Hektoen International

A Journal of Medical Humanities

Tag: Annabelle Slingerland

  • Patients without borders: Cardiac surgery, activism, and advocacy

    Annabelle SlingerlandLeiden, Netherlands In the 1970s, a “patients without borders” organization made it possible for people with severe heart disease to be flown to other countries for treatment that was unavailable in their home country. It was a decade after Christiaan Barnard had pioneered heart transplantation in South Africa, and although most patients did not…

  • Dr. Samuel Sarphati

    Annabelle SlingerlandLeiden, the Netherlands Times of confusion and uncertainty can also be fruitful grounds for seeds to root, rise, and bloom. One such seed was Dr. Samuel Sarphati, who created New Amsterdam on the banks of the river Amstel. Amsterdam in the early nineteenth century was already renowned for its prosperous canal belts, streets lit…

  • How a small town kept smallpox small

    Annabelle Slingerland Leiden, the Netherlands   Fig. 1 Presentation of smallpox. To make a mountain out of a molehill is a vice, but to keep the mole underground is a virtue. The little town of Tilburg in the south of the Netherlands was not accustomed to seeing mountains, but when a molehill first came into…

  • St. Mary’s Hospital, birthplace of penicillin

    Anabelle S. Slingerland Leiden, Netherlands Kevin Brown London, England     Lithograph of St. Mary’s Hospital, 1853 On April 23, 2018, Prince William and the Duchess of Cambridge left the Lindo Wing of St. Mary’s Hospital in London with their new baby boy. Fans of the Royals, who had been camping outside St. Mary’s for…

  • Charite hospital

    Annabelle Slingerland Leiden, the Netherlands   On November 14, 1709, King Frederik I of Prussia planted a small seed that over the following three centuries grew, branch by branch, into one of the foremost medical research and treatment centers in the world.   Plague House, 1709 The Plague, later Almshouse, Matthäus Seutter (1678-1757), circa 1740…

  • Alcatraz Hospital revisited—patients behind bars

    Annabelle SlingerlandLeiden, the Netherlands While many hospitals and their locations become historic icons for the accomplishments of their staff, Alcatraz Hospital is famous for its very walls, its infamous patients, and treatment. It was a hospital inside a maximum security U.S. federal penitentiary on Alcatraz Island, which covers twenty-two acres only a little more than…

  • The song of diabetes

    Annabelle Slingerland Wouter Jukema The Netherlands   We would like to thank Dr. Robin Seeley and Rosemary McNally.   Preface Type 1 and type 2 diabetes are now so routinely diagnosed and treated that we rarely consider their origins. However, this distinction did not officially exist until it first appeared in the International Classification of…