Hektoen International

A Journal of Medical Humanities

Tag: Biochemistry

  • Book review: Insulin – The crooked timber

    Arpan K. BanerjeeSolihull, United Kingdom The title of this interesting book is taken from the German philosopher Immanuel Kant, who wrote that: “Out of the crooked timber of humanity no straight thing can ever be made.” It is applicable to the tortuous way scientific discoveries are made and is particularly pertinent to diabetes and the…

  • Painting an ICU

    Mark TanNorthwest Deanery, England, United Kingdom “[Monet was] only an eye – yet what an eye.”— Paul Cézanne Much has been written about Claude Monet’s ophthalmic pathology.1-4 However, attributing his stylistic development to cataracts alone seems an overly reductionist view. In 1874, at least fifteen years before his Japanese Bridge and Water Lilies series, his…

  • Heart failure

    Charles Halsted Davis California, United States By the time I completed my third medical school year, I had learned the basics of physiology and biochemistry, but had never been face-to-face with a person who depended upon my skills to survive. I had never heard a racing heart nor the sounds of gurgling lungs. I was assigned…

  • The Doctors Cori, carbohydrate metabolism, and the Nobel prize

    Energy in animals and humans is stored in the body in the form of glycogen. Starch, a similar molecule but less branched, serves the same function in plants. Glycogen, discovered by Claude Bernard in 1856, is stored primarily in the liver (about 120 grams) and in muscle (about 400 grams), and to a lesser amount…

  • Oliver Sacks and caring for the whole person

    Margaret MarcumBoca Raton, Florida The neurologist Oliver Sacks—“The Poet Laureate of Medicine” according to The New York Times—developed an effective clinical method of treating the patient as a complete person rather than as a defective body part. He wrote that clinicians “are concerned not simply with a handful of ‘symptoms,’ but with a person, and…

  • The early days of the Nobel Prize and Golden Age of Microbiology

    Juan–Carlos ArgüellesMurcia, Spain Introduction According to Alfred Nobel’s (1833–1896) last will and testament, signed on November 27, 1895, the largest share of his fortune would be dedicated to a series of awards bestowed on those people who deserved great merit for their intensive work in favor of mankind. That year the Nobel Prize was born,…