Hektoen International

A Journal of Medical Humanities

Tag: infectious disease

  • Health, wellness, and their determinants

    Travis KirkwoodOttawa, Ontario, Canada John Snow is often referred to as the father of modern epidemiology. His work is certainly worthy of this1 and present-day public health2 still strives toward upstream approaches, primordial prevention, and redress on the social determinants of health. It seems however that the core lessons from John Snow back in 1854 have…

  • Did Macbeth have syphilis?

    Eleanor J. Molloy Dublin, Ireland Introduction Syphilis was endemic in Elizabethan England and it was estimated that nearly 20% of the population of London were infected.1 The signs and symptoms were commonly known to the average person and would be potentially recognizable to the audience in Shakespeare’s plays. Shakespeare mentions syphilis more times than any…

  • Fleas in art and medicine

    Fleas cause itching and red bite marks on their hosts but are nowadays mainly a nuisance. This was not always so. In the Middle Ages they spread bubonic plague from rats to man, causing the Black Death epidemics that killed 25 million people—up to 50% of the Europe’s population. They also transmit the agents causing…

  • Daniel Carrion and his disease

    In 1879 an armed conflict known as the War of the Pacific broke out between three South American nations, pitting Chile against a Peruvian-Bolivian alliance in a dispute over land rich in minerals, especially sodium nitrate. The Chileans defeated their adversaries by land and sea, their armies invading Peru, occupying Lima, eventually annexing valuable territory…

  • Philadelphia’s plague

    Hayat El BoukariTetouan, Morocco On August 3, 1793, a young French sailor rooming at Richard Denney’s boarding house was desperately ill with a fever.1 As he was a poor foreigner, no one bothered to find out his name. His fever worsening, he died a few days later, as also did eight residents from two houses…

  • Dr. Uplavici’s studies on amebic dysentery

    In 1887 Professor Dr. Jaroslav Hlava (1855 –1924) of the Charles University in Prague carried out studies on the transmission of amebic dysentery by inoculating six cats with infected human stools and successfully producing dysentery in four. On completing his experiments, he published his results in a scientific paper under the title “O Uplavici,” meaning “About…

  • El garrotillo: On diphtheria and Goya

    Vicent RodillaValencia, Spain Diphtheria is a bacterial infectious disease caused by Corynebacterium diphtheriae that affects mostly children. Although by 2017 some 85% of infants worldwide have been vaccinated for DTP (diphtheria-tetanus-pertussis), some 19.9 million children remain unvaccinated.1 According to the World Health Organization, reported cases of diphtheria have decreased from nearly 100,000 in 1980 to…

  • The most loathsome disease of the emperor Galerius

    “His disease was occasioned by a very painful lingering disorder. His body, swelled by an intemperate course of life to an unwieldy corpulence, was covered with ulcers, and devoured by innumerable swarms of those insects who have given the name to a most loathsome disease.” — Edward Gibbon, The Decline and Fall of the Roman…

  • Washington’s deadliest enemy

    Kathryn ToneWiesbaden, Germany As Commander of the Continental Army, General George Washington is famously remembered for the surprise 1776 Christmas attack on the Hessian garrison in Trenton, New Jersey. A bold, relatively spontaneous decision, the attack was a last-ditch effort to salvage some sort of victory after some punishing eight months of humiliating defeats from…

  • Bugs and people: When epidemics change history

    Salvatore MangionePhiladelphia, Pennsylvania, United States In a November 15, 2016 lecture at Oxford University Union, famed British astrophysicist Stephen Hawking predicted that mankind will not last more than a thousand years, and that the only way it can escape extinction is by finding another planet. In May 2017 he moved up the deadline to a…