May, 2019 - Hektoen International

Can the neuroaesthetics response unleash a path to psychosis?

May 22, 2019

C. Ann Conn Covington, Louisiana, United States Prehistoric rock art implies a primitive grammar of the mind found in art and which can be universally accessed. Photo by Cazz on Flickr. How does the brain perceive beauty and what is the biology of transcendent artistic appreciation? Is this epiphanic reaction hijacked during delusional thinking […]

How we love

May 22, 2019

Linda Clarke Guelph, Ontario, Canada Photo by James Sullivan The communities of health care and medicine are richly storied. For almost three decades, I have invited people in those communities to tell me their stories and they have been generous in their telling. A story told can be image-laden and many of those images […]

Quinine and the cinchona plant: Gain or bane for Africa?

May 22, 2019

Lom Ning Bamenda, Republic of Cameroon Slave Market. Frederic Remington. 1893. Art Institute of Chicago. Public domain. “The gin and tonic has saved more Englishmen’s lives and minds than all doctors in the Empire.”1 This statement by Winston Churchill referred to the bitter-tasting substance in tonic water, quinine. This antimalarial alkaloid did save lives, […]

Fat by choice: a quest for meaning

May 22, 2019

Amer Toutonji Charleston, South Carolina, USA Tom-Ton – Fat Boy. Credit: Wellcome Collection. CC BY 4.0 An early bird, Brian wakes up no later than 5:30 am to get on with the first meal of the day: twelve eggs and ten sausages, or their equivalent. Most recently weighing in at 530 pounds, Bryan, or […]

How to save a life

May 22, 2019

Sam Campbell Moh’D Ibrahim Johnson City, Tennessee, United States “We had been happy together, though it took years to convince her family to allow us to marry.” My wife is in Texas, threatening to file divorce papers. I am here, 996 miles away, trying to find Mrs. Smith who has wandered out of her […]

Two tales of talipes equinovarus

May 21, 2019

Christopher Walker Bielsko-Biala, Poland Operations for club-foot. Wellcome Collection. Public domain. Congenital talipes equinovarus, better known as clubfoot, is a poorly understood but surprisingly common medical condition. According to Ansar et al, it affects about one in one thousand newborns, though this figure varies by country.1 There is a roughly fifty-fifty split between those […]

Luigi Galvani: beginnings of electrophysiology

May 21, 2019

JMS Pearce East Yorks, England Fig 1. Lithograph: portrait of L. Galvani. From Wellcome Collection. Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) Physicist or physician? Scientist or healer? Artificially, these are divisions that have classified doctors through the ages. Luigi Galvani (1737-1798) (Fig 1.) showed that it was possible to be an amalgam of both. […]

Samuel Clossy’s Observations: an unrecognized contribution to the origin of anatomical pathology

May 21, 2019

Guillermo Quinonez Ancaster, ON, Canada Laurette Geldenhuys Halifax, NS, Canada Title page of Site and Causes of Disease by Giovanni Battista Morgagni It is often stated in the medical history literature that Anatomical Pathology was established as a modern science in 1761 when Giovanni Battista Morgagni published Site and Causes of Disease (Figure 1) […]

Pig-tail probe

May 21, 2019

Zeynel Karcioglu Charlottesville, Virginia, United States A cartoon by the author comparing the tails and depicting the probe in question. I read with great interest Dr. Stanley Gutiontov’s article entitled “Pig man: pigs in medicine from Galen to transgenic xenotransplantation” in Hektoen International, and it reminded me of an amusing “pig-related” experience I had […]

Dangerous inheritance

May 21, 2019

Merle Borg San Diego, California, United States Prehistoric Rock Paintings at Manda Guéli Cave in the Ennedi Mountains – northeastern Chad. Photo by David Stanley. 2015. CC BY 2.0. It was an ordinary accident. Two boys driving to high school had topped a hill too fast, and wedged their small pickup under a stopped […]