Hektoen International

A Journal of Medical Humanities

Tag: Avi Ohry

  • Dr. Thomas Barnardo

    Avi OhryTel Aviv, Israel The title of a short 1904 note in the journal Hospital was “Dr. Barnardo’s Homes.”1,2 Thomas John Barnardo (1845–1905) was described as “evangelical, entrepreneurial and philanthropic.”3 He helped vast numbers of children living in homelessness and poverty. Barnardo was born in Dublin, Ireland. His father emigrated from Hamburg, Germany. His ancestors were…

  • Tytus Chałubiński (1820–1889)

    Avi OhryTel Aviv, Israel Tytus Chałubiński was a distinguished Polish physician, naturalist, botanist, educator, and philosopher. He was born in Radom, a town south of Warsaw where a high school and a hospital are named after him. From 1838 to 1840, Chałubiński studied medicine at the Medical-Surgical Academy in Vilnius (now in Lithuania, but at…

  • Pavel Ivanovich Jacobi (1841–1913)

    Avi OhryTel Aviv, Israel Pavel Ivanovich Jacobi (1841–1913), largely forgotten and rarely featured in the psychiatric literature, was a Russian socialist who made as great an impact on the treatment of the mentally ill as Jonathan Swift in Dublin, Phillipp Pinel in Revolutionary France, Father William Tuke and his sons in England, and Vincenzo Chiarugi…

  • A tale of two cities

    Avi OhryTel Aviv, Israel I wish that when I visited the Abbey of St. Gall in Switzerland years ago, I had also seen the German island of Reichenau and the Swiss village of Heiden 104 km to the south. Both are on Lake Constance, which the Germans call Bodensee and is situated at the point…

  • Fritz Mainzer and the Jewish Hospital in Alexandria, Egypt

    Avi OhryTel Aviv, Israel In 1961, Dr. Fritz Mainzer (1897–1961) was invited to lecture at a medical congress in Wiesbaden, Germany. Unfortunately, a fatal myocardial infarction ended the life and impressive career of this forgotten Jewish physician and scientist.1 Mainzer studied in Heidelberg and Frankfurt-on-Main. He was an assistant to Gustav Georg Embden (1874–1933), a…

  • Abraham de Balmes ben Meir, Jewish Italian physician and polymath

    Avi OhryTel Aviv, Israel Abraham de Balmes ben Meir (c. 1460–1523) was a Jewish physician and polymath from the baroque Italian city of Lecce in the south of Italy, where his grandfather had served as personal physician to King Ferdinand I of Naples. He studied medicine in Naples but left in 1510 when Jewish people…

  • Winnie Ille Pu and Dr. Alexander Lenard

    Avi OhryTel Aviv, Israel Sandor (Alexander) Lenard1 was born in Budapest, Hungary in 1910 and died in Dona Irma, Santa Catarina, Brazil in 1972. He was a Jewish poet, author, physician, painter, musician, translator, language teacher, philosopher, and polyglot. A short outline of Lenard’s life events could be summarized as follows: Hungary, medical studies in…

  • Whitlock Nicholl: Physician and theological writer

    Avi OhryTel Aviv, Israel In November 1839, Dr. John Clendinning delivered at the St. Marylebone Infirmary a lecture on the examination of the sick, the principal sources of fallacy attending practical diagnosis, and “on feignted [not “feigned”] and concealed diseases, and insidious complications of disease.”1 The lecturer discussed “hysteria” and other neuroses, and a disease…