Hektoen International

A Journal of Medical Humanities

Tag: Hektorama

  • Opening the left ventricle

    This image is from Henry W. Cattell’s 1905 Post-mortem pathology; a manual of post-mortem examinations and the interpretations to be drawn therefrom; a practical treatise for students and practioners. It shows the approach for opening the left ventricle after the heart is removed from the body. Highlighted Vignette Volume 12, Issue 4 – Fall 2020…

  • Four Women Dancing

    The urge to move to music is universal. Dancing represents an essential part of human culture, and acts as a social unifier, increasing cohesion in a group. Collective effervescence, a concept created by sociologist Émile Durkheim, is what sits at the heart of dancing and gives it its unifying power. A more unified community is…

  • Sawing to the bone

    This illustration, believed to be the frontispiece of one of the surgical texts by Walter Hermann Ryff, is perhaps one of the more realistic for its time. During this era, anatomical and medical texts tended to be fairly bloodless, portraying flayed human beings in states of repose. Here instead we see a leg amputation with…

  • Up to date orthopedics

    This image of how to treat fractures of the elbow was published in Industrial medicine and surgery in 1919. The arm is held with the elbow fully flexed, and motion under supervision is encouraged after about five days. Currently these fractures are treated similarly, but there is a tendency to have a different degree of…

  • Painting an honest image

    Rachel FleishmanPhiladelphia, Pennsylvania, United States I send my colleague home to kiss her children, then go to the nursery to meet my patient. The obstetrician shows me the newborn’s penis; it will not stop bleeding. Together, we wrap it with a special gauze. Surgicel. The bandage turns a dark black, adhering to the bloody ridge…

  • From enigma to Jeremy

    Ami Schattner Jerusalem, Israel One day each week I leave my hospital to serve as a consultant in ambulatory internal medicine. General practitioners from the area refer difficult patients to me, and thus my encounters vary from the very simple to the most challenging diagnostic riddles. Rachel belonged to the latter. This elderly lively lady…

  • Cells of an embryo

    The layers of cells in an embryo, also known as germ layers, develop in stages to create all the parts of the living body. This image from 1874 illustrates exactly that. Showing the differing shapes of differing embryos, but matching the colors of each system across them, creates an effective tool. For example, the yellow…

  • Lucas van Leyden: Ear surgery

    This surgeon is shown operating on the ear of a young man in an environment quite different from a modern surgical suite. He may be merely lancing a boil, but his patient looks unhappy. It is also obvious from their clothes that there is quite a difference in class between the two. With his fur…

  • Primitive surgery

    This 14th century woodcut from the Ashmolean Museum offers a view of what a surgeon’s office looked like at that time. We can see the patient, with boils, welts, or wounds peppering his skin, attended by the surgeon. On the far left a woman stands ready to assist. She holds some kind of a tool…

  • Staining the cells of the nervous system

    Camillo Golgi (1843 –1926) was an Italian biologist and pathologist, now recognized as the greatest neuroscientist of his time. He studied and worked at the University of Pavia, where he developed a technique of using potassium dichromate and silver nitrate to stain cellular components black. Using this stain he was able to discover the organelle now known as the Golgi apparatus, consisting…