Hektoen International

A Journal of Medical Humanities

Tag: Hektoen

  • Control of blood

    E.C. SparyUnited Kingdom Blood, that vivid liquid within our bodies, has an attraction for human cultures that is apparent from at least the time of the Maya civilization. If many in the West know of chocolate’s origins in pre-Columbian practices, few are aware that the original drink was composed to resemble fresh blood: liquid, nourishing,…

  • Only blood

    Anthony ChiocchiNew York, New York, United States I remember my first nosebleed. It was the late eighties and I was at the age where it was still permissible for me to sleep on the floor of my parent’s bedroom. Ostensibly this was due to their superior air conditioner, but in truth I was afraid of…

  • Howard Kelly’s avant-garde autopsy method

    Julius BonelloGeorge TsourdinisPeoria, Illinois, United States Once dubbed the “Prince of Gynecology,” Dr. Howard A. Kelly was one of the most prominent surgeons in the United States in the early twentieth century.1 Through the blessing of Sir William Osler, Kelly had risen to the rank of Head of Gynecology at Johns Hopkins Medical School at…

  • Bloody women

    M.K.K. Hague-YearlMontréal, Québec, Canada Sitting with little fanfare inside a twentieth-century red hardcover binding is a single leaf whose bibliographic record contains brackets of uncertainty: “[Calendar for Austria, 1496.] [Kaspar Hochfeder, Nürnberg? 1495.]” The catalogue offers only a basic description: “The woodcut occupying the whole lower portion depicts a zodiac man, two bloodletting scenes, a…

  • Defining donation

    Ahmad ShakeriHowsikan KugathasanToronto, Canada Money was tight in college for my roommate and me. I had a book buying habit and he frequented restaurants. Both of us were tutors but our financial strategies and our part time jobs were not the only things that united us. There was blood. Every few months, the American Red…

  • A case of toxic blood

    Shruthi DeivasigamaniPhiladelphia, Pennsylvania, United States On a blustery winter day, a molecule of water condenses around a particle of dust in the air. The structure grows in size as it falls closer to earth, and before it hits the ground outside, it has crystallized into a perfect, six-sided snowflake. Miles away, a thirty-one-year-old woman is…

  • Ludwik Hirszfeld: The story of one life that changed thousands of others

    Paulina KowalińskaWrocław, Poland “To a far greater extent the group reactions have been used in forensic medicine for the purpose of establishing paternity. The possibility of arriving at decisions in such cases rests on the studies of the hereditary transmission of the blood groups; the principal factural results in this field we owe to the…

  • Bloody beginnings of hematology

    Sherin Jose ChockattuBengaluru, India His pole, with pewter basins hung,Black, rotten teeth in order strung,Rang’d cups that in the window stood,Lin’d with red rags, to look like blood,Did well his threefold trade explain,Who shav’d, drew teeth, and breathd a vein —John Gay (The Goat Without a Beard, 1727) For over three millennia, self-taught physicians and…

  • Yellow blood: Learn from yesterday

    Meguna NakaiNagoya, Japan In 2020 Japan will host the second Tokyo Olympics. When the first Olympics were televised in 1964, people were surprised to find that Japan had developed so quickly even though only nineteen years had passed after World War II. Yet there remained much to be done. One urgent need was to improve…

  • The mysterious Red Cross boy

    Emeka Chibuikem V.Enugu State, Nigeria Who is this Red Cross Boy? This is the question to which I could find no answer until this day. I am Alex, from the Igbo tribe in the South-East of Nigeria, and I was born out of wedlock in 1991 to a single mother who died in 1998, while…