Hektoen International

A Journal of Medical Humanities

Month: November 2021

  • “God Helps Them That Help Themselves”: Poor Richard and the inoculation controversy

    Stewart JustmanMissoula, Montana, United States Before vaccination there was inoculation, and long before opposition to vaccination for Covid-19 there was furious resistance to the practice of inoculating for smallpox. Upon being introduced into Boston in 1721, in the midst of an outbreak of smallpox—exactly the wrong time and place for a dispassionate trial of a…

  • Elizabeth Garrett Anderson

    JMS PearceHull, England, United Kingdom Elizabeth Blackwell and Elizabeth Garrett Anderson were the first women physicians in the United States and Britain.1 Both were born in England. Elizabeth Blackwell (1821-I9I0) was born in Bristol but moved with her family to New York when aged eleven. Only after twelve medical schools rejected her did she manage…

  • Dr. Susan LaFlesche Picotte: Tradition, assimilation, and healing

    Mariel TishmaChicago, Illinois, United States “My office hours are any and all hours of the day and night.”—Susan LaFlesche Picotte1 It was August of 1889 and Dr. Susan LaFlesche Picotte was suffering a sleepless night. She had just treated her first patient and she doubted her diagnosis. She was a new doctor after all, and…

  • Dr. Heinrich Hoffmann and Der Struwwelpeter

    Howard Fischer Uppsala, Sweden   Heinrich Hoffmann: The Struwwelpeter; Frankfurt am Main: Literary Institute Rütten & Loening, 1917 (400th edition); Copy of the Braunschweig University Library Call number: 2007-0968. Via Wikimedia. “Give me a child and I’ll shape him into anything.” — B.F. Skinner   Dr. Heinrich Hoffmann (1809-1894) was a general practitioner in Frankfurt.…

  • Franz Joseph Gall and phrenology

    JMS PearceHull, England, United Kingdom For many reasons the work of Gall, when stripped of its excrescences, constituted an important landmark in the history of neurology. -Macdonald Critchley4 In the times of Galen, the location of the mind and spirit was imprecisely thought to reside in the brain’s ventricles and pineal. In the second century…

  • John Hunter, his wolf dogs, and the inherited smiles of Pomeranians

    Stephen MartinUnited Kingdom John Hunter, 1728-1793, was a polymathic doctor. Besides being an anatomist and clinician, he was also interested in early genetics, exemplified by his “Observations tending to shew that the Wolf, Jackal, and Dog, are all of the Same Species.”1 Hunter presented this paper to the Royal Society in 1787. (Fig 1) His…

  • Healing in the face of cultural devastation

    Patrick FlynnLos Angeles, California, United States In 1855, a young Crow boy, no more than ten years old, ventured to the top of a mountain in present-day Montana. Over the next two decades, the boy would rise through the ranks of his tribe’s political structure, ultimately being elected chief at the age of twenty-nine. But…

  • Rudolf Virchow and the anthropology of race

    Friedrich C. LuftDetlev GantenBerlin, Germany Rudolf Virchow, born in 1821, was arguably the most important German physician, biologist, social scientist, and anthropologist of the nineteenth century. His establishment of cellular pathology is known by all and his comment that “politics is nothing more than medicine on a grand scale” is recalled by many. Less appreciated…

  • “On Being Sane in Insane Places”1: Psychiatric hospitalization as seen by Gabriel García Márquez and Dr. David Rosenhan

    Howard FischerUppsala, Sweden Literature and science may complement each other. Sometimes they actually describe the same phenomenon. Gabriel García Márquez (1927–2014) was a Colombian novelist, journalist, and short story writer. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1982. His short story “I Only Came to Use the Phone” (1978), part of the collection…

  • Book review: Albemarle Street: Portraits, personalities and presentations at the Royal Institution

    Arpan K. BanerjeeSolihull, United Kingdom In this fascinating book, the late Professor Meurig Thomas, a distinguished chemist, former Master of Peterhouse, Cambridge University, and an accomplished popularizer of science, tells the story of one of Britain’s greatest scientific institutions, which for over 200 years has been responsible for many of the great scientific advances of…