Healthcare now and then
BITTER MEDICINE Medical remedies have a long history of unpleasantness, either because their nasty taste could not be masked or perhaps because of a traditional prejudice that a prescribed remedy would not work unless it was bitter, fizzed when dissolved in water, or was painful if given by injection. Classical examples are treacle, castor oil, […]
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THE MEDICI RULERS OF FLORENCE Published on January 1, 2020 H E K T O R A M A: . THE GOUT OF MEDICI George Dunea Florence in the fifteenth century was one of the most important cities in Western Europe. Rich and resplendent, first in banking and in the wool trade, […]
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MEDICINE AND TRAVEL Published on January 1, 2020 H E K T O R A M A: . DOCTOR MOORE IN ITALY Einar Perman Moore, a practicing physician in Glasgow with a good reputation, was offered an opportunity to travel. Like other prominent noblemen of his day, the young Duke of Hamilton was […]
Avant garde research on a blood substitute at the Hektoen Institute of Medical Research
Jayant Radhakrishnan Darien, Illinois, United States From Left to Right: Gerald S Moss MD, Richard Brinkman MD, Lakshman Sehgal PhD, Robert Forest DVM. June 1975, photograph of the team with the first baboon resuscitated with stroma free hemoglobin after being bled down to a hemoglobin concentration of zero. Photo taken by the author. The […]
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DA VINCI AT 400 Published on December 15 , 2019 H E K T O R A M A: . LEONARDO’S ANATOMICAL STUDIES Julia King Leonardo da Vinci was a “Renaissance man” in the truest sense, contributing his inexhaustible talent to many fields, including anatomy. In a time when medicine was still […]
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AMERICAN HEART PIONEERS Published on November 1, 2019 H E K T O R A M A: . ALFRED BLALOCK & VIVIEN THOMAS Carrie Barron 1930 Nashville. A twenty-year old African American man, honors student, and son of a carpenter had his eyes set on becoming a physician. This was not unfounded. In […]
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LATIN AMERICA Published on September 13, 2019 H E K T O R A M A: . THE FIRST TEN HOSPITALS ON THE AMERICAN CONTINENT Marco Antonio Ayala-García The first hospital in the Americas was built by Fray Nicolás de Ovando from 1503 to 1508 in Hispaniola (Dominican Republic and Haiti). Named Hospital de […]
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CELEBRATING WOMEN IN MEDICINE Published on September 13, 2019 H E K T O R A M A: . ALICE HAMILTON Anne Jacobson The squalid streets of working-class Chicago in the late nineteenth century would have been something of a shock to the girl who grew up in a sheltered but educated household […]
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THE GLORY OF FRANCE Published on September 13, 2019 H E K T O R A M A: . ARCHITECTURE AND THE FRENCH HOSPITAL Eric Breitbart Until I left England to work in France, it had never occurred to me that the architecture of a hospital was intimately linked to geography and that […]
Adrianus Spigelius, the last great Paduan anatomist
In his time the Flemish physician Adrianne van den Spiegel (often referred to by the latinized name of Adrianus Spigelius) was the most renowned practicing clinician in the city of Padua. An accomplished anatomist, he was left with only meager eponymous pickings: the caudate (Spigelian) lobe of the liver and some more obscure structures around […]