Hektoen International

A Journal of Medical Humanities

Month: May 2020

  • Amputations

    Amputations were gruesome affairs before the advent of anesthesia. In the civilian population they would have been done mainly for ischemia, gangrene, and infections. In the image shown on the left, the man standing in the background wears a letter tau to indicate that he had suffered from St. Anthony’s fire, ergotism. He presumably has…

  • A physician and a pregnant patient

    A very pregnant young woman, not feeling her best, is sitting with a doctor in consultation. Another woman in the background is holding a container full of urine that the doctor will examine. But presumably the doctor has already determined what ails the patient, for he is writing a prescription. The ubiquitous chamber pot is…

  • Giovanni Cortesi—Renaissance surgeon of Bologna and Messina

    Giovanni Batista Cortesi. ÖNB, Austrian National Library. We owe our gratitude to Dr. Paolo Savoia from the Department of History at King’s College London for his learned review of the life of Giovanni Batista Cortesi (1552-1643), a remarkable early Italian surgeon and physician who deserves to be better known. According to Dr. Savoia, the story…

  • Saints Damian and Cosmas removing a bullet from a man’s chest

    The renowned third century saints Cosmas and Damian were also doctors, often shown in paintings replacing a gangrenous leg with a healthy one. Here the two saints are performing an operation to remove a bullet from a patient’s chest. Saint Cosmas and Saint Damian dressing a chest wound. Oil painting by Antoine de Favray, 1748.…

  • Ambroise Paré shown amputating a leg on the battlefield

    One of the many of Amboise Paré’s surgical innovations was to tie off the blood vessels severed during amputations rather than cauterize them to stop the bleeding. This approach yielded greatly improved results but was much more time consuming because as many as fifty ligatures may have been needed during one amputation. In this painting…

  • A very early Picasso painting

    Pablo Picasso was sixteen years old and obviously was not yet famous when he made this painting. His father, an artist himself, had encouraged his son to paint but favored traditional forms such as country scenes and conventional portraits. He himself sat as model for Science and Charity (1897) and is depicted as the conventional…

  • Intubation for diphtheria

    In 1904 diphtheria was a dangerous killer that suffocated its victims by obstructing the respiratory passages and sometimes required an emergency but dangerous surgical tracheostomy. In this painting a specialist in infectious diseases is avoiding tracheostomy by inserting a tube to bypass the obstruction. He is observed intently by interested physicians, all watching this new…

  • Four nurses caring for one patient

    Four nurses are taking care of this sick patient, presumably in a hospital, clearly at a time when there was no nursing shortage. The one on the left is taking the patient’s pulse; one on the right seems to be staring into space. Vintage engraving of Victorian nurses caring for a dying man suffering from…

  • Nurse brings in the meal for a convalescing patient

    This scene is from the nineteenth century, when most sick people were being cared for at home. A family member is reading to a convalescing young woman, while a nurse seen on the far right is bringing in the patient’s medicine, or more likely the meal, which she has probably prepared herself. A girl reads…

  • Operating room nurses

    Two nurses and a male porter are returning to the ward a patient who has just undergone surgery. Another nurse is holding up a bottle of blood or saline. Operating room staff wheeling a patient back into a ward after an operation. Oil painting by Ethel Macmillan, ca. 1940. Credit: Wellcome Collection. (CC BY 4.0)  …