Hektoen International

A Journal of Medical Humanities

Tag: articles

  • Avant garde research on a blood substitute at the Hektoen Institute of Medical Research

    Jayant Radhakrishnan Darien, Illinois, United States   From Left to Right: Gerald S Moss MD, Richard Brinkman MD, Lakshman Sehgal PhD, Robert Forest DVM. June 1975, photograph of the team with the first baboon resuscitated with stroma free hemoglobin after being bled down to a hemoglobin concentration of zero. Photo taken by the author. The…

  • Camus, Meursault, and the Biopsychosocial model

    Liam ButchartStony Brook, New York Since the development of medical literature studies in the 1970s, the field has grown and expanded in many fascinating ways.1 For example, courses in medical schools now encourage students to examine their own biases and emotional responses, and medical literature scholars emphasize the educational and clinical value of learning to…

  • Gordon Morgan Holmes MD., FRS.

    JMS PearceHull, England “Beneath the exterior of a martinetthere was an Irish heart of gold” Wilder Penfield Gordon Holmes (1876-1965) was born in Castlebellingham, Ireland. He was named after his father, a landowner, descended from a Yorkshire family that had settled in King’s County (County Offaly) in the mid-seventeenth century. In a golden era of…

  • The illness of Tom Wedgwood: A tragic episode in a family saga

    John Hayman Melbourne, Australia Tom Wedgwood (1771-1805) was born into the famous pottery dynasty as the third surviving son of Josiah Wedgwood (1730-1795) and his wife Sarah (1734-1815). Sarah was also a Wedgwood, a distant cousin of her husband.1 Tom was ill for all of his short life, a life recorded by his biographer, Richard…

  • Walt Whitman: A difficult patient

    Jack CoulehanStony Brook, New York, United States On June 15, 1888, the following notice appeared in the New York Times under the headline AGED POET SUFFERS RELAPSE: Prof. William Osler, of the University of Pennsylvania, was summoned by telegraph this afternoon to go to Walt Whitman’s bedside. The aged poet had a relapse, and it…

  • Sir Roderick Glossop: Wodehouse’s “eminent loony doctor”

    Paul DakinNorth London, UK P.G. Wodehouse is one of the greatest comic authors of the twentieth century. He wrote nearly a hundred books containing a fascinating array of characters. Many inhabited the confined geography of 1920’s London and country houses, with occasional trips to New York or the French Riviera. This was the world Wodehouse…

  • Latin and medicine

    Noah DeLoneMiami, Florida, United States Language is the cornerstone of our ability to communicate as humans and underlies the prose of our medical discourse. The words we select can be indicative of our background, training, and intentions. It should come as no surprise that a robust knowledge of one’s own language is essential to good…

  • Pushing back at perceptions of epilepsy: The interplay between medicine and literature in three 19th-century British novels

    Laura FitzpatrickNew York, United States If I wished to show a student the difficulties of getting at truth from medical experience, I would give him the history of epilepsy to read.—Oliver Wendell Holmes, 18911 As the nineteenth century dawned, the average Briton still understood epilepsy much in the way his ancient Greek counterpart had: as…

  • Changes in childbirth in the United States: 1750–1950

    Laura KaplanNew York, New York, United States For most of American history, pregnancy, labor and delivery, and post-partum have been dangerous periods for mother and child. However, starting slowly in the late 18th century and accelerating into the late 19th century, labor and delivery radically changed. Initially new medical interventions, such as forceps and anesthesia,…