Hektoen International

A Journal of Medical Humanities

Category: Vignettes at Large

  • Doctors’ husbands

    Howard FischerUppsala, Sweden “Enjoy when you can, and endure when you must.”– Johann Wolfgang von Goethe The stereotypical image of the “medical couple” is changing: it is no longer the doctor-husband and his nonphysician-wife. This change is permanent and will accelerate, since 60% of American medical students1 and 54% of physicians2 are women. Eighty percent…

  • Paruresis: “Shy bladder” syndrome

    Howard FischerUppsala, Sweden “Keep calm and carry on.”– British motivational poster, 1939 Paruresis is the fear of being unable to urinate without privacy. It is more than simple shyness or embarrassment, but is rather an “intermittent idiopathic form of urinary retention.”1 In severe cases, the individual can only urinate at home, alone. The term “paruresis”…

  • Drapetomania: A “disease” that never was

    Howard FischerUppsala, Sweden “Slavery is next to hell.” – Harriet Tubman “And before I’d be a slave,I’ll be buried in my grave…”– Oh, Freedom, African-American spiritual Slavery arrived in what later became the United States in 1619. Slaves were used mainly as agricultural laborers. In the US South, that meant working with tobacco and cotton…

  • Medical marijuana, caregivers, and jail time

    Remi AlliUnited States Did you know that under current laws in the United States, if you deliver medical marijuana, there is a chance you could land in jail? In some states, a caregiver can be found guilty of illegal possession of marijuana even if it has been approved for medical use. State medical marijuana acts1…

  • Chinese footbinding: A millennium of mutilation

    Howard FischerUppsala, Sweden “Foot binding is the most incendiary and least controversial subject in modern Chinese history.”1– Dorothy Ko, professor of History and Women’s Studies, Barnard College Foot binding was practiced in China from the tenth century through most of the twentieth century. It involved breaking the bones and tightly binding the feet of young…

  • “Phossy jaw”: an industrial horror story

    Howard FischerUppsala, Sweden “The greatest tragedy in the whole story of occupational diseases.”1– Donald Hunter, M.D. (1898–1978) The development of cheap, reliable, and reasonably safe matches became possible with the addition of white phosphorus (P4O10) to the match head mixture. The first factory to use white phosphorus (also called “yellow phosphorus”) in match manufacturing opened…

  • Isaac Bashevis Singer describes koro

    Howard FischerUppsala, Sweden “When I was a little boy, they called me a liar, but now that I am grown up, they call me a writer.”– Isaac Bashevis Singer I. B. Singer (1903–1991) was born in Warsaw, Poland. He lived there and also in rural Poland during the First World War. In 1935 he immigrated…

  • J. Marion Sims and the reputation-character distinction

    Jack E. RiggsMatthew S. SmithMorgantown, West Virginia, United States “Reputation is what men and women think of us;character is what God and angels know of us.”— Thomas Paine (likely inaccurate attribution) Few medical legacies have been more controversial than that of J. Marion Sims, the Father of American Gynecology.1-3 Sims rose from humble and obscure…

  • Addiction a century ago

    “Addiction, mainly in the upper classes, was viewed with sympathy. It was not a criminal offense to buy or sell morphine. Freud for a time prescribed cocaine to some of his excitable patients, and we know that Sherlock Holmes, when he was bored, injected himself with a 7% solution. Soon after their accession, the tzar…

  • It could be bad

    Paul RousseauCharleston, South Carolina, United States The doctor poked and probed and prodded and pinched and rubbed his chin and clicked his pen and rose from his stool and breathed a groan, “Something is wrong, and it could be bad, is plausibly bad, is certainly bad, but not cancer bad, but bad heart bad, and…