Hektoen International

A Journal of Medical Humanities

Tag: History Essays

  • Howard A. Knox and intelligence testing on Ellis Island

    Carine Tabak Kansas City, Kansas, United States   Interview during the mental examination of an immigrant on Ellis Island, conducted by two PHS officers and an interpreter. US National Library of Medicine Digital Collections.  Between 1892 to 1924, twelve million men, women, and children entered the United States through the Ellis Island Immigration Center, making…

  • From poppy to morphine and heroin

    JMS Pearce Hull, England   Among the remedies which it has pleased almighty God to give to man to relieve his sufferings, none is so universal and so efficacious as opium. – Thomas Sydenham, 1680   The controversial pharmaceutical company Farbenfabriken Bayer AG* had an important role in the development of morphine, heroin, and aspirin,…

  • Philip the Handsome and the plague

    Nicolas Roberto Robles Badajoz, Spain Figure 1. Tomb of Felipe I and Juana La Loca. Photo by Javi Guerra Hernando on Wikimedia. CC BY-SA 4.0. Philip of Habsburg was born in Bruges in 1478. He was the son of Maximilian I, the Holy Roman Emperor, and Mary of Burgundy, daughter of Charles the Bold, in…

  • The secrecy behind JFK’s autoimmune disease

    Jude Tunyi Columbus, Ohio, United States   John F. Kennedy leaving on gurney from hospital following spinal surgery, as his wife Jacqueline stands over him. Dick DeMarsico, 1954. Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division. Most Americans are familiar with the life and death of John F. Kennedy (JFK), but they may not know about…

  • Temporary insanity in tropical waters

    Richard de Grijs Sydney, Australia   Frontispiece to the second edition (1639) of John Woodall’s The Surgion’s Mate, promising to outline “[t]he cures of the Scurvey [sic] … and of the Calenture.” Line engraving by George Glover. Wellcome Collection. So, by a calenture misled, The mariner with rapture sees, On the smooth ocean’s azure bed,…

  • Santa Margherita da Cortona

    Susan Brunn PuettJ. David PuettChapel Hill, North Carolina, United States From humble beginnings to years as a mistress, Margherita altered her path to become a tertiary Franciscan penitent, attending the ill and poor, founding a hospital, and devoting herself to Christ. She was in the vanguard of several other women of the late Middle Ages…

  • Saved by the spoonful: Oral rehydration therapy (ORT)

    Mariam AbdulghaniMichigan, United States In the early 1970s, the Bangladesh Liberation War caused a mass exodus of refugees from East Pakistan (now Bangladesh) into West Bengal, India. Some ten million people found sanctuary in camps along the Indian-Pakistan border, where the conditions of war during the monsoon season led to a cholera outbreak. The disease…

  • Can headless martyrs really walk? The belief in cephalophores in the Middle Ages

    Andrew Wodrich Washington, DC   Saint Denis of Paris holding his severed head. Mid-15th century depiction from an illuminated prayer book (Getty Museum, Los Angeles, Ms. 5, fol. 35v, 84.ML.723.35v). The halos surrounding his decapitated head as well as the stump of his neck suggest that the soul and saintliness of St. Denis remain in…

  • Sea sick: Naval surgery and sanitation in eighteenth-century Britain

    Melissa Yeo Ontario, Canada   Instruments in a Surgeon’s Chest (click to enlarge). From The surgeons mate or military and domestique surgery, John Woodall, 1639. Wellcome Collection. Public domain. Scurvy, yellow fever, and typhus were considered “the three Great Killers of seamen.”1 Hygiene and diet were very poor aboard eighteenth-century sailing vessels, as ships were often…

  • Hadrian and Frank’s sign

    Vittoria Sabatini Florence, Italy   Bust of Hadrian with view of creased ear. Capitoline Museums. Via Wikimedia. Public domain. It is difficult to remain an emperor in the presence of a physician, and difficult even to keep one’s essential quality as man. The professional eye saw in me only a mass of humors, a sorry…