Hektoen International

A Journal of Medical Humanities

History Essays

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A – J

Mariam Abdulghani
Saved by the spoonful: Oral rehydration therapy (ORT)

Rebekah Burgess Abramovich
Elizabeth Fleischmann-Aschheim

Umut Akova
Marfan syndrome and Abraham Lincoln

William R. Albury
From changelings to extraterrestrials: depictions of autism in popular culture
Historical reflections on cause, responsibility and blame in medicine

Jacob Appel
The derailment of Franklin Pierce

Mohammad Hossein Azizi and Farzaneh Azizi
PDF Document A History of the Human Plague in Iran

Joyce Balls-Berry, Lea Dacy, and James Balls
“Heard It through the Grapevine”: The black barbershop as a source of health information

Jeremy Hugh Baron
PDF Document Professor Lord Lister, William Ernest Henley, and Oscar Wilde
PDF Document Sailors’ scurvy before and after James Lind – a reassessment
PDF Document How much should we know about our leaders’ health?

J.D. Bartleston, Cynthia J. Chelf, and Dietlind L. Wahner-Roedler
The Rosenbach eyelid sign

Emily Bethea
The US hospice movement: redressing modern medicine

David Blitzer, Alvise Guariento, and Robert M. Sade
The Lewis and Clark Expedition: medical ethics in uncharted territory

Julius P. Bonello
Trying to conceive: royal fertility issues in Renaissance times

Julius P. Bonello and Adam Awwad
A sporting end to Henry II, King of France

Julius P. Bonello and Cassandra Palmer
Joshua Chamberlain: The last casualty of the US Civil War

Julius P. Bonello and Emma E. Ryan
Mary Ann Bickerdyke SUM ’24

Julius P. Bonello and Kathy J. Slater
Grave robber or father of experimental surgery: A look into the life of John Hunter

Jennifer Borst
Swaddling: Forever bound in controversy?

Anagha Brahmajosyula
A historical review of Crohn’s disease

Kingston Bridges
Hanaoka Seishū, inventor of an early general anesthetic

Basil Brooke
A happy individual knows nothing

Stewart Cameron
Arthur Wohlmann and the Rotorua Health Spa

Philippe Campillo and Daniel Caballero
The influence of the text De Arte Gymnastica on the resurgence of medical gymnastics in Renaissance Italy: Girolamo Mercuriale (1530-1606)

Ninan Chacko
PDF Document Autonomy or Economy?

Enrique Chaves-Carballo
Death, disease, and discrimination during the construction of the Panama Canal (1904–1914)

Erin Connelly
“If it be a poor man”: medieval medical treatment for the rich and poor

Anita Cooke
A very Victorian drug

Michael Crossland
An abominable habit

Paul Dakin
John Wesley: amateur physician and health crusader

Nada Darwish and Alan Weber
Muslim women healers of the medieval and early modern Ottoman Empire

Jonathan R.T. Davidson
“Dr. Jim” (Sir Leander Jameson): A hero and villain of the British Empire SUM ’24

Joseph deBettencourt
History repeated: child abuse in the United States

Richard de Grijs
“Plague of the Sea, and the Spoyle of Mariners”—A brief history of fermented cabbage as antiscorbutic
Of vermicide and vermifuge: A history of intestinal parasites at sea
“Filth so foul and stench so offensive as not to be imagined”
The grim horrors of the orlop deck
The forgotten menace of long naval patrols
William Dawes: Deep flaws and sparks of brilliance
A foul “sailor’s mouth” of a different kind
Of toerags and spice boxes: Sanitation at sea
No fitful rest for the ordinary sailor

Vincent P. de Luise
Medicean optics: an analysis of Raffaello’s Portrait of Pope Leo X and Two Cardinals

Jessica Douthwaite
Leaving nothing to the imagination: Casualties Union and post-war first aid training

George Dunea
PDF Document Porphyria Variegata, a disease of kings
The doctor and the baron
High drama in the scullery
Otto von Bismarck, the Iron Chancellor
Ivan Illich after almost half a century 
Agricola’s De re metallica: an early description of industrial diseases
Diane de Poitiers, a case of mammary narcissism
The assassination of President McKinley: death from traumatic gunshot pancreatitis?
Lucrezia Borgia—victim of her times
Science and medicine in Venice
Edward Gibbon’s decline and fall
The medical history of Ronald Reagan
The two doctors Bigelow from New England
From healing to superstition and witchcraft SUM ’24
Hittite medicine SUM ’24

Jack Effron
The battle of the vivisected dog

Eve Elliot
The Queen’s quickening: the phantom pregnancies of Mary I
Body language: The history of medical terminology

