Hektoen International

A Journal of Medical Humanities

Tag: Rockefeller Foundation

  • The origins of NIH medical research grants

    Edward Tabor Bethesda, MD, United States   The main administration building at the “National Institute of Health,” photographed sometime between 1940–1947, before the name was changed to “National Institutes of Health.” The original name can be seen under the cornice. From the “Images from the History of Medicine” collection at the National Library of Medicine,…

  • The germ of laziness

    Enrique Chaves-Carballo Overland Park, Kansas, United States   Charles Wardell Stiles (1867-1941). Parasitologist, U.S. Department of Agriculture. Portrait ca. 1912. Wikimedia Commons Rockefeller Foundation The Rockefeller Foundation was chartered on June 1909 “to promote the well-being and to advance the civilization of the peoples of the United States and its territories and possessions and of…

  • How Britain rescued scientists from Nazi tyranny

    JMS Pearce Hull, England   Fig 1. Signatories to Letter to The Times, 22 May 1933 In March 1933 while visiting Vienna, William Beveridge, Director of the London School of Economics, learned that Hitler had just decreed it illegal for “non-Aryan,” mostly Jewish people to hold posts in the Civil Service. Many lawyers, doctors, and…

  • The hunt for a yellow fever therapy

    Edward McSweegen Kingston, Rhode Island, United States   Roux’s syringe for delivering antitoxin, The College of Physicians of Philadelphia.  Source In March 2020, a research group in China reported the use of convalescent plasma to treat ten patients suffering from coronavirus COVID-19 infections.1 This type of therapy—passive immunization—dates back to 1891 when the German bacteriologist Emil…

  • Wilder Penfield

    JMS Pearce Hull, England, United Kingdom   Fig 1. Wilder Penfield, Stamp Wilder Penfield was not only a great surgeon and a great scientist, he was an even greater human being. -Sir George Pickering, Regius Professor of Medicine at Oxford University   Wilder Penfield (1891-1976) (Fig. 1) was the most gifted pioneer of Canadian neurosurgery.…