Hektoen International

A Journal of Medical Humanities

Tag: bilateral sciatica

  • Medical monuments in St. John’s Church, Kolkata

    Stephen MartinThailand The British architecture of Kolkata, though by no means representative of modern India, has some extraordinary beauty. One of many outstanding sites is St. John’s Church, consecrated in 1787 (Fig 1) and based on James Gibbs’ St. Martin in the Fields in Trafalgar… Read more

  • Relieving pain by injection

    Until the middle of the nineteenth century, doctors had considerable difficulty in relieving the pain of their patients in that they could only administer medicines by mouth, enema, or suppository. The notion of injecting drugs into a vein had been stimulated by the attempts of… Read more

  • Imagined conversation: The day Mitchell and Charcot met

    Jack RiggsMorgantown, West Virginia, United States “Professor Charcot, allow me to introduce Mr. Thomas who has travelled to Paris from America in hope that you might assist him with a most troubling malady.” Charcot’s dutiful assistant stepped back and gave a transmitting nod. Charcot returned… Read more

  • Looking for lice in seventeenth-century art

    Howard FischerUppsala, Sweden “As far as we can ascertain, since man has existed the louse has been his inseparable companion.”1 Bathing, and even washing the hair and the face, were not common practices in seventeenth-century Europe. Children and adults of every social class, from the… Read more

  • Dylan Thomas’s terminal illness

    JMS PearceHull, England Time held me green and dyingThough I sang in my chains like the sea.– Dylan Thomas, “Fern Hill”, 1937 The poet Dylan Marlais Thomas (1914–1953) was born in Cwmdonkin Drive in Swansea on 27 October 1914. He was much in awe of,… Read more

  • Infectious mononucleosis

    The disease known colloquially as “mono” or the “kissing disease” has probably been around since antiquity but was only recognized more recently. In 1880 Nil Filatov, a Russian pediatrician, described it as “idiopathic adenitis”. In 1888 Emil Pfeiffer reported it as an acute benign illness… Read more

  • The periodic table of the elements

    In this system hydrogen is assigned the number one, lithium is three, carbon six, nitrogen seven, oxygen eight, etc. The elements are organized in rows or periods and columns or groups according to their atomic weight. The elements were discovered beginning in the 18th century… Read more

  • William Murrell and nitroglycerin

    Born in London in 1853, William Murrell was the first to use nitroglycerin in the treatment of angina pectoris. Son of a barrister, he received his medical training at the University College Hospital in London and then taught physiology there. He became a member of… Read more

  • “Filth so foul and stench so offensive as not to be imagined”

    Richard de GrijsSydney, Australia … during the voyage there is on board these ships terrible misery, stench, fumes, horror, vomiting, many kinds of sea-sickness, fever, dysentery, headache, heat, constipation, boils, scurvy, cancer, mouth-rot, and the like, all of which come from old and sharply salted… Read more

  • David Macbride: On scurvy and the art of tanning

    Avi OhryTel Aviv, Israel David Macbride (1726–1778) of the county of Antrim, Northern Ireland, was an Irish physician who contributed to the treatment of scurvy1 and to the art of tanning.2 In his youth, he was apprenticed to a local surgeon and served for a… Read more

  • Sporozoites: The elusive assassins

    Jayant RadhakrishnanChicago, Illinois, United States Almost 5,000 years ago, the Chinese described a disease that presented with intermittent fevers, enlarged spleens, and a predilection to epidemics. Those malarial infections were possibly caused by Plasmodium vivax (P. vivax) since P. malariae is unlikely to cause epidemics.… Read more

  • Somerset Maugham on studying medicine (abstracted and in parts paraphrased from Of Human Bondage)

    In 1897 Somerset Maugham (1874–1965) qualified as a physician but never practiced medicine and became a full-time writer.1 In his 1915 novel Of Human Bondage he drew on his experiences at St. Thomas’s Hospital to describe what it was like to be a medical student… Read more