Hektoen International

A Journal of Medical Humanities

Tag: amputation

  • The grim horrors of the orlop deck

    Richard de GrijsSydney, Australia The often awe-inspiring works of art immortalizing historic naval battles usually belie the harsh reality of war. Amidst clouds of billowing, black smoke and the deafening roar of cannon fire, sailors faced the real danger of life-threatening injuries. Injured sailors were carried, dragged, or stretchered to the surgeon’s “cockpit,” a dimly…

  • Infectious diseases in the Civil War

    Lloyd Klein San Francisco, California, United States The main cause of death during the American Civil War was not battle injury but disease. About two-thirds of the 620,000 deaths of Civil War soldiers were caused by disease, including 63% of Union fatalities. Only 19% of Union soldiers died on the battlefield and 12% later succumbed to…

  • They don’t teach us that

    Evelyn M. Potochny Hershey, Pennsylvania, United States   Soldiers in line to get in a plane. Photo by Pixabay. You called in your own medevac. You’d even tourniqueted both legs, or what was left of them. And when the Chinook kicked up all that dust and finally landed, you looked so—calm. Someone read each name…

  • The memorial of Thomas Johnson, eighteenth-century barber surgeon

    Stephen Martin Durham, UK, and Thailand   Fig 1. Monument to Thomas Johnson, Brancepeth. Source: photo © author. Public domain for non-commercial use In the churchyard of St. Brandon in Brancepeth1 village, County Durham, UK, is an unusual headstone monument.2 (Fig 1) Dating to the very last year of the eighteenth century, it has three…

  • The barber-surgeons: Their history over the centuries

    Anusha Pillay Raipur, India   Bloodletting from the arm. Wellcome Collection. CC BY 4.0. “His pole, with pewter basins hung, Black, rotten teeth in order strung, Rang’d cups that in the window stood, Lin’d with red rags, to look like blood, Did well his threefold trade explain, Who shav’d, drew teeth, and breath’d a vein.” –…

  • Sawing to the bone

    This illustration, believed to be the frontispiece of one of the surgical texts by Walter Hermann Ryff, is perhaps one of the more realistic for its time. During this era, anatomical and medical texts tended to be fairly bloodless, portraying flayed human beings in states of repose. Here instead we see a leg amputation with…

  • Robert Liston—the fastest knife in town

    Robert Liston (1794–1847), FRCSEd (1818). Portrait by Samuel John Stump (1778–1863), 1847. The Royal College of Surgeons of Edinburgh via Wikimedia. CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. Samuel Johnson, a man of strongly held prejudices, had a low opinion of most foreigners, and this included the Scots. James Boswell, his biographer and a Scotsman himself, records how Johnson…

  • To my friend with diabetes, on losing her foot

    Anna Kander Iowa City, IA, USA   The author’s friend, almost sixty years ago–when she was first diagnosed with Type I Diabetes and told she probably wouldn’t survive to adulthood. You walk sixty-seven years while childhood diabetes, against your iron will, poisons your peripheral nerves with sugar, and the muscles of your feet, starved of circulation,…