Hektoen International

A Journal of Medical Humanities

Tag: 19th century

  • John Abernethy

    John Abernethy was born in London in 1764 and went to school in Wolverhampton, where he learned Latin and Greek, and graduated top of his class. He would have preferred to study law but his father insisted he choose medicine. At age fifteen, he was apprenticed for five years to a surgeon with a large,…

  • August Von Platen, inspiration for Death in Venice

    Nicolas Roberto RoblesBandajoz, Spain Weil da, wo Schönheit waltet, Liebe waltet Because where beauty reigns, love reigns – Sonette aus Venedig. August von Platen was a German poet whose death inspired Thomas Mann to write Death in Venice. Descended from an impoverished noble family, he attended the Cadet School at Munich from ages ten to…

  • “For their own sakes”: The Edinburgh Seven, Surgeon’s Hall Riot, and the fate of English medical women

    Mariel TishmaChicago, Illinois, United States “There seems to be practically no doubt now that women are and will be doctors. The only question really remaining is, how thoroughly they are to be educated . . .”—Sophia Jex-Blake, Medical Women: Two Essays1 In 1860s Great Britain, few women could practice medicine. The first was Elizabeth Blackwell.…

  • Epidemic cholera and Joseph William Bazalgette

    JMS PearceHull, England, United Kingdom Rampant epidemics of cholera took many lives in the Victorian era. These epidemics were finally overcome with the discovery that cholera was a waterborne infection and by massive reconstruction of the sewers. Sir Joseph William Bazalgette (1819-1891) (Fig 1), known as the “Sewer King,”1 was born in Enfield, London. His…

  • R. Austin Freeman and the Victorian forensic thriller

    Anthony PapagiannisThessaloniki, Greece Many people today are acquainted with well-known books and television series of forensic crime fiction. The modern detective fiction writer is expected to provide detailed descriptions of autopsies, current technology, pharmacology, and toxicology. Yet, even in this relatively new version of the old genre of police fiction, there is nothing new under…

  • Paul Pierre Broca

    JMS PearceHull, England, United Kingdom At the turn of the nineteenth century, knowledge of how the brain worked was largely conjectural. Intelligence, memory, language, and motor and sensory functions had not been localized. The physiologist Flourens, promoting the notion of “cerebral equipotentiality,” concluded, “The cerebral cortex functions as an indivisible whole . . . an…

  • Theodor Meynert

    JMS PearceHull, England, United Kingdom Theodor Meynert (1833-1892) (Fig 1) was an eminent if eccentric neuropathologist and psychiatrist. His original work had an impact not just on medicine but on the philosophy of the mind and the “history of materialism.”1 Modern brain research attempts to unravel the intricacies of human brain-mind relationships, much of which…

  • Dr. Susan LaFlesche Picotte: Tradition, assimilation, and healing

    Mariel TishmaChicago, Illinois, United States “My office hours are any and all hours of the day and night.”—Susan LaFlesche Picotte1 It was August of 1889 and Dr. Susan LaFlesche Picotte was suffering a sleepless night. She had just treated her first patient and she doubted her diagnosis. She was a new doctor after all, and…

  • Dr. Heinrich Hoffmann and Der Struwwelpeter

    Howard FischerUppsala, Sweden “Give me a child and I’ll shape him into anything.”—B.F. Skinner Dr. Heinrich Hoffmann (1809-1894) was a general practitioner in Frankfurt. When an opening for a physician at the Frankfurt psychiatric hospital was announced, he took the job despite having no particular experience in the field. He apparently taught himself and increased…

  • Franz Joseph Gall and phrenology

    JMS PearceHull, England, United Kingdom For many reasons the work of Gall, when stripped of its excrescences, constituted an important landmark in the history of neurology.—Macdonald Critchley4 In the times of Galen, the location of the mind and spirit was imprecisely thought to reside in the brain’s ventricles and pineal. In the second century AD,…