Hektoen International

A Journal of Medical Humanities

Tag: History Essays

  • Napoleon’s final illness

    JMS PearceHull, England Napoleon Bonaparte was born on the French island of Corsica on August 15, 1769. His colorful life, illnesses, and military exploits have been extensively recorded.1 On 17 October 1815, after the forty-five-year-old Napoleon’s famous defeat near Waterloo, the allies banished him to St. Helena, a subtropical island in the South Atlantic Ocean,…

  • Death of the Prudent Prince, Medici Grand Duke Ferdinando II

    Sally MetzlerChicago, Illinois, United States The day of May 27, 1670, bore witness to the death of Ferdinando II, a man lauded as a most prudent prince and admired by his European peers. His reign was termed as a “prolonged and pleasant autumn, the taste of venison.”1 Ferdinando II was the fourth Grand Duke of…

  • The wizards who saved lives

    Ceres OteroMexico City, Mexico Of the various peoples who inhabited prehispanic Mexico, the Aztecs were the most medically advanced.1 According to their mythological beliefs, divine beings were to be venerated for giving life to humans and for creating on Earth a place where they could fully develop and live in balance with other species.2 Because…

  • “Filth so foul and stench so offensive as not to be imagined”

    Richard de GrijsSydney, Australia … during the voyage there is on board these ships terrible misery, stench, fumes, horror, vomiting, many kinds of sea-sickness, fever, dysentery, headache, heat, constipation, boils, scurvy, cancer, mouth-rot, and the like, all of which come from old and sharply salted food and meat, also from very bad and foul water,…

  • The medical history of Ronald Reagan

    Ronald Reagan was the fortieth president of the United States and the fifth to be shot at by a would-be assassin. On March 30, 1981, a deranged young man, John Hinckley Jr., fired six bullets at him outside a hotel in Washington, D.C. One bullet struck his chest, ricocheted off his left seventh rib, and…

  • “A conspicuous place in the annals of murder”: The anatomy murders of Burke and Hare

    Matthew TurnerHershey, Pennsylvania, United States In 1828 Scotland, two men committed a series of crimes that would earn them, as a contemporary newspaper described, “a conspicuous place in the annals of murder.”1 To both contemporaries and modern audiences, the gruesome story of Burke and Hare is “an endless source of morbid fascination.”1 For centuries, Western…

  • The Doctors’ Riot of 1788

    Matthew TurnerHershey, Pennsylvania, United States In the wake of the American Revolution, slavery remained a key part of the United States’ economy. Even the northern states were not exempt; in the waning years of the eighteenth century, slaves made up nearly 20% of the population of New York City alone.1 As a 2011 Lancet article…

  • Mercury poisoning and the death of John Wilkes Booth

    Matthew D. TurnerHershey, Pennsylvania, United StatesJason SappJoint Base Lewis-McChord, Washington, United States Introduction On April 26, 1865, twenty-six soldiers of the 16th New York Cavalry Regiment surrounded a barn on the Garrett farm in Virginia. Hiding within the barn were two refugees, one of them the most wanted man in the United States, and the…

  • The bizarre history of the bezoar

    Howard FischerUppsala, Sweden “As for the bezoar [we removed] …we have restricted ourselves from employing its therapeutic power in the practice of medicine.”1– John Moffat, M.D. A bezoar is a compact mass of material that may be found in the digestive tract of mammals, including humans. Bezoars in humans may cause problems. Those found in…

  • Marfan syndrome and Abraham Lincoln

    Umut AkovaAtlanta, Georgia, United States Marfan syndrome is a rare, inherited genetic disorder that affects the body’s connective tissues. People with Marfan syndrome often have distinctive physical features such as tall stature, long limbs, joint hypermobility, and a narrow face. The condition is primarily caused by mutations in the FBN1 gene, which is located on…