Hektoen International

A Journal of Medical Humanities

Month: January 2022

  • Wilhelm Baum (1799–1883)

    Postgraduate medical education in the nineteenth century required personal contact with the masters of the profession – working and rounding with them, or at least listening to their lectures. Thus the German surgeon Wilhelm Baum spent one year after obtaining his doctorate (1822) as a surgical assistant to von Graefe in Berlin. He then studied…

  • Musical evenings on HMS Bounty

    Stewart JustmanMissoula, Montana, United States Dispatched to Tahiti in 1787 to gather breadfruit trees to be transplanted to the West Indies, HMS Bounty was a small ship with every possible inch allotted to botanical cargo. Spare too was the crew, which included no marines who might have acted as Lieutenant William Bligh’s bodyguards in the…

  • The Queen’s quickening: The phantom pregnancies of Mary I

    Eve ElliotDublin, Ireland In November 1554, the people of England believed a miracle had taken place. Resplendent on her new throne, Queen Mary I, daughter of Henry VIII, proudly revealed that she was with child. She was thirty-seven (past the usual childbearing age in the Tudor era) and had only been married to her much…

  • The illness of King George III

    JMS PearceHull, England, United Kingdom The Hanoverian King George III (1738–1820) was a diligent man of wit and intelligence, a man who enhanced the reputation of the British monarchy until he was finally stricken by illness. When this drove him from regal duties, politicians realized they missed his calming effect on their squabbles.1 In many…

  • Serendipity in science and medicine

    JMS PearceHull, England, United Kingdom The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries, is not “Eureka!”, but “That’s funny…” —Isaac Asimov Horace Walpole (son of the first British Prime Minister, Sir Robert Walpole) coined the word “serendipity” in 1754. It was based on a Persian fairytale in which three…

  • “Between false modesty … and conceit” – Sir Roger Bannister

    Jack RiggsDavid WatsonMorgantown, West Virginia, United States Give me one moment in timeWhen I’m racing with destinyThen in that one moment of timeI will feel, I will feel eternity —Albert Hammond and John Bettis, “One Moment in Time” Sir Roger Bannister is perhaps the most famous neurologist in history, yet few associate his name with…

  • The Great War and the other war

    Maryline AlhajjBeirut, Lebanon The reverberations of October 29, 1914 would carry throughout the lands of the Ottoman Empire and serve as an ominous premonition of disastrous years to come. On that day, following a surprise attack on Russia’s Black Sea coast,1 the Empire entered World War I. It was the beginning of the end, as…

  • The “Ne-Uro” mess

    Nishitha BujalaHyderabad, Telangana, India When I took my oral exams in the final year of medical school, I was tested on surgical instruments by an external professor. He appeared to be in his sixties and stern. As a conversation starter, he asked my favorite specialty. “Neurology,” I answered. As a professor of urology, he was…

  • John Abernethy

    John Abernethy was born in London in 1764 and went to school in Wolverhampton, where he learned Latin and Greek, and graduated top of his class. He would have preferred to study law but his father insisted he choose medicine. At age fifteen, he was apprenticed for five years to a surgeon with a large,…

  • Hope

    Rima NasserBeirut, Lebanon “We must accept finite disappointment, but never lose infinite hope.” – Martin Luther King, Jr. This is not an incendiary rant about the politicians and people whose greed and inhumaneness pushed Lebanon into an abyss of ignorance and dereliction. This also is not a tale averring the grandeur of this magical country…