Hektoen International

A Journal of Medical Humanities

Tag: American Civil War

  • Doctor and dictionary

    For almost two decades beginning in 1882, Dr. William Chester Minor, retired army surgeon and captain of the Union Army during the American Civil War, labored unceasingly, day after day, reading and researching sixteenth and seventeenth century books, making notes on more than 12,000 slips of paper, and mailing them to the Scriptorium of Dr.…

  • Elizabeth Blackwell, MD

    JMS Pearce East Yorkshire, England   Figure 1 Although Elizabeth Blackwell was portrayed on an 18 cent US stamp in 1974, curiously this was over a century after she graduated in medicine (Figure 1). Many remain unaware of her remarkable story as the first female Anglo-American physician, campaigner, and medical suffragette (Figure 2). [i] She…

  • The American Civil War as a biological phenomenon: Did Salmonella or Sherman win the war for the North?

    Michael Brown Chicago, Illinois, United States   Reexamining Civil War deaths Patients in Ward K of Armory Square Hospital – Washington, DC, 1865   A demographic historian, J. David Hacker, recently discovered an unfortunate truth; using newly digitized data from the 1860, 1870, and 1880 censuses, he constructed new estimates of Northern and Southern Civil…