Hektoen International

A Journal of Medical Humanities

Tag: medical history

  • Theodor Kocher (1841–1917)

    Emil Theodor Kocher. Les Prix Nobel, 1909, p. 66. Via Wikimedia. Public domain. Theodor Kocher was the first surgeon to ever receive the Nobel Prize. He was born in 1841 in Bern, Switzerland, went to school there, and was first in his class. He studied medicine in Bern and graduated summa cum laude, then went…

  • COVID-19 and the Black Death

    Colleen Donnelly  Denver, Colorado, United States   A street during the plague in London with a death cart and mourners. Colour wood engraving by E. Evans. Wellcome Library no. 6918i. Source During the fourteenth century waves of the bubonic plague washed across Europe. Doomsday books of the age described an apocalypse that wiped out one-quarter…

  • Budapest: medicine and paprika

    L. J. Sandlow George Dunea Chicago, Illinois, United States   The Magyars, ancestors of modern Hungarians, came from the region of the Ural Mountains and invaded Europe around AD 800. Crossing the Carpathian Mountains, they conquered the Pannonian plain and established a large and important medieval kingdom. In 1526 they were defeated at the decisive…

  • Literatim: Essays at the intersections of medicine and culture

    Arpan K. BanerjeeSolihull, UK In this interesting collection, medical historian Howard Markel has brought together his previously published essays from the New England Journal of Medicine, Journal of the American Medical Association, and the PBS Newsletter into one volume. The collection of eighty pieces covers a wide range of topics that have interested Markel over…

  • Women in the medical profession: The trial of Jacoba Felicie de Almania

    Mariel Tishma Chicago, Illinois, United States A meeting of doctors at the university of Paris. From the “Chants royaux” manuscript, Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris. BNF, Français 1537, fol. 27v. Source In November 1322 a group of folk healers and empirics were put on trial by the Faculty of Medicine from the University of Paris. Their crime…

  • Stanley Shaldon as I knew him

    Stanley Shaldon. Photo by the author. Stanley Shaldon belonged to that first generation of nephrologists who made dialysis available at a time when uremia was a sentence of death. He was one of the bright young registrars whom Professor Sheila Sherlock took with her from the Royal Postgraduate Medical School at Hammersmith to the Royal…

  • A surgeon and a gentleman: the life of James Barry

    Mariel Tishma Chicago, Illinois, United States   Dr. James Barry with John, a servant, and his dog, Psyche. Unknown Artist. c1850.   “Do not consider whether what I say is a young man speaking, but whether my discussion with you is that of a man of understanding.”1 – Dedication of the thesis of James Barry In November of 1809,…

  • Embalming Vladimir Lenin

    In 1997, two years after the dissolution of the Soviet Union, Ilya Zbarsky wrote a book about embalming the body of Vladimir Lenin, a process in which both he and his father (Boris Zbarsky) took part during the decades of terror of the Bolshevik reign. It all seems to have begun in 1918, when a…

  • Hiroshima seventy-five years after the bombing

    Cristóbal Berry-CabánFort Bragg, North Carolina, United States “At exactly fifteen minutes past eight in the morning on August 6, 1945, Japanese time, at the moment when the atomic bomb flashed above Hiroshima, Miss Toshiko Sasaki, a clerk in the personnel department of the East Asia Tin Works, had just sat down at her place in…