Claire Elliott
How not to make the consultation sexy

Michael Ellman
Mark Hanna’s knees and the Panama Canal

Patrick Fiddes and Paul A. Komesaroff
An emperor unclothed: the virtuous Osler

Paul G. Firth
Shackleton’s angel

Howard Fischer
Another look at the medical problems of Jean-Paul Marat: searching for a unitary diagnosis
Nazi doctors and medical eponyms
Creating a race of orphans: Lebensborn, the “spring of life” 
Syndrome K and the Fatebenefratelli Hospital
The Warsaw ghetto hunger study
When the FBI investigated William Carlos Williams
“The trial” of Dr. Spock
Andersonville, Georgia and Elmira, New York: When Hell was on Earth
A tangled web: stealing newborns in twentieth-century Spain
Fascist Italy: The Battle for Births
Going berserk
Dr. Alice Miller on Hitler’s childhood
International adoption of Greek “orphans”
Rapamycin: The “fountain of youth” from Easter Island?
The adenoid riots of 1906
The resident doctors’ strike: Montreal, 1934
The bizarre history of the bezoar
Louis Jolyon West, M.D.: A dangerous doctor
René Descartes found that Sweden was hazardous to his health

Morris Fishbein
PDF Document Ludvig Hektoen: A biography and an appreciation

Ronald Fishman
Dirty, dark, dangerous: coal miners’ nystagmus

Patrick Flynn
Healing in the face of cultural devastation

James L. Franklin
PDF Document Chicago medicine and peptic ulcer disease
Eisenhower and Crohn’s Disease
In praise of swimming: from Benjamin Franklin to Oliver Sacks 
The three contraries of Benjamin Franklin: “the gout, the stone and not yet master of all my passions”
Guaiac and “the old Guaiacum test”
“My dear neoplasm:” Sigmund Freud’s oral cancer

Laurette Geldenhuys and Guillermo Quinonez
Samuel Clossy’s Observations: an unrecognized contribution to the origin of anatomical pathology

Charles Raymond Gill
Bank of England Medical Officers: from Napoleonic to modern times

Denis Gill
Doctors like eponymity

Ira D. Glick, Danielle Kamis, and Neil Eisenberg
Improving health and saving lives: the unusual relationship of religion on sports and health

Harry Goldin
Biblical leprosy: A dermatologist’s perspective

F. Gonzalez-Crussi
An “enematic” saga
Cranium: the symbolic powers of the skull
Of luxuriant manes and in praise of baldness

Kevis Goodman
“Uncertain disease”: the science of nostalgia

Shelley Stern Grach
Medicine and the Jews in the Middle Ages

Magdalena Grassman and Eva Niklinska
The Polish White Cross – birthed on American soil to support Polish soldiers abroad

B. Herold Griffith
Two great Scots: John and William Hunter

Richard de Grijs
“All hands to dance and skylark!” – Shipboard dancing in the British Navy
Temporary insanity in tropical waters

Lynsey Grosfield
Collections complete: experiential centres of learning

Stanley Gutiontov
Pig man: pigs in medicine from Galen to transgenic xenotransplantation

Timo Hannu
Thomas Bartholin’s consolation on the burning of his library

Bert Hansen
Medical history on the silver screen: Hollywood’s ten-minute films about medical heroes

Katherine Harvey
“Troubled in my eyes”: the risks of reading and writing

Laura D. Hirshbein
The boys’ club

Maureen Hirthler and Richard Hutchison
Jean-Françoise Champollion—Revisiting his illnesses and death

Barry I. Hoffbrand
Fellows of the Royal College of Physicians and their fees

Shabrina Jarrell
The Doctors’ Trial and the Nuremberg Code

Liz Jones
The promise of a perfect smile

Paul G. Joseph
The value of achievement

Stewart Justman
Musical evenings on HMS Bounty


K – P

Robert M. Kaplan
Dictator on the couch: The only known psychological treatment of Adolf Hitler

Charles G. Kels
Political obfuscation and medical speculation

Mahek Khwaja
Healing and hedonism: a reevaluation of Hashishian legends of crime and indulgence

Lloyd Klein
General Robert E. Lee’s myocardial infarction: Did illness impact the Battle of Gettysburg?
Infectious diseases in the Civil War

Lloyd Klein and Eric Wittenberg
The decisive influence of malaria on the outcome of Grant’s Vicksburg campaign of 1863

Adam Komorowski and Sang Ik Song
Doctorum Ecclesiae: the medical clerics of the Diocese of Bath and Wells, England
Episteme and translation in an annotated copy of the Canon of Medicine by Ibn Sīnā (Avicenna)

