Hektoen International

A Journal of Medical Humanities

Tag: fever

  • On orchids and testes

    Howard FischerUppsala, Sweden “You like orchids?…Nasty things. Their flesh is too much like the flesh of men, their perfume the rotten sweetness of corruption.”– John Steinbeck Orchids belong to a widespread group of flowering plants. There are about 28,000 species of orchids worldwide.1 The underground tubers of many European orchids—which contain the plant’s reserve food…

  • The decisive influence of malaria on the outcome of Grant’s Vicksburg campaign of 1863

    Lloyd KleinEric WittenbergCalifornia, San Francisco, United States The vital importance of controlling the Mississippi River was apparent to Union strategists from the beginning of the Civil War. The river served as a major supply route, facilitated the transportation of men and military supplies, and abetted communication. Union control of the river would deprive the Confederacy…

  • Diagnosis: Neurosyphilis. Treatment: Malaria, iatrogenic

    Howard FischerUppsala, Sweden “The syphilitic man was thinking hard…about how to get his legs to step off the curb and carry him across Washington Street. Here was his problem: His brains, where the instructions to his legs originated, were being eaten alive by corkscrews.”– Kurt Vonnegut, The Breakfast of Champions Julius Wagner-Jauregg, M.D. (1857–1940) graduated…

  • Scotland’s Anthrax Island

    Howard FischerUppsala, Sweden “They make a desolation and call it peace.”— Agha Shahid Ali (1949–2001) During World War Two, the British government purchased from its owners the Gruinard Island, a one by two km island off the Scottish coast. The one inhabitant was evicted, and the island became the site of secret tests to weaponize…

  • Book review: Casanova’s Guide to Medicine

    Arpan K. BanerjeeSolihull, United Kingdom The eighteenth-century Italian Giacomo Casanova (1725–1798) is today best remembered for legendary amorous pursuits that resulted in his name becoming a part of the English language. What has been forgotten, however, is that he was a remarkable and erudite polymath. He graduated as a lawyer from the University of Padua…

  • Thomas Sydenham, “The English Hippocrates”

    JMS PearceEast Yorks, UK Still Fever burns, and all her skill defiesTill Sydenham’s wisdom plays a double part,Quells the disease and helps the failing Art. -from a poem on plague by John Locke, 1668 From Hippocrates, “Father Of Medicine,” to William Osler, “Father Of Modern Medicine,” plaudits for doctors abound and venerate their varied virtues.…

  • The Schoolhouse Lab

    Edward McSweeganKingston, Rhode Island, United States “Black measles” was a common name for spotted fever, which regularly killed people in the western United States. Symptoms included a spotty rash on the extremities, fever, chills, headache, and photophobia. No one knew what caused it. The first recorded case in Montana’s Bitterroot Valley was in 1873.1 Twenty-three…

  • Some subjects are given

    Michael SalcmanBaltimore, Maryland, United States Some subjects are given to the authorsof poems and songs, of mechanical puzzlesand lives, given over and over like a spiking fever in an old TB wardor the low level irritation of a cancerraising its hand in a bone — here I am it says, conversant with any private language…

  • Borderline

    William MarshallTucson, Arizona, United States When family and friends from back East ask me about the Arizona/Mexico border, two images come to mind: first, an almost unlimited view of blue sky and distant mountains; second, a sick, frightened teenage boy sitting on an exam table in the urgent-care clinic. Hiking among the pines on the…