Hektoen International

A Journal of Medical Humanities

Tag: Hektorama

  • Of luxuriant manes and in praise of baldness

    Frank Gonzalez-CrussiChicago, Illinois, United States The feverish imagination of poets has ever eulogized the beauty of feminine hair. The beloved’s hair has been represented as golden threads, sunrays, fragrant flowers, or astrakhan fleece (wool famous for its tight, shiny loops). Richard Lovelace spoke of it as “sunlight wound up in ribbands.”1 To Charles Baudelaire, his…

  • The X Club

    JMS PearceHull, England, United Kingdom Charles Babbage, who conceived the first automatic digital computer, published in 1830 Reflections on the Decline of Science in England. This stimulated the formation of several new groups that aimed to further scientific progress and exchange of ideas. These were distinct from Britain’s nineteenth century gentlemen’s social clubs and were…

  • The Rh factor: An intertwined history

    Paula CarterChicago, Illinois In 1924, Lucy Reyburn gave birth to her first child, a daughter she named Darlene. Lucy lived in Iowa and the birth was an embarrassment. She had become pregnant and hurriedly married a man who left before the baby was born. It was for the best; the man had been unkind. But…

  • African American medical pioneers

    Mariel TishmaChicago, Illinois, United States The road for African Americans in the medical professions has not been easy. Enslaved Africans received no education.1 During the first half of the nineteenth-century medical schools in the North would admit only a very small number of black students. Even after the Civil War, African Americans continued to be…

  • Avant garde research on a blood substitute at the Hektoen Institute of Medical Research

    Jayant Radhakrishnan Darien, Illinois, United States   From Left to Right: Gerald S Moss MD, Richard Brinkman MD, Lakshman Sehgal PhD, Robert Forest DVM. June 1975, photograph of the team with the first baboon resuscitated with stroma free hemoglobin after being bled down to a hemoglobin concentration of zero. Photo taken by the author. The…

  • Sophia Louisa Jex-Blake, first British woman doctor

    Sophia Louisa Jex-Blake (1840-1912) was a rebellious child from the very start, “fresh, willful, and naughty.”1 She attended Queen’s College in London over the objection of her very conservative father, who upon graduation allowed her to take up a position as a mathematics tutor only if she did not take a salary (1859). After teaching…

  • Mary Putnam Jacobi, advocate for women in society and medicine

    Mary Corinna Putnam Jacobi (1842–1906) was born in London to American parents. She spent her childhood and adolescence in New York, where she studied pharmacy before receiving her medical degree in Philadelphia in 1861. In 1866, after briefly working in Boston with Marie Zakrzewska,1 she went to Paris to further her medical training. Back in New…

  • Battle of Gettysburg

    Reed Brockway Bontecou (1824-1907) was an American surgeon from Troy, New York, who in 1846 made a trip up the Amazon river to collect flora and fauna for the local natural history museum, and whose surgical feats include the first successful ligation of a traumatic aneurysm of the axillary artery in America (1857) and the…

  • William Bell: Photographed injured veterans

    William Bell was a veteran of the American Civil War who fought at Antietam and Gettysburg, and became chief photographer of the Army Medical Museum in Washington. He took photographs of injured soldiers as part of a project to document the range of injuries among veterans. On the left, the solider is cleverly posed in…

  • Georg Bartisch, early Renaissance eye-surgeon

    Georg Bartisch (1535–1607) became an apprentice to a barber-surgeon at age thirteen, followed by two additional apprenticeships to an oculist and a lithotomist. He worked as itinerant surgeon in Germany and Bohemia, but eventually become court oculist to Duke Augustus I of Saxony in Dresden. A highly superstitious man, he believed in astronomy and witchcraft,…