March, 2020 - Hektoen International

Albert Einstein headed off at the “Nobel pass” by Alvar Gullstrand

March 31, 2020

Jayant Radhakrishnan Darien, Illinois, United States Photograph of Albert Einstein in his office at the University of Berlin. c1920. Accessed via Wikimedia. Allvar Gullstrand. Unknown artist. The National Library of Medicine. Allvar Gullstrand was a brilliant ophthalmologist and the second of eleven surgeons who have received the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine. He was […]

The Dutch anatomy lessons

March 31, 2020

JMS Pearce Hull, England, United Kingdom Fig 1. The Anatomy Lesson of Dr Nicolaes Tulp. 1632. Rembrandt van Rijn. Mauritshuis. The Hellenistic anatomist Herophilus (c. 330- c. 260 BC) and the physiologist Erasistratus (c. 325– c. 250 BC) were granted limited permission to dissect executed criminals with consent of the first Ptolemaic Pharaohs. This practice, […]

Hiroshima seventy-five years after the bombing

March 31, 2020

Cristóbal Berry-Cabán Fort Bragg, North Carolina, United States Figure 1. Little Boy at Tinian Island, August 1945. National Archives. Figure 2. Mushroom cloud over Hiroshima, August 6, 1945. National Archives. Figure 3. This person’s skin was burned in a pattern corresponding to the dark portions of a kimono worn at the time of the […]

Volume 12, Issue 3 – Summer 2020

March 31, 2020

Frontispiece A Cold War Vaccine: Albert Sabin, Russia, and polio, James L. Franklin Did Macbeth have syphilis?, Eleanor J. Molloy Ambroise Pare: standard bearer for barber-surgery reform, Mildred Wilson Robert Louis Stevenson and hereditary hemorrhagic telangiectasia, Sally Metzler Ladies in red: medical, metaphorical reflections, Milad Matta & Gregory Rutecki The 1918 Pandemic—the collective story versus […]

William Cheselden, father of modern British surgery

March 30, 2020

William Cheselden was the most eminent English surgeon of the first half of the eighteenth century.1,2 Born in Leicestershire in 1688 just two weeks before William of Orange landed in England, he learned Greek and Latin at school, then was apprenticed to a local barber-surgeon. At fifteen he went to London and was again apprenticed, […]

Gerard Blasius (1627–1682)

March 24, 2020

Gerardus Leonardus Blasius (1625-1695), physician and professor in medicine. Anyonymous. C.1660. Stadsarchief Amsterdam Gerard Blaes (Blasius) was a Dutch physician and anatomist, famous for his work on the spinal cord and for one of his students discovering the parotid (Stensen’s) duct. As a young man he had lived and studied in Copenhagen, where his father was […]

La Couronne

March 23, 2020

Sophia Wilson New Zealand Novel Coronavirus SARS-CoV-2. NIAID. CC BY 2.0 Virions, under an electron microscope, resemble a crown. An artist’s soft hued roses and golds, belie the sinister underbelly, the forked tongue. Everything suddenly looks a whole lot different; Today an elderly woman inclined over walking frame, inches down supermarket aisles in search of weekly […]

“A Veritable Angel of Mercy”: the sardonic representation of Nurse Ratched in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest

March 23, 2020

Mariella Scerri Mellieha, Malta Group photograph of the first twenty Navy Nurses, appointed in 1908. Naval Photographer. 1908. Wikimedia. Public Domain. Critical acclaim and popular opinion have elevated Kesey’s first novel, One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest published in 1962, to something of a modern classic, much read and written about as well as adapted […]

Antonio Benivieni, early anatomist and pathologist

March 23, 2020

De abditis, or Concerning some hidden and remarkable cases of diseases and cures. The Florentine Antonio Benivieni dissected corpses and recorded his findings some seventy years before Andreas Vesalius and even more so before Batista Morgagni. Yet though he has been called the “founder of pathology,” he never achieved the fame and recognition accorded to […]

Sir Alexander Fleming: A microbiologist at work and play

March 23, 2020

Jayant Radhakrishnan Darien, Illinois, United States “Seemingly Simple Elegance” by Arwa Hadid. American Society for Microbiology Agar Art 2019 Professional. Undergraduate MLS student, Oakland University, Rochester Hills, MI, United States i Sir Alexander Fleming had many talents. His discoveries of lysozyme in 1923 and in 1928 the antibiotic effect of the fungus Penicillium notatum are […]