Hektoen International

A Journal of Medical Humanities

Month: May 2022

  • When Papa Doc treated yaws

    Howard FischerUppsala, Sweden “Our Doc who is in the National Palace for life, hallowed be Your name by present and future generations. Your Will be done in Port-au-Prince and in the countryside…” — Translation of part of the “Catechism of the Revolution” that was recited daily by Haitian schoolchildren François Duvalier, M.D. (1907–1971) was the…

  • Addiction a century ago

    “Addiction, mainly in the upper classes, was viewed with sympathy. It was not a criminal offense to buy or sell morphine. Freud for a time prescribed cocaine to some of his excitable patients, and we know that Sherlock Holmes, when he was bored, injected himself with a 7% solution. Soon after their accession, the tzar…

  • “Panama disease”: A pandemic…for bananas

    Elizabeth RudaChicago, Illinois, United States The average person does not go to the grocery store, look around the produce section, and think, “Wow, these foods could be extinct within the next few years.” Yet extinction is possible in the case of the most common cultivar of banana sold today, the Cavendish.1 At the same time…

  • Sarah Gamp: Precursor of the nursing profession

    Before the reforms introduced by Florence Nightingale, the nursing profession was exemplified by women such as the famous Sarah (Sairey) Gamp of Charles Dickens’ Martin Chuzzlewit. Described as a fat woman with a husky voice and a moist eye, she wore dilapidated articles of dress picked up from several second-hand clothes shops. “The face of…