Hektoen International

A Journal of Medical Humanities

Tag: cataract surgery

  • Etruscan medicine

    The Etruscans were ancient people whose origins are still uncertain. Herodotus believed they had emigrated to Italy from Lydia in Asia Minor, but Dionysius of Halicarnassus, writing in the Augustan era, argued that they were indigenous to Italy, a view supported by modern genetic and… Read more

  • The Welsh fasting girl

    In 1869, a twelve-year-old Welsh girl named Sarah Jacob became famous for claiming she had eaten nothing for two years. Crowds came to visit her at her family farm, and many made donations. She lay in a decorated bed wearing a crown of flowers, serene… Read more

  • Couvade syndrome: Expectant fathers and pregnancy symptoms

    When prospective fathers develop the same symptoms as their pregnant wives, they are said to suffer from couvade syndrome, or sympathetic pregnancy. Named after the French word couver, meaning to brood or hatch, it was described in 1865 by the British anthropologist Edward Tylor and… Read more

  • Christiaan Eijkman, unpolished rice, and the discovery of vitamins

    In 1883, a young Dutch physician, Christiaan Eijkman, arrived to work on the island of Java in the Dutch East Indies. Born in 1858, he took his preliminary examinations in 1875, became a student at the Military Medical School of the University of Amsterdam, and… Read more

  • Akbar the Great: Medical aspects

    Jalal-ud-Din Muhammad Akbar (1542–1605), known to history as Akbar the Great, was the third emperor of the Mughal dynasty and one of the most influential rulers of early modern South Asia. Ascending to the throne at the age of thirteen, he transformed a fragile empire… Read more

  • The lost genius of Vaslav Nijinsky

    Stephen McWilliamsDublin, Ireland Darren Aronofsky’s 2010 film Black Swan tells the tale of a dancer in the New York City Ballet’s production of Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake. Key to the story is the ballerina’s descent into psychosis under immense pressure to compete for the leading part… Read more

  • Babur, the first Mughal emperor

    Babur is remembered as the conqueror of India and founder of the Mughal dynasty. Born in 1483 in Andijan, present-day Uzbekistan, his full name was Zahīr ud-Dīn Muhammad Babur. His family was part of the “Mongolized Turkic” population that arose following the conquests by Genghis… Read more

  • The rat in medicine

    Rats occupy a peculiar position in their relation to humans. Traditionally despised and hated as carriers of disease, they have become in recent years indispensable partners in the pursuit of better health, therapeutic innovation, and understanding of disease mechanisms. They are easy to handle, have… Read more

  • Polycythemia rubra vera

    Polycythemia vera is a blood cancer in which the bone marrow generates too many red blood cells. It affects about one in every 50,000 people, primarily men over sixty years old, and is somewhat more common in subjects of Ashkenazi Jewish descent than in other… Read more

  • On quadruple amputations

    Avi OhryTel Aviv, Israel Recently I read “How Losing My Limbs Turned Me into a Different Kind of Cook.”1 It is the story of Yewande Komolafe, whose two-decade career as a cook came to an abrupt end when a catastrophic sickle cell crisis led to… Read more

  • Crimea: Past and present

    Crimea, on the Black Sea, has been successively inhabited by Cimmerians, Scythians, and Greeks. Around the sixth century BCE, colonists from Greece established important settlements in Crimea, such as Chersonesus (near modern Sevastopol) and Pantikapaion (modern Kerch). The Greek influence during the classical period is… Read more

  • Grunya Sukhareva and the early observation of autistic behavior

    Martine MussiesUtrecht, The Netherlands Grunya Efimovna Sukhareva was born and trained in Kyiv, Ukraine. By the early 1920s she had moved to Moscow, where she worked in a school for children with neurological difficulties and began keeping meticulous records of her young patients. She noted… Read more