Hektoen International

A Journal of Medical Humanities

Tag: hypertension

  • On orchids and testes

    Howard FischerUppsala, Sweden “You like orchids?…Nasty things. Their flesh is too much like the flesh of men, their perfume the rotten sweetness of corruption.”– John Steinbeck Orchids belong to a widespread group of flowering plants. There are about 28,000 species of orchids worldwide.1 The underground tubers of many European orchids—which contain the plant’s reserve food…

  • Walter E. Dandy, one of the founders of neurosurgery

    Philip R. LiebsonChicago, Illinois, United States Three pioneers established the discipline of neurosurgery. They were the British surgeon Victor Horsley and the Americans Harvey Cushing and Walter Dandy. Both Americans were surgeons at Johns Hopkins Hospital and Dandy (1886-1946) was the youngest. His innovations include the first clipping of an intracranial aneurysm, the surgical management…

  • Sir George Pickering and the low salt diet

    Nicolas Roberto RoblesBadajoz, Spain 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 obtained a scholarship in basic sciences at Pembroke College, Cambridge, then decided to study medicine. He went to St. Thomas’s Hospital…

  • Did Ernest Hemingway have the Celtic curse?

    Philip R. LiebsonChicago, Illinois, United States Considering Ernest Hemingway’s mishaps before he died in 1961 by a self-inflicted shotgun wound, it is surprising that he lived so long. He survived two plane crashes several days apart that left him with a concussion, burns, cracked ribs and vertebrae, and ruptures of the liver, spleen, and kidneys.…

  • Felix Mendelssohn, musical prodigy

    Felix Mendelssohn made his musical debut at age nine. Born in Hamburg in 1809, he came from a distinguished German family that moved to Berlin in 1902. His grandfather and father had been successful businessmen who also made it a point to provide their children with an excellent education in the liberal arts. His grandfather…

  • Sympathectomy for hypertension

    Sympathectomy for essential hypertension was introduced in the late 1920s at a time when no effective medical treatment was available. It consisted of resecting several sympathetic neurons that exit the spinal cord from the mid to lower spinal cord and are arranged in two columns of nodules called ganglia on either side of it. Sympathetic…

  • Walter Kempner (1903–1997) and his rice diet

    Walter Kempner, the doctor with the thick German accent who came to America to escape from the Nazis, was born in 1903. Son of two bacteriologists who had both worked on tuberculosis, he graduated in medicine from the  University of Heidelberg in 1928 and subsequently worked there and in Berlin. When the anti-Jewish laws were…

  • Harry Goldblatt and the kidney

    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 not available at the time. There had been a long-standing…

  • The Emberá of Panama

    L.J. SandlowGeorge DuneaChicago, Illinois, United States The Emberá are an indigenous people who live near the Panama-Columbia border. There are about 33,000 living in Darién, Panama, and 50,000 in Colombia. Until 1960 most lived in extended family settlements along the rivers. Since the 60s many have moved together into small villages, still along the river.…

  • The search for Eisenhower’s adrenal tumor

    Kevin R. LoughlinBoston, Massachusetts, United States For most Americans, the knowledge of Dwight Eisenhower’s health history is limited to the fact that he had a serious heart attack while president. However, a seemingly casual comment by a non-physician political scientist, Robert E. Gilbert, in his book The Mortal Presidency: Illness and Anguish in the White…