Hektoen International

A Journal of Medical Humanities

Tag: E. Coli

  • St. Petersburg: Splendor and suffering

    St. Petersburg rises from the marshes of the Neva Delta as a city whose waterways, pastel palaces, and summer nights have inspired generations of artists and writers. Yet beneath its elegance also lies a history of forced labor, revolution, hunger, and extraordinary endurance. Few cities… Read more

  • The story of Calcutta

    Calcutta, officially Kolkata, is the capital of the state of West Bengal, with 4.5 million people living in the city and 15 million in the metropolitan area. Often regarded as India’s cultural center, it was the financial and commercial center of eastern and northeastern India… Read more

  • The medical past is not a foreign country

    Nicholas SummertonBrough, United Kingdom The medical past has been characterized as a foreign country having little relevance or applicability to modern-day clinical practice or current health care dilemmas.1 However, finding ways to cope with disease, death, disability and distress has been a constant concern throughout… Read more

  • The anatomist as hierophant: Rembrandt’s Dr. Tulp

    Paul WilliamsBeaconsfield, UK Hierophant: “A person who interprets and explains esoteric mysteries.”1 On the morning of 31 January 1632, career criminal Adriaen Adriaenzoon was executed in Amsterdam by hanging. Shortly thereafter, Dr. Nicolaes Tulp—Amsterdam physician, city councillor, and praelector anatomiae (anatomy lecturer) to the Amsterdam… Read more

  • Damascus: A city of history, medicine, and literature

    Damascus is one of the world’s oldest continuously inhabited cities. Founded around 9000 BCE, it has served throughout history as a meeting place for merchants, pilgrims, scholars, and physicians. Its longevity owes much to its location; water from the Barada River sustained settlement and cultivation… Read more

  • House and Holmes

    Stephen McWilliamsDublin, Ireland In David Shore’s award-winning television series House, M.D. (2004–2012), Hugh Laurie played the eponymous Dr. Gregory House. Aficionados have always thrived on tales and legends reimagined, and perhaps House, M.D. is no different. Its narrative may have evoked in its millions of… Read more

  • What killed Jane Austen?

    Ad KapteinLeiden, The NetherlandsBrian HughesGalway, Ireland Jane Austen’s final illness has generated extensive speculation. The persistent question, “What killed Jane Austen?” raises a broader issue: What happens when modern diagnostic categories are applied retrospectively to fragmentary historical evidence?1-2 In medical humanities, literary works and letters… Read more

  • Armenia: History, culture, and medicine

    The modern Republic of Armenia is a small country in Transcaucasia that offers stunning mountain and valley views. From its capital, Yerevan, one can see Mount Ararat, now in Turkey, located only about twenty miles from the border between Armenia and Turkey. Mount Ararat is… Read more

  • Vladivostok, gateway to the Pacific

    Vladivostok is Russia’s largest Pacific port, located on the Sea of Japan at the eastern end of the Trans-Siberian Railway, nearly 6,000 miles from Moscow, but only about 30 miles from the Chinese border and 80 miles from Korea. This gives it a distinctly Asia-Pacific… Read more

  • Oliver Goldsmith, mad dogs, and parasites

    This dog and man at first were friends;But when a pique began,The dog, to gain some private ends,Went mad, and bit the man. … But soon a wonder came to lightThat showed the rogues they lied,—The man recovered of the bite,The dog it was that… Read more

  • Old and alone

    Riddhi NaikBambolim, India It was an ordinary day on the medicine ward. As a second-year medical student, my responsibility was to take patient histories, so I approached the bed assigned to me. There I interviewed a 75-year-old man with ischemic heart disease, and he was… Read more

  • The sleep room at Chelmsford

    Xavier NesbitTasmania, Australia In 1963 in Sydney, Australia, psychiatrist Harry Bailey admitted his first patient for deep sleep therapy at Chelmsford Private Hospital, a small establishment in the northern suburb of Pennant Hills.1 Over the next sixteen years, roughly 1,100 people passed through its sleep… Read more