Civil War - Hektoen International

The death of Zachary Taylor: The first presidential assassination or a bad bowl of cherries?

June 18, 2020

Kevin R. Loughlin Boston, Massachusetts, United States Figure 1: Senator Foote pulling a revolver on Senator Benton on Senate Floor. The quote above Benson’s head reads, “Get out of the way and let the assassin fire! Let the scoundrel use his weapon! I have no arm’s(sic) I didn’t come here to assassinate.” Library of […]

First principles

January 30, 2020

Charles G. Kels San Antonio, Texas, United States Ambulance Corps. Method of removing wounded from the field depicts the aftermath of battle in the American Civil War. The law of war is enshrined in treaties but steeped in blood. In 1859, a young Swiss businessman was traveling through Italy when a savage battle between […]

African American medical pioneers

December 16, 2019

Mariel Tishma Chicago, Illinois, United States The road for African Americans in the medical professions has not been easy. Enslaved Africans received no education.1 During the first half of the nineteenth-century medical schools in the North would admit only a very small number of black students. Even after the Civil War, African Americans continued […]

Battle of Gettysburg

December 11, 2019

Reed Brockway Bontecou (1824-1907) was an American surgeon from Troy, New York, who in 1846 made a trip up the Amazon river to collect flora and fauna for the local natural history museum, and whose surgical feats include the first successful ligation of a traumatic aneurysm of the axillary artery in America (1857) and the […]

Hammond, Lincoln, and the emergence of American neurology

April 17, 2019

Jack Riggs Morgantown, West Virginia, United States Surgeon General William A. Hammond. Public domain. All the world’s a stage, And all the men and women merely players. They have their exits and their entrances, and one man in his time plays many parts. – William Shakespeare Shakespeare’s words describe the extraordinary life of […]

Those eyes

March 4, 2017

Susan Woldenberg Butler Canberra, Australia Publication Acknowledgement: This fictional short story was published in Secrets from the Black Bag (Royal College of General Practitioners Publications; London, December, 2005). I’ve always involved myself in the lives of my patients and their families. Familiarity with context helps me to provide better treatment and nourishes such mental […]

The American Civil War as a biological phenomenon: Did Salmonella or Sherman win the war for the North?

January 22, 2017

Michael Brown Chicago, Illinois, United States Reexamining Civil War deaths Patients in Ward K of Armory Square Hospital – Washington, DC, 1865 A demographic historian, J. David Hacker, recently discovered an unfortunate truth; using newly digitized data from the 1860, 1870, and 1880 censuses, he constructed new estimates of Northern and Southern Civil […]