Hektoen International

A Journal of Medical Humanities

Tag: 20th century

  • Psychiatric care at the historical Athens Mental Health Facility

    Cherron PayneFarmington, Connecticut, United States When I was an undergraduate student at Ohio University in Athens, my friends and I would often hike to an intriguing place called the Ridges, overlooking the picturesque Hocking River and the Appalachian gem of Ohio University in Southeastern Ohio. The Ridges was not solely a picturesque hillside, but a…

  • Malaria in defeat and victory

    Richard J. E. BrownYorkshire, England, United Kingdom A few weeks ago, in the reading room of the National Archives in London, I came across the war diary of a British medical unit of the Second World War. This particular unit, No.1 Malaria Field Laboratory, Royal Army Medical Corps, had been posted to the eastern Mediterranean…

  • The forerunner

    Shafiqah SamarasamMalaysia Southeast Asia has experienced detrimental, large-scale air pollution for decades. Known as the “Southeast Asia haze,” this transboundary pollution is largely caused by illegal agricultural fires in the forests of Indonesia. The lingering smoke results in breathing difficulties and adverse health outcomes for the citizens of the region.1 With haze becoming a prevalent, annual…

  • Abhay Sadhak (fearless seeker): Baba Amte

    Utkarsh G. HingmireNagpur, India Murlidhar Devidas Amte, affectionately known as Baba Amte, was a lawyer who left his lucrative legal career to devote his life to the treatment of patients suffering from leprosy.1 If one was to describe his life in a few sentences it would be “I sought my soul, my soul I could…

  • Ellen Powell Tiberino’s The Operation

    Cody RitzPhiladelphia, Pennsylvania, United States In the graphite drawing by the late Ellen Powell Tiberino titled The Operation (1980), a tangled chaos emanates from an operating table surrounded by medical professionals of varying expressions—the two closest of whom hunch over the mess of contraptions and viscera with claw-like hands. Another healthcare worker stares directly at…

  • Walter E. Dandy, one of the founders of neurosurgery

    Philip R. LiebsonChicago, Illinois, United States Three pioneers established the discipline of neurosurgery. They were the British surgeon Victor Horsley and the Americans Harvey Cushing and Walter Dandy. Both Americans were surgeons at Johns Hopkins Hospital and Dandy (1886-1946) was the youngest. His innovations include the first clipping of an intracranial aneurysm, the surgical management…

  • Alexis Carrel: The sunshine and the shadow

    Philip R. LiebsonChicago, Illinois, United States Dr. Alexis Carrel (1873-1944) was as complex as his glass perfusion pump apparatus. A brilliant research surgeon, he won the Nobel Prize in Medicine before his fortieth birthday for his work on vascular suture and the transplantation of blood vessels and organs, and later developed techniques that were predecessors…

  • The Lazarus phenomenon: When the dead return to life

    Tom SeweNairobi, Kenya It is a few minutes after 2 AM. A middle-aged woman lays motionless on a table in a hospital emergency department with tubes protruding from multiple orifices. The relentless cardiac monitor screams its flat-line signal as the code-blue team pants, scrubs clinging to their sweaty chests after a phenomenal forty-five-minute cardiopulmonary resuscitation…

  • Matron Charlotte Evelyn Nelson (1938-1954) and her portrait by Alice Burton

    Frederick John O’DellNorthampton, United Kingdom Charlotte Evelyn Nelson (1894-1959) was born on 13 July 1894 in Hull. Before her sixth birthday she was orphaned, as the 1901 census lists her at the Hull Seamans and General Orphan Asylum, aged six and a schoolgirl. Later she was moved into service and by the 1911 census she…

  • Mental hospital memories of another era

    Robert CraigBrisbane, Queensland, Australia In 1964, having obtained a place to study medicine at Cambridge University, I was given the opportunity as a medical student to work as an assistant nurse for three months in a large residential mental hospital in Suffolk, England. The pay was meager but board and lodging were included. Suffolk was…