Hektoen International

A Journal of Medical Humanities

Tag: London

  • Mustard: History of the yellow seed

    Carol ShermanChicago, Illinois, United States The National Mustard Museum in Middleton, Wisconsin1 describes itself as having over 5,600 mustards. They originate from all fifty states of the United States and from more than seventy countries. This museum, casting itself as midcentury, exhibits old curios and vintage signage. The museum also provides a place to sit…

  • 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…

  • Wilder Penfield

    JMS PearceHull, England, United Kingdom Wilder Penfield was not only a great surgeon and a great scientist, he was an even greater human being. -Sir George Pickering, Regius Professor of Medicine at Oxford University Wilder Penfield (1891-1976) (Fig. 1) was the most gifted pioneer of Canadian neurosurgery. He devised effective surgery for controlling intractable epilepsy…

  • Vampires and blood trafficking: The International Red Cross campaign against third-world plasma collection in the 1970s

    William SchneiderIndianapolis, Indiana, United States One of the cornerstones of the WHO Blood Safety program is the voluntary donation of blood. According to the WHO Fact Sheet No. 279 (June 2015), all Member States are urged “to develop national blood systems based on voluntary unpaid donation.” The reason is, An adequate and reliable supply of…

  • Becoming a doctor in Chicago (c. 1954)—The Chicago Medical School

    Peter BerczellerEdited by Paul Berczeller An excerpt from Dr. Peter Berczeller’s memoir, The Little White Coat. Chicago Med was the poor relation among the medical schools ringing Cook County Hospital. The sooty three-story building was dwarfed by the high rises of the Rush and Illinois medical schools close by. Though its building was no taller…

  • From enigma to Jeremy

    Ami Schattner Jerusalem, Israel One day each week I leave my hospital to serve as a consultant in ambulatory internal medicine. General practitioners from the area refer difficult patients to me, and thus my encounters vary from the very simple to the most challenging diagnostic riddles. Rachel belonged to the latter. This elderly lively lady…

  • Nicholas Culpeper and Herbal Medicine

    JMS PearceHull, England Apart from crude measures such as amputation and surgery without anesthesia, most medical treatments were ineffective until the twentieth century. Herbal remedies dominated from the time of ancient Hindu and Chinese cultures. Herbals were used by the Greek scholar Theophrastus (371 – 287 BC) and by Pedanius Dioscorides (AD 40 – 90),…

  • A 130-year-old medical cold case: Who was Jack the Ripper?

    Kevin R. LoughlinBoston, Massachusetts, USA As murder followed murder and mutilated bodies were discovered and described in the press, one can imagine the fear that swept the hardscrabble Whitechapel section of London in 1888. Populated with many immigrants, mostly from Eastern Europe and Russia, unemployment was rampant and tenements were found on most streets. It…

  • The female body dissected: Anatomy and John Keats

    Niamh Davies-BranchAberdeen, United Kingdom John Keats, poet of the great odes, was also a surgical apprentice at Guy’s Hospital, London from October 1815 to March 1817.1 Although he never spent a day as a surgeon, he completed six years of medical and surgical training. During this period, he maintained an active literary life, composing thirty-nine…

  • Robert M. Kark (1911–2002)

    In the 1950’s, Robert Kark and his team of Robert C. Muehrcke, Victor Pollak, and Conrad Pirani became, for a short time, the dominant force in American nephrology by popularizing the use of kidney biopsy as a diagnostic tool. This technique had first been described by Scandinavian investigators with somewhat limited success, but the Kark team…