Hektoen International

A Journal of Medical Humanities

Tag: asthma

  • John Bostock and hay fever

    JMS Pearce Hull, England   Fig 1. Bostock’s paper to Medico-Chirurgical Transactions of London, 1819. Before the 1800s, hay fever, now estimated as affecting 5–10% of Western populations, was not widely recognized by physicians. James MacCulloch MD FRS, a doctor and geologist, in 1828 was the first to use the term hay fever, which he…

  • Homeopathy: medicine or placebo?

    Shrestha Saraf Sutton Coldfield, UK Sudarshan Ramachandran Birmingham, UK   Samuel Christian Friedrich Hahnemann. Mezzotint by R. Woodman after G. E. Hering. Wellcome Collection. Public Domain Mark Homeopathy, based on a pseudoscientific system of alternative medicine, was developed by German physician Samuel Hahnemann around 1790. The primary principle of homeopathy is “like cures like,” i.e.,…

  • Agricola’s De re metallica: an early description of industrial diseases

    The “Father of Mineralogy,” Georgius Agricola. Via Wikimedia. Georg Bauer was born in Saxony in 1494 and went by the name of Georgius Agricola because in his time academicians often latinized their name, so that Bauer in German translated into Agricola, meaning peasant or farmer. He was a medical practitioner in a small mining town…

  • Girolamo Cardano: Renaissance physician and polymath

    Born at Pavia in the duchy of Lombardy in 1501, Girolamo Cardano practiced medicine for fifty years but is remembered chiefly as a polymath. He composed 200 works, made important contributions to mathematics and algebra, invented several mechanical devices (some still in use today), and published extensive philosophical tracts and commentaries on the ancient philosophers…

  • The Philosophers’ Stone: history and myth

    S.E.S. Medina Benbrook, Texas, United States   The ouroboros and the squared circle. The ouroboros is an ancient symbol where the metaphysical property of infinity is represented by a serpent or dragon swallowing its own tail. Its image is often used in alchemical texts from the Middle Ages. Contained within the ouroboros is the squared circle,…

  • Blood beliefs and practices in Iran

    Bahar Dowlatshahi Tehrann, Iran   Circulation of the blood (human). Wellcome Collection. CC BY 4.0. Blood is believed to have special abilities and properties in many eastern countries such as Iran. Even human personality traits, emotions, and relationships are referred to with blood. Angry people boil their blood; those who are kind and loving are called…

  • Bloody beginnings of hematology

    Sherin Jose Chockattu Bengaluru, India Bloodletting in 1860 – one of only three known photographs of the procedure. From the Burns Archive collection. 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…

  • Silent no more

    Susan Kaplan Chicago, Illinois, United States   Lung, Bronchiole – Metaplasia, Goblet cell from a male Sprague – Dawley rat in an acute study. National Institutes of Health. I hear a cough in the dark. Like all mothers, I am exquisitely attuned to any sound from my children in the middle of the night. A few more…

  • Charles Harrison Blackley: the man who put the hay in hay fever

    Julian Crane Wellington, New Zealand    Charles Harrison Blackley Since the 1950s, and especially since the 1980s, there has been a worldwide increase in the prevalence of allergic diseases, asthma, hay fever, and eczema. In the last twenty years the most notable manifestation of this trend has been the rapid rise in food allergy in…