Hektoen International

A Journal of Medical Humanities

Category: Infectious Disease

  • AIDS: Thru a glass darkly

    S.E.S. MedinaBenbrook, Texas, United States I sat in the deep, cool shade of a stout, leafy Texas cedar escaping the torrid summer heat, idle thoughts meandering. Cotton-ball clouds grazed lazily across their azure prairie. The pervasive insane miasma swirling like a whirlwind around COVID-19 reminded me of days past when a very different virus dominated…

  • “Killed By Vaccination”: the enduring currency of a nineteenth century illogic

    Saty Satya-MurtiSanta Maria, California, United States Vaccine misinformation and anti-vaccination conspiracy theories are not new but have acquired a combative energy during the Covid-19 pandemic. Nearly all the arguments now raised against vaccination were known in the late nineteenth-century, and the vaccine objectors’ rhetoric shows striking similarities to that in use today. Smallpox vaccine opponents:…

  • Recognition at last

    Jayant RadhakrishnanDarien, Illinois, United States “Though she be but little, she is fierce.” — William Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night’s Dream     The adage “out of sight, out of mind” appears to have been coined for microbes. We only think about them when they cause havoc, as in the current pandemic. Lately the situation seems to be…

  • Epidemic cholera and Joseph William Bazalgette

    JMS PearceHull, England, United Kingdom Rampant epidemics of cholera took many lives in the Victorian era. These epidemics were finally overcome with the discovery that cholera was a waterborne infection and by massive reconstruction of the sewers. Sir Joseph William Bazalgette (1819-1891) (Fig 1), known as the “Sewer King,”1 was born in Enfield, London. His…

  • “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…

  • Pursuing Hualapai tigers in the Mule Mountains

    Stephen A. KlotzJustin O. SchmidtTucson, Arizona, United States Every Monday afternoon after returning to my office from infectious disease clinic, I would find pickle jars and yogurt containers on my desk. Upon removing the lids and peering in, I saw crawling over one another the largest kissing bugs in the United States. There was always…

  • Malaria in defeat and victory

    Richard J. E. BrownYorkshire, England, United Kingdom A few weeks ago, in the reading room of the National Archives in London, I came across the war diary of a British medical unit of the Second World War. This particular unit, No.1 Malaria Field Laboratory, Royal Army Medical Corps, had been posted to the eastern Mediterranean…

  • The forerunner

    Shafiqah SamarasamMalaysia Southeast Asia has experienced detrimental, large-scale air pollution for decades. Known as the “Southeast Asia haze,” this transboundary pollution is largely caused by illegal agricultural fires in the forests of Indonesia. The lingering smoke results in breathing difficulties and adverse health outcomes for the citizens of the region.1 With haze becoming a prevalent, annual…

  • Dr. Edward Livingston Trudeau and aeration of the White Plague

    Philip R. LiebsonChicago, Illinois, United States Edward Livingston Trudeau was born in 1848, one year before Frédéric Chopin died of tuberculosis. Trudeau’s extended family eventually included Justin Trudeau, the Prime Minister of Canada, and Garry Trudeau of Doonesbury fame. In his time tuberculosis was killing up to 14% of persons who had ever lived and…

  • Peter Panum and the “geography of disease”

    Kathryne DycusMadrid, Spain In 1846, the Faroe Islands experienced an outbreak of measles, the likes of which had not been seen in sixty-five years. The Danish government called upon a newly graduated physician, Peter Ludwig Panum, to investigate and control its spread. Panum wrote of the experience in his seminal text, “Observations Made During the…