Hektoen International

A Journal of Medical Humanities

Tag: George Dunea

  • The death of the Serenissima (1797)

    To approve [Napoleon’s] demands, the Great Council was called for Friday 12 May. From soon after sunrise the people of Venice had been congregating in the Piazza, just as they had done countless times before in the city’s history. In the past, however, they had usually assembled for purposes of celebration. Never before had they…

  • Escargot—Fine dining

    Escargot is the French word for edible land snails. It usually refers to the genus Helix (aspersa or pomatia), the members of which have been a delicacy enjoyed as food for many centuries. Their original ancestor evolved from a single cell organism almost a billion years ago. It was a marine organism until about 250…

  • Eating chicken

    The common chicken (Gallus domesticus) is a member of the Phasianidae family that also includes pheasants, partridges, quails, and turkeys. Its ancestor, the red jungle fowl (Gallus gallus) was domesticated in Southeast Asia and China before 7000 BC and was valued for its eggs and cockfighting prowess. This ancestor evolved in India around 2000 BC…

  • Relieving pain by injection

    Until the middle of the nineteenth century, doctors had considerable difficulty in relieving the pain of their patients in that they could only administer medicines by mouth, enema, or suppository. The notion of injecting drugs into a vein had been stimulated by the attempts of Christopher Wren, Richard Lower, and Jean Baptiste Denys to transfuse…

  • Infectious mononucleosis

    The disease known colloquially as “mono” or the “kissing disease” has probably been around since antiquity but was only recognized more recently. In 1880 Nil Filatov, a Russian pediatrician, described it as “idiopathic adenitis”. In 1888 Emil Pfeiffer reported it as an acute benign illness with characteristic lymphadenopathy in children and called it glandular fever…

  • The periodic table of the elements

    In this system hydrogen is assigned the number one, lithium is three, carbon six, nitrogen seven, oxygen eight, etc. The elements are organized in rows or periods and columns or groups according to their atomic weight. The elements were discovered beginning in the 18th century when the Swedish chemist Carl Wilhelm Scheele discovered oxygen (1772),…

  • William Murrell and nitroglycerin

    Born in London in 1853, William Murrell was the first to use nitroglycerin in the treatment of angina pectoris. Son of a barrister, he received his medical training at the University College Hospital in London and then taught physiology there. He became a member of the Royal College of Surgeons of England and Royal College…

  • Somerset Maugham on studying medicine (abstracted and in parts paraphrased from Of Human Bondage)

    In 1897 Somerset Maugham (1874–1965) qualified as a physician but never practiced medicine and became a full-time writer.1 In his 1915 novel Of Human Bondage he drew on his experiences at St. Thomas’s Hospital to describe what it was like to be a medical student at that time. He first has his young protagonist practice…

  • Martin Chuzzlewitt by Charles Dickens

    Although Charles Dickens called Martin Chuzzlewitt immeasurably the best of his stories, it was at first unsuccessful and even caused him to have his pay cut. Suspenseful and gripping, with murders and poisonings, Martin Chuzzlewitt takes place at a time when hospitals were largely places where the poor went to die1; the wealthy were treated…

  • The history of scarlet fever

    Scarlet fever is a highly contagious infectious disease that probably has existed for thousands of years. Ancient texts from China and other parts of the world have described symptoms resembling those of scarlet fever. In the 5th century BC, Hippocrates documented a patient with a reddened skin and fever. Centuries later, in 1553, the Sicilian…