Hektoen International

A Journal of Medical Humanities

Tag: Doctors Patients and Diseases

  • On becoming a disabled physician

    Mel Ebeling Birmingham, Alabama, United States   Hephaestus at the Forge. Sculpture by Guillaume Coustou the Younger, 1742. Musée du Louvre, Paris. Photo by Marie-Lan Nguyen (Jastrow) on Wikimedia. Public domain. The same prominent scar blemishes each foot: beginning two inches below my big toe, it slithers along the medial aspect of my foot, making…

  • Questioning immunology and the soul

    Vani Ghai Pune, India   Healing ulcers on the lower leg. The ulceration may have been due to varicose veins. Watercolor drawing by S. A. Sewell. Wellcome Collection. CC BY 4.0. The long and tiring battle with COVID has stimulated modern medicine to investigate new approaches to understanding the science of immunity. It has long…

  • Patients without borders: Cardiac surgery, activism, and advocacy

    Annabelle SlingerlandLeiden, Netherlands In the 1970s, a “patients without borders” organization made it possible for people with severe heart disease to be flown to other countries for treatment that was unavailable in their home country. It was a decade after Christiaan Barnard had pioneered heart transplantation in South Africa, and although most patients did not…

  • Herbert William Page and the railway spine controversy

    Jonathan DavidsonDurham, North Carolina, United States The first passenger railway journey resulted in the death of a prominent British politician.1 During the 1830s and 1840s,2 railway travel became a popular means of transport in Victorian Britain. By the 1850s, it was clear that this revolutionary advance in transportation also caused many injuries that resulted in…

  • Medicine’s pandemonium of paradoxes

    Fergus ShanahanDublin, Ireland “You live and breathe paradox and contradiction, but you can no moresee the beauty of them than the fish can see the beauty of the water.”– Michael Frayn (Bohr to Heisenberg), Copenhagen1 The language of medicine is loaded with misnomers, inaccuracies, and ambiguities, and is in need of reform.2 Paradoxes, on the…

  • “Avoid a remedy that is worse than the disease”

    Howard Fischer Uppsala, Sweden   Hair loss in child with tinea capitis infection. CDC, 1970. Public domain. Overconfidence is an undesirable quality. It does not enhance a physician’s approach to learning, nor to changing when change is needed. How a doctor diagnoses or treats a condition today may cause future generations of physicians to wonder,…

  • The sixtieth anniversary of the “Battered Child Syndrome”

    Howard Fischer Uppsala, Sweden   An intraparenchymal bleed with overlying skull fracture from abusive head trauma. May 29, 2016. James Heilman, MD, via Wikimedia. CC BY-SA 4.0. “The more original a discovery, the more obvious it seems afterward.” — Arthur Koestler, novelist and journalist   In 1962, Dr. C. Henry Kempe and colleagues at the…

  • Orion H. Stuteville: A surgeon’s surgeon

    Jayant RadhakrishnanDarien, Illinois, United StatesBangalore JayaramMysuru, Karnataka, India The Cook County Hospital in Chicago, Illinois fostered many notable American surgeons. It was also the birthplace of major medical and surgical advances. Dr. Orion Harry Stuteville (February 15, 1902 – May 26, 1994), or “Steudy”, was one such surgical giant. He had a unique life and…

  • Humans with tails

    Howard Fischer Uppsala, Sweden   A human tail. From “Tail-like Formations in Men. After the Researches of Dr. Bartels, Prof. Ecker, Dr. Mohnike, Dr. Ornstein, and Others.” Popular Science Monthly, vol. 40, January 1892. Via Weird Historian. Public domain. “…he had been born and had grown up with a cartilaginous tail in the shape of…

  • Wedding anniversary

    Paul Rousseau Charleston, South Carolina, United States Woman treating a patient in an intensive care unit. U.S. Government photo by Mass Communication Specialist 2nd Class Ryan M. Breeden. U.S. Navy Medicine on Rawpixel. Public domain.   Things fall apart; the center cannot hold…and everywhere The ceremony of innocence is drowned… — W. B. Yeats, The…