Hektoen International

A Journal of Medical Humanities

Tag: Brain

  • Book review: The Story of the Brain in 10 1/2 Cells

    Arpan K. BanerjeeSolihull, United Kingdom The brain is arguably the most complex organ in the human body, containing more than 100 billion neurons. In this new book, neuroscientist Richard Wingate sets out to describe different types of brain cells, weaving together neuroscience with stories of scientific pioneers who made major contributions to elucidating how the…

  • Discovering genius: The neurobiological substrate of intelligence

    Helena LjuljZagreb, Croatia “It is by the shape and size of the forehead that we are to judge of the extent of a man’s understanding… When the frontal vein appears distinctly in the midst of a forehead, open, uniform, and regularly arched, it announces extraordinary talent.”1 According to the eighteenth century physiognomist Johann Caspar Lavater,…

  • François Magendie

    JMS PearceHull, England François Magendie (1783–1855) (Fig 1) was a pioneering French physiologist, pharmacologist, and clinician who carried out a surprisingly wide variety of investigations. His best-remembered works are on the fourth ventricular foramen and the function of spinal nerves. He was born in Bordeaux, son of a surgeon, Antoine Magendie, and his wife, Marie…

  • Is a bigger brain better?

    Matimba Molly ChilalaNdola, Zambia Does intelligence depend on the size and dimensions of the brain? According to the Merriam-Webster Dictionary, intelligence can be defined as the ability to understand or deal with novel or trying situations. It is also described as a mental quality that consists of the ability to learn from experience, adapt to…

  • Christopher Wren’s contributions to medicine

    JMS PearceHull, England An extraordinary natural philosopher and Renaissance man, Christopher Wren (1632–1723) (Fig 1) was primarily an astronomer and architect.1 He is remembered mostly for his work after the Great Fire of London of 1666 as designer of St. Paul’s Cathedral, originally erected in AD 604. Wren laid the first stone at on Ludgate…

  • Luigi Rolando

    JMS PearceHull, England Likened to the small intestines, in ancient times the gyri of the brain were named “coils” by Greek physicians and anatomists. Vesalius in the sixteenth century amplified the description in the celebrated De humani corporis fabrica. Thomas Willis in Cerebri anatome (1664) radically changed the accepted view that cognitive and somatic functions…

  • Book review: How the Mind Changed: A Human History of Our Evolving Brain

    Arpan K. BanerjeeSolihull, United Kingdom The human brain has long been a source of wonder and a fascinating subject for study. Philosophers, scientists, biologists, psychologists, anthropologists, and medical scholars have spent lifetimes studying the brain and how this remarkable organ works. In this book, neuroscientist and author Joseph Jebelli describes the evolutionary development of the…

  • Questioning immunology and the soul

    Vani GhaiPune, India The long and tiring battle with COVID has stimulated modern medicine to investigate new approaches to understanding the science of immunity. It has long been apparent that immune systems exist almost ubiquitously across the living and that all diseases involve the immune system. But even though immunology plays a decisive role in…

  • Walter Edward Dandy

    JMS PearceHull, England In the history of American neurosurgery, two names stand out from the rest: Harvey Cushing (1869–1939) and Walter Edward Dandy (1886–1946). Sadly, they were inveterate rivals. Dandy was undoubtedly a brilliant pioneer of both neurosurgical research and practice. He was born in in a small house on 5th Street, Sedalia, Missouri, an…

  • Paul Pierre Broca

    JMS PearceHull, England, United Kingdom At the turn of the nineteenth century, knowledge of how the brain worked was largely conjectural. Intelligence, memory, language, and motor and sensory functions had not been localized. The physiologist Flourens, promoting the notion of “cerebral equipotentiality,” concluded, “The cerebral cortex functions as an indivisible whole . . . an…