Hektoen International

A Journal of Medical Humanities

Tag: Alois Alzheimer

  • On rival priority in publishing

    JMS PearceHull, England Rival claims for priority in describing diseases or related investigations are only too common. Such vexing disputes are neither recent nor confined to medicine and science. An early example of publication rivalry is in Vergil’s Proverbiorum Libellus (Venice, 1498), often known as the Adagia, the first collection of Latin proverbs, which preceded…

  • “Modern psychiatry begins with Kraepelin”

    JMS PearceHull, England “Modern psychiatry begins with Kraepelin”1 The pages of history seen through the retrospectroscope often provide dull facts rather than insights into the personalities and driving forces of its famous subjects. Such is the case of Emil Wilhelm Kraepelin (1856-1926) (Fig 1), a German psychiatrist, widely acknowledged as the founder and pioneer of…

  • Alzheimer and his disease

    JMS PearceHull, England “Fortiter in re, suaviter in modo (powerfully in deed, gently in manner).”— Franz Nissl’s description of Alzheimer (1916) Curiously, until the 1970s the high prevalence Alzheimer’s disease was not recognized as the most common cause of dementia.1 Most demented patients until then were labeled as having cerebral arteriosclerosis, or as sufferers from…

  • African American medical pioneers

    Mariel TishmaChicago, Illinois, United States The road for African Americans in the medical professions has not been easy. Enslaved Africans received no education.1 During the first half of the nineteenth-century medical schools in the North would admit only a very small number of black students. Even after the Civil War, African Americans continued to be…