Hektoen International

A Journal of Medical Humanities

Month: June 2020

  • Canadian contributions to the study of pathology

    Guillermo QuinonezLaurette GeldenhuysNova Scotia, Canada Canadian and American medicine in general, and pathology in particular, have developed in parallel and in synchrony since the nineteenth century. Despite Canada’s limited population, scientific cultural similarities and geographical conditions would explain such development. Canadians, some of whom practiced both in the U.S. and Canada, have made important contributions…

  • Two great Scots: John and William Hunter

    B. Herold GriffithChicago, Illinois, United States Excerpted from a presentation at the meeting of the Society of Medical History of Chicago October 3, 2006 Of the many surgeons who have had ties to Glasgow over the past 500 years or so, the most famous were the Hunter brothers, and a century later, Sir Joseph Lister.…

  • Navigating the waters of post-COVID survivorship

    Denise BockwoldtChicago, Illinois, United States On the TV news, COVID survivors are being rolled out of the hospital in wheelchairs, applauded and cheered on by a crowd of hospital staff. “They’ve recovered!” the reporter announces happily. It is a hopeful sign for everyone who fears this virus, and for healthcare workers a ritual that affirms…

  • Mary Niles and the Canton rats

    Edward McSweeganKinston, Rhode Island, United States Bubonic plague arrived in Honolulu in December 1899. A month later it had spread to San Francisco, where the infection caused a series of deadly outbreaks until 1907.1 But for decades before plague reached the American west coast, it had burned through rural China. By 1893, the plague reached…

  • The surgery of pyloric stenosis in Chicago

    John RaffenspergerFort Meyers, Florida, United States Harald Hirschprung, a Danish pediatrician, in 1888 described the clinical course and pathology of two infants who died with congenital hypertrophic pyloric stenosis.1 Gastroenterostomy was adopted for the treatment of infants with pyloric stenosis, but surgical treatments were hampered by delayed diagnosis, malnutrition, and a lack of knowledge about…

  • Live chicken for treating plague buboes

    When the bubonic plague struck Europe after 1347, it left the medical profession helpless. Unable to cure or contain the disease, doctors focused largely on dealing with the buboes. They bled their patients and applied cups to prevent the dissemination of the poisonous contents, often choosing sites near to where the buboes were situated. They…

  • Death in the time of corona

    Nivetha SubramanianPalo Alto, California, United States When several years ago, a virus, continents away, barred grieving families from holding their loved ones, I thought how lonely it must be, to breathe a last breath, surrounded by masked strangers. I greet you this morning, pressing your weeping legs, listening to your drowning lungs, and frowning at…

  • The beginnings of humane psychiatry: Pinel and the Tukes

    JMS PearceHull, England “It is perhaps not going too far to maintain that Pinel has been to eighteenth-century psychiatry what Newton was to its natural philosophy and Linnaeus to its taxonomy.”—George Rousseau, Historian, 1991 Although modern treatment of mental illness has its limitations, older methods of treatment were both crude and cruel. For centuries they…

  • Book review: Nobel and Lasker Laureates of Chinese descent: In Literature and Science

    Laurence ChanDenver, Colorado, United States This book celebrates notable scholars of Chinese descent with a special focus on the Wolf Prize, and four Lasker and eleven Nobel laureates spanning a wide range of disciplines in both literature and science. We visit the struggles of pioneers Tsung-Dao Lee and Chen-Ning Yang as the first Chinese Nobel…