Hektoen International

A Journal of Medical Humanities

Category: Science

  • Did Scythian men feminize themselves by drinking mare’s urine?

    Andrew WilliamsLeicester, United Kingdom The Enarees were nomadic Scythian soothsayers who lived within the areas bounded by the rivers Danube, Bug, Don, and Dnieper, and who Herodotus in the 5th century AD asserted were effeminate.1,2 Unfortunately the Scythians did not leave any written records. Hippocrates’ Airs Water and Places XX11 using the term Anarieis related…

  • Max Planck on innovation and age

    Howard Fischer Uppsala, Sweden   Gravedigger. 1940. Library of Congress.  Max Planck (1858–1947) was born in Kiel, Germany, to an educated family. He earned his Ph.D. in physics in 1879 from the University of Munich. His quantum theory, in which he postulated that energy is released in discrete units and not continuously, won the Nobel…

  • Will DNA be the next invisible ink?

    Edward TaborBethesda, Maryland, United States Deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA), the chemical that forms our genes, can be used to encode and transmit narrative documents and photos, as shown in several published studies. DNA might also become the next “invisible ink” because messages in DNA can be “hidden in plain sight” to reduce the chance of being…

  • Fred Gey, father of the antioxidant hypothesis

    Alun EvansBelfast, United Kingdom Fred Gey was a German scientist who developed the concept that antioxidant vitamin deficiency caused certain diseases. He qualified as an MD at the University of Basel in 1952, having first researched clinical biochemistry. He then spent two years in the biochemistry section of the Max Planck Institute in Göttingen, Germany,…

  • Chemical origins of terrestrial biology

    David GreenChicago, Illinois, United States As an undergraduate at the University of Pennsylvania in the 1950s, I attended a lecture by Harold C. Urey, a Nobel laureate. The subject of his lecture was the origin of life, and he described an experiment that he and his graduate student, Stanley Miller, had performed at the University…

  • Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen and X-rays

    Arpan K. Banerjee Solihull, England   Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen. LIFE Photo Archive. Via Wikimedia. The name Röntgen will be familiar to most for his discovery of X-rays on November 8, 1895. This date is now celebrated as the International Day of Radiology. Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen was born in Lennep, Germany on March 27, 1845. The…

  • Archibald Edward Garrod: Inborn errors of metabolism

    JMS Pearce Hull, England   Fig 1. Archibald Edward Garrod. Crop of image in Obituary Notices of Fellows of the Royal Society, 1932–1954. Wellcome Collection. CC BY 4.0. It is given to very few to invent a new class of diseases and to even fewer one that has survived subsequent scrutiny. Archibald Garrod, KCMG DM…

  • Entomological evidence and tales of the dead

    Srilakshmi Chidambaram Manila, Philippines   Transformation of large cone maggot from larvae to adult. USDA Forest Service via Flickr.  Picture the scene: A body, blue with bloat, sprawled across the floor. The skin is sloughed off and peeling; fat drips through the carpet. The room is warm with the sickly-sweet stench of decay. A living,…

  • The myth of knowledge

    Chloe Lee Singapore   Argonauts in quest of the Golden Fleece. Maxfield Parrish, 1910. New York Public Library Digital Collections. Legend has it that aeons ago on the Island of Colchis hung a magical Golden Fleece that could heal any disease. Modern medicine has proposed a new explanation for this incredible tale: Colchicum autumnale, a…

  • Robert Hooke and Micrographia

    JMS Pearce Hull, England   Fig 1. Cells in cork tree bark. From Hooke’s Micrographia via the Encyclopaedia Britannica. It is perhaps rash to attempt to appraise the work of Robert Hooke (1635–1703), but renewed attention is merited to a great scientist whose contribution to medicine and science has not been adequately acknowledged. Robert Hooke…