Hektoen International

A Journal of Medical Humanities

Category: Neurology

  • Edward Lear

    JMS PearceHull, England, United Kingdom How pleasant to know Mr Lear!Who has written such volumes of stuff!Some think him ill-tempered and queerBut a few think him pleasant enough.—Edward Lear 1879 Hundreds of famous people from every branch of life have been diagnosed or suspected—sometimes on dubious evidence—as sufferers from the symptom epilepsy. Edward Lear (1812–1888)…

  • A note on handedness

    JMS PearceHull, England, United Kingdom Handedness (chirality) refers to the preferential use of one hand over the other. It is a matter of degree; it is seldom absolute. Population left and right preference existed in the Neanderthals (lived from 400,000 to about 40,000 years ago) onwards. Only homo sapiens amongst the great apes shows strong…

  • Walter E. Dandy, one of the founders of neurosurgery

    Philip R. LiebsonChicago, Illinois, United States Three pioneers established the discipline of neurosurgery. They were the British surgeon Victor Horsley and the Americans Harvey Cushing and Walter Dandy. Both Americans were surgeons at Johns Hopkins Hospital and Dandy (1886-1946) was the youngest. His innovations include the first clipping of an intracranial aneurysm, the surgical management…

  • The migraine aura and royal astronomers

    JMS PearceHull, England, United Kingdom Spleen sighs for ever on her pensive bed,Pain at her side and megrim at her head.— “Rape of the Lock”, Alexander Pope (1688-1744) About one third of migraine sufferers experience an aura1 or warning that begins suddenly, lasts about twenty to forty minutes, and most commonly affects vision, and less often,…

  • Broca’s Brains: A lesson in the importance of saving the history of neuroscience

    Richard BrownHalifax, NS, CanadaThalia Garvock-de MontbrunMontreal, QC, Canada Recent fires at the National Museum of Brazil and at the University of Cape Town in South Africa1,2 have shown the fragility of rare books, scientific records, photographs, and films. Descriptions of book burning by Richard Ovendon3 also highlight how easily historical records can be destroyed by…

  • The intricate forest of the neuron

    Silvia MainaTorino, Italia Entering the room, I was welcomed by some small and attractive ink drawings. In the first, like a genealogical tree or a medieval miniature, thin branches stretched to fill the frame. In the second, waves of sea anemones wrapped into the algae that populates the sea floor. The exposition, entitled Organisms and…

  • Eye-brain-extremity coordination and enduring sports achievement

    Marshall LichtmanRochester, New York, United States Neuroscientists have imaged the brain of athletes, looking for changes related to the sports they played, whether principally aerobic or anaerobic. These efforts have suggested expansion of the gray matter in certain anatomical areas of the brain in elite athletes. These analyses have been crude by necessity, as the…

  • Encephalitis lethargica

    Encephalitis lethargica was a worldwide epidemic during the years 1918-1930 that resembled influenza. It was first described in Vienna in 1916 by Constantin von Economo in thirteen patients suffering from unusual neurological symptoms that he thought constituted a new entity and called encephalitis lethargica. Similar cases were described at the same time in a French…

  • Multiple sclerosis: Early descriptions

    JMS Pearce Hull, England Clinical MS: Augustus D’Este, McKenzie It was almost two centuries ago that the best known and possibly the first detailed patient’s description of multiple sclerosis (MS) was recorded. It survives in the diaries (1822-48) and almanac of Sir Augustus D’Este, the Harrovian grandson of King George III.1,2 In December 1822, when he…

  • John Hughlings Jackson

    JMS PearceHull, England “. . . A man among the little band of whom are Aristotle and Newton and Darwin.”  -Gustave I. Schorstein (1863-1906), physician at the London Hospital The magnitude of Hughlings Jackson’s contributions to medicine is almost impossible to encapsulate. He was the foremost figure of nineteenth-century British neurology. He has enjoyed numerous…