Hektoen International

A Journal of Medical Humanities

Tag: Julius Wagner-Jauregg

  • Diagnosis: Neurosyphilis. Treatment: Malaria, iatrogenic

    Howard FischerUppsala, Sweden “The syphilitic man was thinking hard…about how to get his legs to step off the curb and carry him across Washington Street. Here was his problem: His brains, where the instructions to his legs originated, were being eaten alive by corkscrews.”– Kurt Vonnegut, The Breakfast of Champions Julius Wagner-Jauregg, M.D. (1857–1940) graduated…

  • Dr. Fanny Halpern, a psychiatric go-between of 1930s Shanghai

    Richard ZhangPhiladelphia, Pennsylvania, United States On September 20, 1935, a lengthy advertisement in one of Shanghai’s most popular newspapers, the Shen Bao, celebrated the recent opening of the Shanghai Puci Sanatorium (上海普濨療養院).1 The sanatorium would later be known in Western histories as The Mercy Hospital for Nervous Diseases. The advertisement lauded the Puci Sanatorium, headed…