Hektoen International

A Journal of Medical Humanities

Tag: cerebrospinal fluid

  • Lumbar puncture

    JMS Pearce Hull, England   Fig 1. Dominici Cotugno’s De Ischiade Nervosa, 1764. 1770. Access to cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) in life as an aid to diagnosis proved impossible until lumbar puncture. Galen of Pergamon (AD 130–200) failed to recognize CSF; he described a vaporous, not aqueous, humor that he called περιττώματα (residues) in the cerebral ventricles.…

  • Lina Shtern and the blood brain barrier

    Irving Rosen Toronto, Ontario, Canada   Dr. Lina Shtern (1878-1968), an esteemed Russian physiologist did pioneering work with the blood brain barrier, and experienced distress as a result of her involvement in the WWII Russian war effort. Smithsonian Institution Archives, Image No. SIA2009-3768. Future generations will remember our age for unbelievable electronic progress, but also…

  • Theodor Kocher (1841–1917)

    Emil Theodor Kocher. Les Prix Nobel, 1909, p. 66. Via Wikimedia. Public domain. Theodor Kocher was the first surgeon to ever receive the Nobel Prize. He was born in 1841 in Bern, Switzerland, went to school there, and was first in his class. He studied medicine in Bern and graduated summa cum laude, then went…

  • Theo’s marvelous medicine

    Joseph deBettencourt Chicago, Illinois, USA   Illustration of the Wade-Dahl-Till shunt from the original patent application. Wade, Stanley C. (1966) US Patent No.3233610. Retrieved from On a cool December day in 1960, a nanny was pushing an infant in a stroller down 85th Street in New York City. Stepping into the road, the nanny saw…

  • A fatal and mysterious illness

    Michael D. Shulman Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, United States   In late 1972, a flurry of letters began to appear in the British medical journal The Lancet which captured the alarm, the bafflement, and the intense professional curiosity aroused by a mysterious new illness. The illness was unique to patients receiving hemodialysis, typically those who had been…