Hektoen International

A Journal of Medical Humanities

Tag: Cambridge

  • Sir George Pickering and the low salt diet

    Nicolas Roberto RoblesBadajoz, Spain As a young man George Pickering was interested in his native Northumbrian countryside and intended to study agriculture. Persuaded later to read for a degree in biochemistry or physiology, he obtained a scholarship in basic sciences at Pembroke College, Cambridge, then decided to study medicine. He went to St. Thomas’s Hospital…

  • The death of King George V

    Seamus O’MahonyLondon, England Bertrand Dawson, Lord Dawson of Penn (1864-1945), was the most eminent British doctor in the years between the two world wars. He was both a skilled medical politician (twice president of the British Medical Association, eight-times president of the Royal College of Physicians) and a brilliantly successful private practitioner. His bedside manner…

  • William Halse Rivers Rivers

    JMS PearceHull, England William Rivers MD FRCP FRS (1864-1922) William Rivers (Fig 1) was a most unusual man, a polymath with careers in neuroscience, ethnology, and psychology. But above all—notwithstanding or perhaps because of personal nervous constraints—he was a man of originality and great humanity. Son of a churchman, he was born in Luton, near…

  • Book review: A Place in History: The Biography of John C. Kendrew

    Arpan K. BanerjeeSolihull, United Kingdom Remarkable scientific advances in the twentieth century were also crucial for the field of medicine. In the new field of molecular biology, for example, scientists applied the principles of physics and chemistry to elucidate the structure of important proteins and molecules in the human body. John Kendrew was one of…

  • Howard H. Tooth CB., CMG., MD., FRCP.

    JMS PearceHull, England Howard Tooth (1856-1925) was one of many physicians who served well their patients and their profession, but who would be unknown save for a syndrome that bears and perpetuates their name. Howard Tooth (Fig 1) was born in Hove, Sussex, educated at Rugby School and at St. John’s College, Cambridge, where he…

  • Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin OM, FRS (1910-1994)

    JMS PearceHull, England Dorothy Hodgkin (Fig 1), though not by religion, had close Quaker affinities through her marriage and through her spirited pacifism. She possessed a unique mixture of scientific skills that allowed her to extend the use of X-rays to reveal the structures of compounds, a technical venture far more complex than anything attempted…

  • Coleridge and the albatross syndrome

    Nicolás Roberto Robles Badajoz, Spain Samuel Taylor Coleridge, the tenth and last child of the vicar of Ottery Saint Mary near Devonshire, England, was born on October 21, 1772. In vivid letters recounting his early years he describes himself as “a genuine Sans culotte, my veins uncontaminated with one drop of Gentility.” He had an amazing…

  • Alfred Skirrow Robinson: The colorful life of a Roaring Twenties surgeon

    Stephen MartinDurham, UK & Thailand In 1926 my grandfather started work for Dr. A.S. Robinson in Redcar, a small town on the Yorkshire coast. The doctor needed a driver—at least that was the plan at first. He sent him for a fortnight to the Rolls Royce School of Motoring at Hendon, on the old Handley-Page…

  • Thomas Young MD FRS (1773-1829): “The Last Man Who Knew Everything.”

    JMS PearceEast Yorks, UK It is impossible to place precisely Thomas Young (Fig 1) into any professional class. He was both physician and scientist, renowned for an astonishing range of theories and discoveries in optics, physics, physiology, hieroglyphics, and medicine. His sundry contributions were profound, original, and ingenious; he has with good reason been likened…

  • Science versus religion: The medieval disenchantment

    JMS PearceHull, England History is a novel whose author is the people.—Alfred de Vigny (1797–1863) In medieval times, knowledge, beliefs, and faith were largely centered upon a divine being. Christianity had replaced the paganism and barbarism of earlier centuries. Most experiences not explained by religious creed were attributed to mysterious forces of enchantment. The gradual…