Hektoen International

A Journal of Medical Humanities

Tag: Elizabeth Blackwell

  • Fashion-based medicine: A history of Western doctors’ dress

    Shefali SoodWashington, DC, United States How do doctors dress? It depends on whom and when you ask. Just like other forms of clothing, the history of medical garb has been subject to the trends of time. While this has changed drastically in the past century, doctors’ dress profoundly reflects the societal expectations of their role.…

  • Book review: The Doctors Blackwell

    Elizabeth CoonEelco WijdicksRochester, Minnesota, United States Edith Lutzker celebrated the centennial anniversary of the struggle of five British heroines in her 1969 groundbreaking book Woman Gain A Place in Medicine. Much less has been written on women physicians in Europe and Asia, but the Italian universities admitted women to study and teach medicine beginning in…

  • Thomas Henry Huxley

    JMS PearceEast Yorks, England “In matters of the intellect, follow your reason as far as it will take you, without regard to any other consideration . . . In matters of the intellect, do not pretend that conclusions are certain which are not demonstrated or demonstrable.”– TH Huxley Above a butcher’s shop in Ealing in…

  • Children treating children: Anne Shirley as clinician

    Kathryne DycusMadrid, Spain Childhood classics provide a range of illness narratives, reminding readers of dangers now preventable and even treatable, but also of the universal imperatives of understanding and accommodating the morbidity and mortality that can accompany childhood. Sickness in children’s literature, as in medicine, presents dramatically colorful dimensions of plot twist, character development, human…

  • Elizabeth Blackwell, MD

    JMS PearceEast Yorkshire, England Although Elizabeth Blackwell was portrayed on an 18 cent US stamp in 1974, curiously this was over a century after she graduated in medicine (Figure 1). Many remain unaware of her remarkable story as the first female Anglo-American physician, campaigner, and medical suffragette (Figure 2).1 She was born to a practising…