Stephen Kosnar
Welcome to The Jungle: the story of adopting two food safety laws

Biji T. Kurien
Looking back 175 years

K.N. Lai
Illness shapes the course of human events

Marshall A. Lichtman
The first effective chemotherapy for cancer

Philip R. Liebson
The sweating sickness in Tudor England: a plague of the Renaissance
Citizen Zinsser: portrait of a Renaissance man
The death of James Abram Garfield
The talented Dr. Cotton and other quacks

Kevin R. Loughlin
Joseph Warren: The forgotten founder
A 130-year-old medical cold case: Who was Jack the Ripper?
The search for Eisenhower’s adrenal tumor
The death of Zachary Taylor: The first presidential assassination or a bad bowl of cherries?
Samuel Mudd, MD: Good Samaritan or conspirator?
Teddy Roosevelt: Did a speech really save his life?
Physicians of the American Revolution new

Christopher Magoon
The Friends’ Ambulance Unit South Bank Clinic: the forgotten valor of the pacifists who stayed beyond the fight

Silvia Maina
Medical photography in the nineteenth century: from portraits to clinical photography

Constance Markey
Doctor in exile

Stephen Martin
Emblems and psychological medicine on the Sutton Hoo purse
Clinical signs in images of King Henry VII

Stephen Martin and Aidan Jones
Applause, Honours and Mortification: Admiral Pellew’s psychology of achievement in combatting slavery

S.E.S. Medina
The Philosophers’ Stone: History and myth

Sally Metzler
Caterina Sforza of Forli: Warrior and medical alchemist
Death of the Prudent Prince, Medici Grand Duke Ferdinando II
Byzantine Emperor John Tzimisces: Murder, charity, & leprosy
Emperor Otto II, malaria, and aloe SUM ’24

Juliana Menegakis
Queen Juana: the mad or the betrayed?

Maureen Miller
Consolidation: pneumonia and other pathologies on the Bellevue Hospital Autopsy

Lisa Mullenneaux
Choose your poison: the curious case of Dr. Waite

Jacquline Musgrave
Risking it all to save strangers—remembering Gisella Perl

Carlos G. Musso
PDF Document Auenbrugger, Corvisart and Laennec: Three Generations that Forged the Basis of Chest Examination

Carlos G. Musso and Paula Enz
PDF Document Ivan Pavlov: a pioneer researcher and fine human being

Avi Ohry
Winnie Ille Pu and Dr. Alexander Lenard
A tale of two physicians and Albert Göring
Notable achievements by people who have lost an upper limb

Seamus O’Mahony
The death of King George V

Ciara O’Neill
The pediatric pioneer and his finger

J.M.S. Pearce
Polymathy in decline?
The forgotten Darwin
The Lunar Society legacy
The Monros: a medical dynasty
Nicholas Culpeper and Herbal Medicine
Scurvy before James Lind
The legacy and maladies of Jonathan Swift
The X Club
The other Charles Darwin (1758-1778)
Science versus religion: the medieval disenchantment
Joseph Merrick, “The Elephant Man”
Jean-Paul Marat, physician and revolutionary 
St. Audrey Etheldrida
The “Ether Controversy”
The discoverers of aspirin 
Leeching and François-Joseph-Victor Broussais
Harvey Cushing and pituitary diseases
The medical exploits of Roald Dahl
The illness of King George III
What makes a polymath, a genius, or a man who knows everything?
George Redmayne Murray and “myxœdema”
From poppy to morphine and heroin
A note on early microscopes
The barber-surgeons
The changing role of the apothecary
Napoleon’s final illness
University of Padua School of Medicine
On rival priority in publishing
The doctrine of signatures
Touching for the King’s Evil

Einar Perman
Samuel Tissot: patient compliance in the 18th century
Doctor Moore on 18th century medicine

Colin Phoon
The origins of pediatrics as a clinical and academic specialty in the United States
The remarkable Harriet Lane

Anusha Pillay
The barber-surgeons: Their history over the centuries

Constantina Pitsillides
The rebirth of medicine

Susan Brunn Puett and J. David Puett
The Florentine Renaissance apothecary
Santa Margherita da Cortona


R – Z

Jayant Radhakrishnan
Diptheria: Horses and dogs to the rescue

Suzanne Raga
Anesthesia: culture, technology, and the rise of the surgeon

Jesús Ramírez-Bermúdez
The monarch, the musician, and the medic

Ira Rezak
Medicine and medals in 19th and 20th century France

Sarah Riedlinger, Dean Giustini, and Brenden Hursh
Part I: The impact of insulin on children with diabetes at Toronto Sick Kids in the 1920s
Part II:  The impact of insulin on children with diabetes at Toronto Sick Kids in the 1920s

Jack E. Riggs and David B. Watson
“Between false modesty … and conceit” – Sir Roger Bannister

Ann W. Robinson
Behind the pep: modern and postmodern perspectives in Lydia E. Pinkham Medicine Company’s advertising

