Hektoen International

A Journal of Medical Humanities

Tag: JB Murphy

  • Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain: About a whistling pneumothorax and pulmonary tuberculosis

     Peter Korsten  Göttingen, Germany   Thomas Mann, 1937 Photo by Carl van Vechten Originally intended as a novella, Thomas Mann’s (1875–1955) multilayered novel The Magic Mountain documents in fine detail the methods used to treat lung diseases and especially pulmonary tuberculosis at the beginning of the twentieth century. Mann’s protagonist, Hans Castorp, who intended to spend…

  • JB Murphy: Chicago’s great but controversial surgeon

    Patrick GuinanGeorge DuneaChicago, Illinois, United States The grand surgical auditorium of the American College of Surgeons in Chicago still bears the name of JB Murphy, the tall, slim, blue-eyed boy from Appleton, Wisconsin, born in 1857 on a farm into an Irish family that escaped the horrors of the potato famine to make a new…