Hektoen International

A Journal of Medical Humanities

Month: June 2019

  • James Syme, the Napoleon of surgery (1799–1870)

    James Syme was born in Edinburgh in the year when Napoleon became First Consul, and in later years came to be called the Napoleon or Wellington of surgery.1-6 As a young man he had an interest in chemistry and at age eighteen developed a method of making textiles impermeable to water by impregnating them with…

  • A 130-year-old medical cold case: Who was Jack the Ripper?

    Kevin R. LoughlinBoston, Massachusetts, USA As murder followed murder and mutilated bodies were discovered and described in the press, one can imagine the fear that swept the hardscrabble Whitechapel section of London in 1888. Populated with many immigrants, mostly from Eastern Europe and Russia, unemployment was rampant and tenements were found on most streets. It…

  • A house call

    Martin DukeMystic, Connecticut, United States Many years ago, in the mid 1980s, when I was still in clinical practice, I made a house call accompanied by a second year medical student who was coming to my office one day a week as part of her course in physical diagnosis. The patient I had been called…

  • Daniel Carrion and his disease

    In 1879 an armed conflict known as the War of the Pacific broke out between three South American nations, pitting Chile against a Peruvian-Bolivian alliance in a dispute over land rich in minerals, especially sodium nitrate. The Chileans defeated their adversaries by land and sea, their armies invading Peru, occupying Lima, eventually annexing valuable territory…

  • Dr. Rebecca Cole and racial health disparities in nineteenth-century Philadelphia

    Meg Vigil-FowlerGrand Junction, Colorado From the beginning of black women’s professional involvement in medicine, public health marked a central component of the scope of their practice. Rebecca Cole, the second black woman physician in the United States, began her career as the “sanitary visitor” in the late 1860s for the New York Infirmary for Women…

  • “Surrounded with many Mercies”: 270 years of patient advice

    Andrew WilliamsFrederick O’DellNorthampton, United Kingdom On July 9, 1748 Dr. James Stonhouse, physician at the Northampton Infirmary (United Kingdom), published “A Friendly Letter to a Patient just admitted to an Infirmary.”1 Later that year, after some minor revisions, the text was reprinted as “Friendly Advice to a Patient,” which for the next century and beyond…

  • A Dickensian medical education

    Gregory RuteckiLyndhurst, Ohio, United States My four grandparents were Polish immigrants who came to America in the early twentieth century. They had no formal education, neither in Poland nor in their new home in Chicago, but worked hard and saved money to pay for the college education of their grandchildren. Life was not easy for…

  • Robert Liston—the fastest knife in town

    Samuel Johnson, a man of strongly held prejudices, had a low opinion of most foreigners, and this included the Scots. James Boswell, his biographer and a Scotsman himself, records how Johnson patronizingly would declare that the best roads lead from Scotland and that much could be made of a Scotsman “if he be caught young.”…

  • The big sheepdog

    Gregory RoseLexington, Kentucky, United States “How ya doin’, Wayne?” It had been some ten years, back in high school, since I had seen Wayne. I had returned to general practice in my small home town and I was not sure what Wayne had been doing during that time, but when I saw him again, it…

  • Notre Dame and gratitude

    Elizabeth CerceoCamden, New Jersey, United States On April 15, 2019, Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris burned. This event highlighted the integral nature of art and beauty in our culture. We often take for granted the beauty that surrounds us and stands as a connection to our past. I was in Paris years ago and went…