Hektoen International

A Journal of Medical Humanities

Tag: Louis Pasteur

  • The belief in bacteria: An early history of microbiology

    Mostafa ElbabaDoha, Qatar The history of microbiology is a compelling narrative of how humanity slowly unraveled the unseen world of microscopic life. The field has fundamentally transformed medicine, biology, and human understanding of disease. But for millennia, explanations for the origins of life and the causes of illness were rooted in philosophical speculation and ancient…

  • The Semmelweis Museum of Medical History, Budapest

    Arpan K. BanerjeeSolihull, England Museums on medical themes are uncommon and generally scattered worldwide. Budapest features the Semmelweis Museum, dedicated to one of Hungary’s greatest physicians and the history of medical advances in Hungary. It is the birthplace and childhood home of Ignaz Semmelweis, born there on July 1, 1818. His father had a grocer’s…

  • The Royal Society of Medicine of London: A brief history

    Arpan K. BanerjeeSolihull, England The origins of the Royal Society of Medicine in London can be traced back to 1805. It was in that year that a breakaway group of learned physicians and surgeons formed a new medical society, the Medical and Chirurgical Society of London. They met first in Gray’s Inn, the legal area…

  • Koch’s postulates revisited

    JMS PearceHull, England Van Leeuwenhoek (1632–1722), a Dutch botanist, using his early microscope observed single-celled bacteria, which he reported to the Royal Society as animalcules. The science of bacteriology owes its origin to two scientists of coruscating originality, Louis Pasteur and Robert Koch. Pasteur may be described as master-architect and Koch as master-builder of the…

  • Gain of function

    Jayant RadhakrishnanDarien, Illinois, United States “It is no good to try to stop knowledge from going forward. Ignorance is never better than knowledge.”– Enrico Fermi (1901–1954) “Gain of Function” (GoF) burst into the general lexicon in 2021 during two shouting matches in the US Senate between the Junior Senator from Kentucky and the Director of…

  • Infectious diseases in the Civil War

    Lloyd Klein San Francisco, California, United States The main cause of death during the American Civil War was not battle injury but disease. About two-thirds of the 620,000 deaths of Civil War soldiers were caused by disease, including 63% of Union fatalities. Only 19% of Union soldiers died on the battlefield and 12% later succumbed to…

  • Plagues and prejudice

    Anne JacobsonOak Park, Illinois, United States It was a calm, clear January morning on the gritty streets of paradise. Honolulu, the capital of the newly-annexed U.S. territory of Hawaii, was ushering out a century of upheaval that had included the arrival of explorers, missionaries, and deadly diseases such as smallpox and measles; the overthrow of…

  • David Bruce, discoverer of brucellosis

    Early life Every medical student would be expected to know something about brucellosis, though quite unlikely to ever see a case. He would have to know that the disease in man may be caused by the Brucella of goats, swine, or cows, but apparently not by that of dogs, foxes, or fish. Bright students might…

  • The door to recovery

    Irene MetznerGlenn YoungkrantzChicago, Illinois, United States Stories about addiction are often filled with despair, but they don’t have to be: this is a true story in two parts. The first is the perspective of a patient, and the second that of his doctor, as they chose to be hopeful. Part I In my own eyes, I was a drunken loser for over thirty…

  • Tales from the crypt: The mosaic symbolism of Louis Pasteur’s tomb

    Abigail ClineAugusta, Georgia, United States Hidden behind the Montparnasse Railway Station is the elegant brick and stone building of the Pasteur Institute. Since its opening in 1887, the Pasteur Institute has been on the front line in the battle against infectious disease. Consisting of research departments studying everything from neuroscience to genomics to epidemiology, the…