Hektoen International

A Journal of Medical Humanities

Month: December 2020

  • John Hunter, Harvey Cushing, and acromegaly

    Kevin R. Loughlin Boston, Massachusetts, United States   Figure 1. Charles Byrne, a giant, George Cranstoun, a dwarf, and three other normal sized men. Etching by J. Kay, 1794. Credit: Wellcome Collection. (CC BY 4.0) Introduction John Hunter and Harvey Cushing were two of the most preeminent surgeons of their eras. John Hunter is considered…

  • Howard H. Tooth CB., CMG., MD., FRCP.

    JMS PearceHull, England Howard Tooth (1856-1925) was one of many physicians who served well their patients and their profession, but who would be unknown save for a syndrome that bears and perpetuates their name. Howard Tooth (Fig 1) was born in Hove, Sussex, educated at Rugby School and at St. John’s College, Cambridge, where he…

  • Cancer and eye diseases: two birds killed with one stone, anti-VEGF antibody

    Ashok SinghChicago, IL, United States Various cells in the human body, such as lymphocytes, monocytes, and all tissue cells release small proteins that, unlike hormones, which act at distant sites, have powerful effects on only neighboring cells. These proteins go under a variety of names such as paracrine factors, growth factors, or, more generally, cytokines…

  • Sympathectomy for hypertension

    Sympathectomy for essential hypertension was introduced in the late 1920s at a time when no effective medical treatment was available. It consisted of resecting several sympathetic neurons that exit the spinal cord from the mid to lower spinal cord and are arranged in two columns of nodules called ganglia on either side of it. Sympathetic…

  • Gospel Argonaut

    Josephine EnsignSeattle, Washington, United States Short of stature and tall of tales, Alexander de Soto was by some accounts a highly educated, skilled, compassionate physician and surgeon, and by other accounts a charlatan, medical quack, faith healer, and quixotic dreamer. Born on July 24, 1840, in the Canary Islands to the Spaniard Alexander de Soto…

  • Book review: Architects of Structural Biology

    Arpan K. BanerjeeSolihull, United Kingdom Modern twenty-first-century high-technology medicine, which we now take for granted, was only made possible by remarkable advances in the physical and biological sciences of the twentieth century. In Architects of Structural Biology, the contributions of four scientific giants and Nobel laureates—Lawrence Bragg, Max Perutz, John Kendrew, and Dorothy Hodgkin—are described…

  • The influence of the text De Arte Gymnastica on the resurgence of medical gymnastics in Renaissance Italy: Girolamo Mercuriale (1530–1606)

    Philippe CampilloDaniel CaballeroLille, France The physicians of ancient Greece were aware that muscular exercise was a source of health and strength, as well as achieving corporal beauty through a balanced relationship between different parts of the body. Ancient statues, such as those of Polykleitos (460 to 420 BC), attest to how such beauty and harmony…

  • Gulliver at Luggnagg — Learning about the immortal struldbrugs (abridged)

    The Luggnaggians are a polite and generous people . . . they show themselves courteous to strangers. One day . . . I was asked by a person of quality, “whether I had seen any of their struldbrugs, or immortals?” . . . He told me “that sometimes, though very rarely, a child happened to…

  • Indo-Europeans and medical terms

    Somewhere around 3,000 to 7,000 years ago there lived in the steppes of southern Ukraine, or perhaps in northern Anatolia, a group of people whom we now call Indo-European but about whom we know very little. They left a few burial mounds, some pottery and skeletons, but their history is obscure. They spoke a presumed…

  • William John Adie (1886–1935)

    JMS PearceHull, England William John Adie (Fig 1) deserves to be remembered as an unusually gifted, compassionate clinician and teacher, but he is best known for his account of the myotonic (Holmes-Adie) pupil. One of many talented Australians who enhanced British medicine, Adie was born in Geelong, west of Melbourne. He was educated at Flinder’s…