Nicolas Roberto Robles
Saint John of God and the origins of nursing
Too many doctors: the death of Friedrich III
Clausewitz’s death: Cholera and melancholy
King Wamba’s poisoning with cytisine
Philip the Handsome and the plague
King Henry III of Castile, the Suffering

Belle van Rosmalen and Thomas van Gulik
Anatomical correlation of the bronze liver of Piacenza with fresh sheep livers SUM ’24

Tony Ryan
Mount Everest and a medical atlas 
Otology in late Victorian Ireland 

Anthony Ryan and Grace Neville
Le petit journal, clowns & children in hospital in Victorian London

Vittoria Sabatini
Hadrian and Frank’s sign

Lynn Veach Sadler
The divine leaf: Physick and the cause for physick

L. J. Sandlow
Oaths, codes, and charters in medicine over the ages

Shrestha Saraf, Sanjay Saraf, and Sudarshan Ramachandran
A look back at insulin

Saty Satya-Murti and Michael Engh
When needs trumped faith and dogma: Early twentieth century Los Angeles women’s social conscience

Mariella Scerri
Wet nursing: a historical perspective

Steve Server
Finding a “New Orientation” in Mexican Public Health: The Servicio Médico-Social

Erika Silvestri
Wilhelm Werner’s life unworthy of life: A voice from the Nazi Euthanasia Program

Anabelle S. Slingerland
The history of diabetes and insulin

Elizabeth A. J. Scott
The anatomist’s violin

Julie Silverman
Dame Cicely Saunders and the foundation of the hospice movement

Shefali Sood
Fashion-based medicine: A history of Western doctors’ dress

Elizabeth Steinhart and JMS Pearce
The Turk’s Head Literary Club new

Armando Susmano
Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s last illness

Carine Tabak
Howard A. Knox and intelligence testing on Ellis Island

Gigi Taymour
Medicine and religion in ancient Egypt

Mariel Tishma
“Some little show of nail”: The health of Anne Boleyn
“Rich man, poor man”: A history of lead poisoning
The history and mystery of cupping
Women in the medical profession: the trial of Jacoba Felicie de Almania
Frankincense and myrrh: medicinal resin worth more than gold 
Body and soul, balance and the Sibyl of the Rhine: the life and medicine of Saint Hildegard of Bingen 
“For their own sakes”: The Edinburgh Seven, Surgeon’s Hall Riot, and the fate of English medical women

Hugh Tunstall-Pedoe
Medical and other memories of the Cold War and its Iron Curtain

Matthew Turner
The Doctors’ Riot of 1788
“A conspicuous place in the annals of murder”: The anatomy murders of Burke and Hare
Did Louis XVI have phimosis? SUM ’24

Matthew Turner and Jason Sapp
Mercury poisoning and the death of John Wilkes Booth

Jude Tunyi
The secrecy behind JFK’s autoimmune disease

Katarina Villner
“And of scurvy the teeth fall out of them”

Daniel Vuillermin and Richard de Grijs
“Marvailous Cures”: Sympathetic medicine connecting Europe and China

William H. Wehrmacher
Illuminating the third millennium with flashes of experience from the 20th century

George M. Weisz and Andrzej Grzybowski
Ludwik Fleck, physician in Lwow Ghetto

Andrew Williams
Why did the chickens refuse to eat before the Roman defeat at Deprana (249 BC)?

Andrew Williams and Frederick O’Dell
“Surrounded with many Mercies”: 270 years of patient advice

Isobel P. Williams
Captain Scott’s brave and loyal assistant: Petty Officer Edgar Evans

Philip K. Wilson
Weighing medical evidence on a historical scale

Andrew P.K. Wodrich
Plague epidemics and the evolution of language in England
Can headless martyrs really walk? The belief in cephalophores in the Middle Ages

Frank A. Wollheim
Dr. Wedekind’s son: a Frank story

James R. Wright Jr.
Maligning Macleod and “Bettering” Best: The discovery of insulin as depicted in film before Michael Bliss

Melissa Yeo
Sea sick: Naval surgery and sanitation in eighteenth-century Britain

Ping Yu & Chi Lu
A publicly funded health care system of China in 11th to 3rd century BC, as recorded in the Rites of Zhou

Richard Zhang
A Tale of Two Tonics: Sino-Western psychopharmaceutical modernity in Shanghai, 1936
American ginseng as an herbal emissary influencing Qing-American trade relations

Vignettes

Vignettes
Is history good for you? Pros and cons
Origins of the Pap smear
The death of Socrates and common hemlock (Umut Akova)
The wizards who saved lives
(Ceres Otero)
From gout to rheumatoid arthritis
Andronicus III, malaria, and Byzantium