Hektoen International

A Journal of Medical Humanities

Tag: Fall 2020

  • Medicean optics: an analysis of Raffaello’s Portrait of Pope Leo X and Two Cardinals

    Vincent P. de Luise  New Haven, Connecticut, United States   Portrait of Pope Leo X (Giovanni di Lorenzo de’ Medici) and his cousins, the cardinals Giulio de’ Medici and Luigi de’ Rossi. Raffaello Sanzio (Raphael). ​o​il on panel 154 cm x 119 cm (​61 in. ​x 4​9​ ​in​). 1518-1519. Galleria degli ​Uffizi​, ​Firenze​. Source: Wikimedia Commons. Myopia, or nearsightedness, is…

  • Otology in late Victorian Ireland

    Tony Ryan Cork, Ireland   Figure 1: Unblocking the eustachian tube using Politzer’s bag. Source Introduction Henry MacNaughton Jones (1844-1918) was born in Cork City and graduated MD at Queen’s College, Cork, in 1864. Just four years later he founded the thirty-bed Cork Ophthalmic and Aural Hospital, where he practiced as a physician and surgeon.…

  • Rehearsing lines

    Catalina Florina Florescu Hoboken, New Jersey, United States   Coffee Queen. Iulia Şchiopu. Permission granted by artist. CHARACTERS: Eve Ana TIME AND SETTING: Now, here. Two women are seated on a bench. That’s all you need to know. Plus that their name is a palindrome. Mirrored names. Make what you want out of this.  …

  • COVID-19: clinico-immunologic snapshot of a coronavirus

    S.E.S. Medina Benbrook, Texas, United States   Coronavirus: Protein Spike Corona. A colorized transmission electron micrograph of the Middle East respiratory syndrome-related Coronavirus (MERS-CoV) that emerged in 2012. November 19, 2012. Public domain image from National Institutes of Health. Source. A tiny mote of moisture, buoyed by silk-soft wind currents, is kicked and coaxed along a random path…

  • Frankincense and myrrh: medicinal resin worth more than gold

    Mariel Tishma Chicago, Illinois, United States   Incense. Frankincense on coal. Photo: birdy. 2007. CC BY-SA 3.0. Via Wikimedia. Boswellia and Commiphora trees are scraggly, sharp, and unfriendly. Growing close to the ground in the arid desert, they have short trunks and fanning branches, sometimes looking more like shrubs than trees. But despite their unlikely…

  • Sir Francis Walshe MD FRS

    JMS Pearce East Yorks, UK   Fig 1. Portrait of F.M.R. Walshe in profile wearing Royal Army Medical Corps uniform viewing a patient in Alexandria, Egypt. “Photograph taken by Sir Victor Horsley at 17. B.G.H. [British General Hospital] Alexandria in 1915.” Credit: © The Royal Society Francis Martin Rouse Walshe (1885-1973) (Fig 1) was a…

  • Mount Everest and a medical atlas

    Tony Ryan Cork, Ireland   This is a story of a medical atlas, the author, the illustrator, and her great-uncle. The book, the Atlas of the Diseases of the Membrana Tympani, was written by Dr. Henry MacNaughton Jones in 1878. This atlas of diseases of the “eardrum” was illustrated by nurse and artist, Margaret Boole.…

  • Walter Kempner (1903–1997) and his rice diet

    Photo of Walter Kempner. Source. Walter Kempner, the doctor with the thick German accent who came to America to escape from the Nazis, was born in 1903. Son of two bacteriologists who had both worked on tuberculosis, he graduated in medicine from the  University of Heidelberg in 1928 and subsequently worked there and in Berlin. When…

  • Harry Goldblatt and the kidney

    Dr. Harry Goldblatt. 1964. Via the National Library of Medicine. In 1928 Dr. Harry Goldblatt applied silver clamps experimentally to the renal arteries of dogs and observed a significant and sustained rise in blood pressure. His main interest as a researcher was to find a cause for hypertension, a disease for which effective treatment was…

  • A historical analysis of the military’s method of anti-malaria health education through print

    Pavane L. Gorrepati  Iowa City, Iowa, United States   The fight against malaria has largely been successful because of modern scientific advances, but during World War II the fight was supplemented by propaganda posters warning soldiers about malaria just as they were warmed against venereal diseases. Everyone was expected to aid the war effort—women to…