwest, which it furnishes; not the annals of the country, but the natural facts, or perennials, which are ever without date. When out of history the truth shall be extracted, it will have shed its dates like withered leaves.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)