Hektoen International

A Journal of Medical Humanities

Tag: England

  • Epidemic cholera and Joseph William Bazalgette

    JMS Pearce Hull, England, United Kingdom     Fig 1. Joseph Bazalgette. Photo by Lock & Whitfield. 1877. National Portrait Gallery London. Via Wikimedia Rampant epidemics of cholera took many lives in the Victorian era. These epidemics were finally overcome with the discovery that cholera was a waterborne infection and by massive reconstruction of the…

  • Hypochondria

    JMS PearceHull, England, United Kingdom In words, as fashions, the same rule will hold;Alike fantastic, if too new, or old:Be not the first by whom the new are tried,Nor yet the last to lay the old aside.— Alexander Pope The changing use and meaning of words are the daily bread of dictionary compilers. Long ago…

  • Franz Joseph Gall and phrenology

    JMS Pearce Hull, England, United Kingdom   Fig 1. Franz Joseph Gall. By Zéphirin Félix Jean Marius Belliard. Via Wikimedia. For many reasons the work of Gall, when stripped of its excrescences, constituted an important landmark in the history of neurology. -Macdonald Critchley4 In the times of Galen, the location of the mind and spirit…

  • A note on handedness

    JMS Pearce Hull, England, United Kingdom   Handedness (chirality) refers to the preferential use of one hand over the other. It is a matter of degree; it is seldom absolute. Population left and right preference existed in the Neanderthals (lived from 400,000 to about 40,000 years ago) onwards. Only homo sapiens amongst the great apes…

  • Janus

    Dahlia Mukherjee Hershey, Pennsylvania, United States   Janus. Original work by Dahlia Mukherjee I was walking back home from school with my friend. It was a typical gloomy English day with the grey clouds swirling menacingly on top of us threatening rain. We were excitedly talking about my friend’s birthday party next Saturday in her backyard.…

  • The death of King George V

    Seamus O’Mahony London, England   Fig 1: Lord Dawson of Penn. Photograph by D. Wilding. Wellcome Collection. Copyright © National Portrait Gallery, London. Public Domain. Bertrand Dawson, Lord Dawson of Penn (1864-1945), was the most eminent British doctor in the years between the two world wars. He was both a skilled medical politician (twice president of the…

  • Painting an ICU

    Mark Tan Northwest Deanery, England, United Kingdom   Claude Monet’s Japanese Bridge and Water Lilies from 1899. Princeton University Art Museum. Wikipedia. “[Monet was] only an eye – yet what an eye.” — Paul Cézanne   Much has been written about Claude Monet’s ophthalmic pathology.1-4 However, attributing his stylistic development to cataracts alone seems an…

  • W.W. Keen: Physician to the presidents

    Kevin R. Loughlin Boston, Massachusetts, United States   Figure 1. The cheek retractor used in Cleveland’s operation. From The surgical operations on President Cleveland in 1893 by W. W. Keen. 1917. Via the Internet Archive. William Williams Keen served in the American Civil War and was present at the first and second Battle of Bull…

  • The “Ether Controversy”

    JMS Pearce Hull, England, UK   Fig 1. Warren and Morton’s operation in the Ether Dome, restaged with Mass General physicians assuming the roles of the original participants. Warren Zapol, MD, chief of anesthesia and critical care, starred as Dr. Morton, while Philip Kistler, MD, director of the Mass General stroke unit, played Dr. Warren.…

  • Art and alcohol

    Giovanni CeccarelliRoma, Italy In the late 1940s Elaine de Kooning, wife of one of the most eminent exponents of American abstract expressionism (Willem de Kooning), commented that the whole art world of her time had become alcoholic. Yet even earlier, perhaps always, drinking and drunkenness had attracted the interest of many artists. In a drinking…