Hektoen International

A Journal of Medical Humanities

Month: June 2024

  • Ernest A. Codman and the idea of medical accountability

    Curtis MargoTampa, Florida, United States There are few treatises in the annals of history that have noticeably altered the course of medicine. The first and most conspicuous would be The Corpus, a collection of more than fifty essays attributed to Hippocrates of Cos.1 Among its many gifts to the healing arts was the notion that…

  • King Henry III of Castile, the Suffering

    Nicolas RoblesBadajoz, Spain Henry III of Castile was called “the Suffering” (in Spanish, Enrique III el Doliente) because of his ill health. He was the son of John I and Eleanor of Aragon, born in 1379 in Burgos. Henry was the first person to hold the title of Prince of Asturias as heir to the…

  • Trachoma: Contained but not yet subdued

    Trachoma is a chronic eye infection caused by Chlamydia trachomatis, a bacterium at first thought to be a virus because of its minuscule size. It is the most common infectious cause of blindness worldwide, striking repeatedly in early childhood and, until recently, blinding millions.1 In 1907, Ludwig Halberstadter and Stanislaus von Prowazek observed the causative…

  • Echinococcus granulosus, the sheepdog worm

    In the days when Britain ruled the waves and its colonies, some sheep from Thomas Hardy’s Wessex and other counties followed their masters to the antipodes instead of stupidly jumping off a cliff.1 They multiplied in the sun and produced much wool, some of which was later returned to England under the imperial preference system…

  • The eponymous tumors of the kidney: Wilms and Grawitz

    In a time when diseases were often named after the first person to describe them, kidney tumors were classified into Wilms tumors for children and Grawitz tumors for adults. Both names supposedly honored the memory of these pioneers, and unlucky candidates sitting for medical examinations were sometimes expected to know who these people were. Max…

  • Touching for the King’s Evil

    JMS PearceHull, England The old word scrofula is now seldom seen in medical writings. Nor are the words ague, buboe, and podagra. Despite their romantic, descriptive appeal, they have been swept aside by the jet stream of the current epidemic of maladroit, often high-tech words, phrases, acronyms, and initialisms. Scrofula, the “King’s Evil,” or “struma,”…

  • Arnold Schoenberg’s String Trio Op. 45: Notes on “My Fatality”

    James L. FranklinChicago, Illinois, United States On August 2, 1946, the Austrian-born composer Arnold Schoenberg suffered a near fatal heart attack at his home in Los Angeles. Despite the fragile state of his health, on August 20th he was able to resume work on a string trio that had been commissioned by Harvard University. Schoenberg…

  • Marcel Marceau saved children with silence

    Howard FischerUppsala, Sweden “The people who came back from the camps were never able to talk about it…”– Marcel Marceau, French entertainer, explaining why he acted without words Marcel Marceau (1923–2007) entertained people all over the world for sixty years as a mime. He was born Marcel Mangel in Strasbourg, France, to a Jewish family.…

  • Filariasis and elephantiasis, plagues of the tropics

    Imagine being bitten by a mosquito, not in your hometown but in one of the countries you have always longed to visit. After a few days, you may not feel well. This is because you have been invaded by the tiny micro-larvae offspring of a worm that lives in another person. You may or may…

  • A medical visionary

    David GreenChicago, Illinois, United States The year was 1967. My father had just had his prostate removed and was having considerable post-surgical pain. On the fifth post-operative day, he collapsed suddenly and could not be resuscitated. The post-mortem examination showed multiple fresh blood clots in his lungs. I was devastated but should not have been…