Hektoen International

A Journal of Medical Humanities

Tag: high blood pressure

  • Sir George Pickering and the low salt diet

    Nicolas Roberto Robles Badajoz, Spain   Figure 1. St. Mary’s Hospital, Paddington, London, UK. Photo by Enric likes Funk. 2008. Via Wikimedia. CC BY-SA 2.0. As a young man George Pickering was interested in his native Northumbrian countryside and intended to study agriculture. Persuaded later to read for a degree in biochemistry or physiology, he…

  • Homeopathy: medicine or placebo?

    Shrestha Saraf Sutton Coldfield, UK Sudarshan Ramachandran Birmingham, UK   Samuel Christian Friedrich Hahnemann. Mezzotint by R. Woodman after G. E. Hering. Wellcome Collection. Public Domain Mark Homeopathy, based on a pseudoscientific system of alternative medicine, was developed by German physician Samuel Hahnemann around 1790. The primary principle of homeopathy is “like cures like,” i.e.,…

  • The proximity of death

    Paul C. Rosenblatt St. Paul, Minnesota, United States   A family outing at Lincoln Park in Chicago a few weeks before the author became ill. Pictured are the author, his mother Rose Rosenblatt, and his sister Doris Rosenblatt (now Kopfstein). Photo taken by the author’s father Harry Rosenblatt and published with permission of the author.…

  • 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…

  • Bill’s legacy

    Adam O. Goldstein North Carolina, USA   Details have been changed to protect patient confidentiality. Photography by JMS2 Bill, a dentist and a patient of mine, died in his sleep at age 52. I did not know Bill as well as many patients, as we had only seen each other four times over five months,…

  • The second chart

    Irene Martinez Chicago, Illinois, United States   Caption: Photography by Keith Williamson When I arrived at the clinic, I was already behind schedule. I got up at 5:30 to get ready, but with my daughter’s end of the year school trip made things more complicated. I was already rushing when I got to the clinic,…