Hektoen International

A Journal of Medical Humanities

Tag: Brain

  • Did Salvador Dali follow the prolactin discovery in his painting of the fountain of milk?

    Michael YafiHouston, Texas, United States The Fountain of Milk Spreading Itself Uselessly on Three Shoes by Salvador Dali remains one of his most enigmatic works. It shows a nude woman on a pedestal, milk flowing from her breasts, while an emaciated man is staring at her.1 As he was completing the painting, Dali may have…

  • The woman doctor as medical and moral authority: Helen Brent MD

    Carol-Ann FarkasBoston, Massachussetts, United States In the late nineteenth century, many women who dared to study and practice medicine tempered that radical move with the reassuring insistence that, by virtue of their sex, they could combine medical knowledge with feminine, maternal guidance for the physical and moral well-being of their patients. The gender essentialism of…

  • Gordon Morgan Holmes MD., FRS.

    JMS PearceHull, England “Beneath the exterior of a martinetthere was an Irish heart of gold” Wilder Penfield Gordon Holmes (1876-1965) was born in Castlebellingham, Ireland. He was named after his father, a landowner, descended from a Yorkshire family that had settled in King’s County (County Offaly) in the mid-seventeenth century. In a golden era of…

  • Cranium: The symbolic powers of the skull

    F. Gonzalez-CrussiChicago, Illinois, USA Of all bodily parts, the head has traditionally enjoyed the greatest prestige. The Platonic Timaeus tells us that secondary gods (themselves created by the Demiurge) copied the round form of the universe to make the head, divinest part of our anatomy. In order to avoid its rolling on the ground like…

  • Costanzo Varolio, who described the pons

    The pons is a broad band of nerve fibers linking the medulla oblongata and cerebellum with the midbrain. It serves to relay messages sent downstream from the cerebral cortex to the cerebellum, the medulla, and the spinal cord. Shaped as a protuberance resembling a bridge with the brainstem flowing under it like a canal, the…

  • Of men and brains and rats

    Observers of the affairs of man in an age of mass destruction weaponry have long worried about the future of the human race. Why do men so often make erroneous decisions and act in ways detrimental to their interests and even to their survival? Is not Homo sapiens the epitome of millions of years of…

  • Rewiring the brain

    Paul RoopraiHamilton, Ontario, Canada Approach as a medical illustrator The modern-day perception of mindfulness and meditation is inextricably linked to the mind, which is associated physically with the brain. The rendering of the brain at the top of the poster represents the biological processes that mindfulness promotes in the brain. The renditions of the neuron…

  • Nature telling her secrets: the Kepler–Descartes connection

    Ronald FishmanChicago, Illinois, United States Nature tells us one secret in terms of another, and she may refuse to disclose one secret until another has been laid bare.– T.S. Kuhn1 In 1604, Johannes Kepler solved the problem of how light is refracted within the eye to produce an image on the surface of the retina. This problem…

  • Reading the brain in John Keats’s “Ode to Psyche”

    Kathryne DycusMadrid, Spain The Romantic poet John Keats wrote in a letter dated May 18, 1818, “I am glad at not having given away my medical books, which I shall look over again to keep alive the little I knew towards that work.”1 Though the Romantic poet abandoned a career in medicine, the knowledge he…

  • Revisiting a medical classic

    James L. FranklinChicago, Illinois, United States Théophile Alajouanine delivered the Harveian Lecture to the Harveian Society of London on March 17, 1948. It was published in the journal Brain in September 1948 and became a medical classic, most frequently cited in papers devoted to the neurology of musical creativity and to the illness of one…