Hektoen International

A Journal of Medical Humanities

Month: May 2019

  • Can the neuroaesthetics response unleash a path to psychosis?

    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

    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?

    Lom NingBamenda, Republic of Cameroon “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, but also propelled the economy and prestige of the British Empire as it…

  • Fat by choice: a quest for meaning

    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

    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

    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

    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

    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

    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

    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…