Hektoen International

A Journal of Medical Humanities

Tag: neurasthenia

  • Book review: The Imaginary Patient: How Diagnosis Gets Us Wrong

    Arpan K. BanerjeeSolihull, United Kingdom Making the right diagnosis is central to the medical encounter. A doctor always started off by taking a history, examining the patient, and sometimes performing additional tests. But when a creditable diagnosis could not be made, the medical profession often invented conditions that later were shown not to exist. Such…

  • Hypochondria

    JMS PearceHull, England, United Kingdom In words, as fashions, the same rule will hold;Alike fantastic, if too new, or old:Be not the first by whom the new are tried,Nor yet the last to lay the old aside.— Alexander Pope The changing use and meaning of words are the daily bread of dictionary compilers. Long ago…

  • Dr. Susan LaFlesche Picotte: tradition, assimilation, and healing

    Mariel Tishma Chicago, Illinois, United States   Fig 1. Susan La Flesche Picotte. 1889. Drexel University College of Medicine Legacy Center Archives & Special Collections. Published with permission. “My office hours are any and all hours of the day and night.” — Susan LaFlesche Picotte1   It was August of 1889 and Dr. Susan LaFlesche Picotte…

  • Dr. Fanny Halpern, a psychiatric go-between of 1930s Shanghai

    Richard Zhang Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, United States   “Dr. F.G. Halpern” in an advertisement for the Puci Sanatorium in the Shen Bao, September 20, 1935. source On September 20, 1935, a lengthy advertisement in one of Shanghai’s most popular newspapers, the Shen Bao, celebrated the recent opening of the Shanghai Puci Sanatorium (上海普濨療養院).1 The sanatorium would…

  • A Tale of Two Tonics: Sino-Western psychopharmaceutical modernity in Shanghai, 1936

    Richard Zhang Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, United States   Advertisement for Sanatogen in the Shen Bao, October 25, 1936.  Source (accessed through Yale University).  Shanghai, 1936: Positioned at the Yangtze Delta, this sprawling, bustling seaport was a multiplicity of cities. It was China’s most lucrative commercial hub for many business elites; a lavish, cosmopolitan adopted home for expatriates from at…

  • W.H.R. Rivers and the humane treatment of shell shock

    Soleil Shah London, UK   A shell-shocked soldier receives electro-shock treatment from a nurse during the First World War. Image Source: Otis Historical Archives National Museum of Health and Medicine (ref Reeve 041476) via Flickr “Wherever the art of medicine is loved, there is also a love of humanity.” – Hippocrates War neurosis, or “shell shock”…