Hektoen International

A Journal of Medical Humanities

Month: July 2019

  • Henry Gray and his textbook of anatomy

    The Gods of Anatomy must have loved Henry Gray, for like swift-footed Achilles he died young and achieved immortality among men. Using a pen, not a sword, he authored a massive textbook of anatomy, first published in 1858. Like its equally voluminous competitor produced by Daniel John Cunningham in 1902, his book has been viewed…

  • Adrianus Spigelius, the last great Paduan anatomist

    In his time the Flemish physician Adrianne van den Spiegel (often referred to by the latinized name of Adrianus Spigelius) was the most renowned practicing clinician in the city of Padua. An accomplished anatomist, he was left with only meager eponymous pickings: the caudate (Spigelian) lobe of the liver and some more obscure structures around…

  • “Some little show of nail”: The health of Anne Boleyn

    Mariel TishmaChicago, Illinois, United States Of all the wives of England’s King Henry VIII, the most well known is Anne Boleyn. She is the woman who, one way or another, caused the split between Henry and Catherine of Aragon – and the split between England and the Catholic Church. She has been declared a martyr,…

  • In full retreat

    Cyndy MuscatelLake Sherwood, California, United States I did not realize how far down the rabbit hole I had gone until I regained what I had lost. I thought it was only my hearing, but it was much more. When I become overwhelmed, I start losing things. Last winter my plate was so full, I needed…

  • Tooth extraction in art: from the dental key to the forceps

    Vicent RodillaAlicia López-CastellanoChristina Ribes-VallésValencia, Spain Tooth extraction has been practiced for centuries, being carried out first by often itinerant barber-surgeons, and, once the profession became regulated in the late 1800s, by licenced dentists. Hippocrates gives one of the oldest written accounts of tooth extraction, which he considered along with cauterization to be a remedial measure…

  • The story of a scar

    Michael EllmanWilmette, Illinois, United States The six-inch scar is high over my left femoral artery in my inner thigh. It is healing well now and is pain free. The scar marks the place where a vascular surgeon extracted a clot that was blocking the popliteal artery. “I fished it out for you,” he told me.…

  • Duchenne de Boulogne

    JMS PearceEast Yorks, England The eponymous Duchenne muscular dystrophy still provokes a sense of sadness in afflicted families and therapeutic impotence in their medical attendants. Although both Edward Meryon (1852) and Wilhelm Griesinger (1865) published early case reports, when Duchenne described the progressive, sex-linked, recessive muscular dystrophy of early childhood, the disorder was almost unknown…

  • Joseph Bell and Conan Doyle

    JMS PearceEast Yorks, England “…The remarkable individuality and discriminating tact of my old master made a deep and lasting impression on me, though I had not the faintest idea that it would one day lead me to forsake medicine for story writing.” Arthur Conan Doyle is remembered worldwide as the creator of Sherlock Holmes. The…

  • Block

    Tuhina RamanPhiladelphia, Pennsylvania, United States The lateral chest is the easel for my handiwork. I paint an orange sheen that glints off my patient’s chest as I prep and drape in standard sterile fashion. Round and round, from the center to the periphery. Once, twice—the third time’s a charm. I stare as it dries, throw…

  • Johann Conrad Brunner and his work on the pancreas

    In the history of medicine, the Swiss anatomist and physician Johann Conrad Brunner is more often remembered for discovering the glands in the duodenal mucosa than for his experiments on the pancreas. Though able to surgically induce at least transient diabetes mellitus in dogs, he failed to make a connection between the pancreas and diabetes,…