Month: November 2021
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Indo-European for health professionals
The Indo-Europeans were a group of people whose language is presumed to be the ancestor of most modern languages spoken in Europe and in parts of Asia. They left behind almost no tangible evidence of their existence other than some funeral mounds, but seem to have been an agricultural people who lived around the Black…
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Book review: Medicine in the Middle Ages
Arpan K. BanerjeeSolihull, United Kingdom In the history of Western Europe, the Middle Ages refers to the period between the fall of the Roman Empire in the fifth century through the beginning of the Renaissance in the 1500s. These thousand years were characterized by unstable nation-states led by kings and nobility. Tribalism was rife, and…
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Depiction of defecation in the works of Pieter Bruegel
Howard FischerUppsala, Sweden “Civilization rests upon two things – the discovery that fermentation produces alcohol, and the voluntary ability to inhibit defecation.”—Robertson Davies, The Rebel Angels The life of the peasant in the sixteenth century was hard. There were wars of religion, war taxes, and Spanish troops occupied the Lowlands. Peasants also had the usual…
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O Superman
John RaskoCarl PowerSydney, Australia The creation of human embryonic stem cells in 1998 sparked enormous excitement.1 The superpower that embryos possess—the ability to generate all cell types found in the body—was suddenly within our reach. The era of “regenerative medicine” seemed to be dawning. In the words of one science writer: “Human embryonic stem cells…
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Paul Pierre Broca
JMS PearceHull, England, United Kingdom At the turn of the nineteenth century, knowledge of how the brain worked was largely conjectural. Intelligence, memory, language, and motor and sensory functions had not been localized. The physiologist Flourens, promoting the notion of “cerebral equipotentiality,” concluded, “The cerebral cortex functions as an indivisible whole . . . an…
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Theodor Meynert
JMS PearceHull, England, United Kingdom Theodor Meynert (1833-1892) (Fig 1) was an eminent if eccentric neuropathologist and psychiatrist. His original work had an impact not just on medicine but on the philosophy of the mind and the “history of materialism.”1 Modern brain research attempts to unravel the intricacies of human brain-mind relationships, much of which…
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Guadalupe: One of Spain’s oldest schools of medicine
Nicolás Roberto RoblesBadajoz, Spain Guadalupe, a small Spanish town in the district of Cáceres, Extremadura, arose around a monastery. Legend says that a shepherd named Gil Cordero was looking for a stray sheep when the Virgin Mary appeared to him. When the shepherd told of this apparition, the clergymen of Cáceres went to the place…
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Volume 13 Special Issue – Fall 2021
Hektoen International is pleased to announce the winners of the 2021 Grand Prix Essay Competition.Winner: C. Louis Leipoldt: The polymath physician and literary giant, Stephen Marcus FinnRunner-Up: “Plague of the Sea, and the Spoyle of Mariners”—A brief history of fermented cabbage as antiscorbutic, Richard de Grijs Honorable Mentions Women surgeons, Moustapha Abousamra Airs and graces:…