Hektoen International

A Journal of Medical Humanities

Year: 2020

  • Wet nursing: A historical perspective

    Mariella ScerriMellieha, Malta Wet nursing, a form of breastfeeding provided by someone other than an infant’s biological mother,1 has a long and sometimes controversial history. Death in childbirth, a mother’s illness, as well as cultural habits and circumstance have all been reasons across civilizations to employ a surrogate to feed a newborn.2 In elite households, “nurses…

  • Baruch Blumberg who discovered the hepatitis B virus

    Baruch Samuel Blumberg, like Barack Obama, was called Barry by his friends. In 1976 he received the Nobel Prize for saving millions of lives by discovering the cause of hepatitis B, a plague that had afflicted mankind since time immemorial. Born in Brooklyn in 1925, he came from a family that had emigrated to the…

  • Not-so-natural history

    Anthony PapagiannisThessaloniki, Greece Physicians learn about chronic disease by watching its natural history and attempting to modify it with therapies. Cardiologists record episodes of ischemic disease, oncologists follow the progression of malignancies, and pulmonologists note changes in respiratory function over time. When patients are first seen, the disease is often already established. It is less…

  • Thomas Young MD FRS (1773-1829): “The Last Man Who Knew Everything.”

    JMS PearceEast Yorks, UK It is impossible to place precisely Thomas Young (Fig 1) into any professional class. He was both physician and scientist, renowned for an astonishing range of theories and discoveries in optics, physics, physiology, hieroglyphics, and medicine. His sundry contributions were profound, original, and ingenious; he has with good reason been likened…

  • Terminal digit preference

    Marshall Lichtman Rochester, New York, United States Numbers that end in zero motivate and energize people. Recall Y2K, when the world celebrated on January 1, 2000. The irresistibility of zeros resulted in everyone celebrating on the wrong date: the new millennium started on January 1, 2001, not 2000. The first year of the Julian calendar in…

  • Sarah’s lesson

    Henri ColtLaguna Beach, California, United States Sarah put her hand on my forearm and dug a fingernail into my white coat. “Doc, I druther you not call my husband in just yet,” she said. “Doc?” I smiled. “You never call me Doc.” I finished installing the morphine pump and set the dose at an hourly…

  • Hope quarantined

    Prasad IyerSingapore Poet’s statement This fictional poem expresses the feelings of a migrant separated from his family during the COVID pandemic. Hope quarantined Quarantine forceth divorced soulsDistanced families and broken wholesShards of thoughts, impaling my core Locked down borders’ hearts a sore Shallow slumber, uneasy sense Worries, anxieties common hence.  Weeks and months in the twilight zoneTogether in…

  • Dr. Will and Dr. Charlie: William James Mayo (1861–1938) and Charles Horace Mayo (1865–1939)

    John RaffenspergerFort Meyers, Florida, United States The father of the Mayo brothers, William Worall Mayo, was born in a village near Manchester, England, in 1819. His father died when he was seven years old, but his mother managed to have him tutored in Latin and Greek, and later he took private lessons with James Dalton, a…

  • Teddy Roosevelt: Did a speech really save his life?

    Kevin R. LoughlinBoston, Massachusetts, United States “Ladies and gentlemen, I don’t know whether you fully understand that I have just been shot, but it takes more than that to kill a Bull Moose.” Teddy Roosevelt uttered those words outside the Gilpatrick Hotel in Milwaukee, Wisconsin on October 14, 1912, shortly after he was shot by…

  • Can behavioral variant frontotemporal dementia salvage Semmelweis?

    Faraze A. NiaziJack E. RiggsMorgantown, West Virginia, United States Remember me for the mind I had; not the mind a disease created.  Few physicians have made a more significant observation than did Ignaz Semmelweis.1 In 1847 he took over two obstetric divisions at the Vienna General Hospital. In Division 1, where babies were delivered by…