Hektoen International

A Journal of Medical Humanities

Tag: anatomy

  • Adrianus Spigelius, the last great Paduan anatomist

    In his time the Flemish physician Adrianne van den Spiegel (often referred to by the latinized name of Adrianus Spigelius) was the most renowned practicing clinician in the city of Padua. An accomplished anatomist, he was left with only meager eponymous pickings: the caudate (Spigelian) lobe of the liver and some more obscure structures around…

  • Johann Conrad Brunner and his work on the pancreas

    In the history of medicine, the Swiss anatomist and physician Johann Conrad Brunner is more often remembered for discovering the glands in the duodenal mucosa than for his experiments on the pancreas. Though able to surgically induce at least transient diabetes mellitus in dogs, he failed to make a connection between the pancreas and diabetes,…

  • Guido Guidi, the anatomist known as Vidus Vidius

    The sixteenth century Florentine anatomist and surgeon Guido Guidi is usually referred to by his Latinized name Vidus Vidius.1-4 He was born in 1509 from a fortunate union of medicine and art by having a physician as his father and the grand-daughter of the famous Florentine painter Domenico Ghirlandaio as his mother. Her name was…

  • Berengario da Carpi, pre-Vesalian anatomist (1460–1530)

    Berengario da Carpi was the most important anatomist of the generation preceding the so-called Anatomical Trinity of Vesalius, Fallopio, and Eustachio. He is regarded as one of the founders of scientific anatomy, challenging the reliance on ancient texts and emphasizing the primacy of direct observation based on dissecting the human body. A prolific author, he…

  • Bartolomeo Eustachio of the Anatomical Trinity

    The tube connecting the inner ear to the throat that may become painfully blocked during a plane landing was described in the sixteenth century by Bartolomeo Eustachi—more often known by his Latin name of Eustachio.1 He constituted, along with Andreas Vesalius (1514–1564) and Gabriele Falloppio (1523–1562), the Anatomical Trinity from which the modern science of…

  • Robert Liston—the fastest knife in town

    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 patronizingly would declare that the best roads lead from Scotland and that much could be made of a Scotsman “if he be caught young.”…

  • The female body dissected: Anatomy and John Keats

    Niamh Davies-BranchAberdeen, United Kingdom John Keats, poet of the great odes, was also a surgical apprentice at Guy’s Hospital, London from October 1815 to March 1817.1 Although he never spent a day as a surgeon, he completed six years of medical and surgical training. During this period, he maintained an active literary life, composing thirty-nine…

  • The artistic depiction of Christ’s crucifixion: history meets biomechanics

    Mark RansomJohnson City, Tennessee, United States The artistic depiction of the crucifixion of Jesus Christ, particularly from the first known images through the seventeenth century, are inconsistent in their portrayal of His cross and body position. There is little doubt that some of the evolution in the scene is in keeping with the artists’ deliberate…

  • Harvard medical school and the body snatchers

    Kevin R. LoughlinBoston, Massachusetts, USA Their silhouettes surely would have been seen against the backdrop of a moonlit night in 1796 as they entered the North Burying Ground in Boston. Their hearts were likely filled with a blend of trepidation and anticipation. Their leader was John Collins Warren, the son of John Warren, one of…

  • Becoming Judith: The connection between Italian Baroque and anatomy lab

    Emily NghiemDetroit, Michigan, USA Art and medicine are not two things that seem to fall together naturally. When considering an example of medicine depicted in art, a reasonable and literal choice would be Thomas Eakins’ The Gross Clinic, where a team of doctors is performing live surgery before an intently fascinated audience. So many depictions…