Hektoen International

A Journal of Medical Humanities

Tag: nervous system

  • Henry Miller

    JMS Pearce Hull, England   Henry Miller. From the author’s personal collection. There are many eminent figures in the worlds of medicine and neurology, most of them distinguished by their clinical skill, academic prowess, scientific originality, or success in establishing major institutes of teaching and research. Henry Miller (1913–1976), though not a laboratory investigator, was…

  • Book review: The Imaginary Patient: How Diagnosis Gets Us Wrong

    Arpan K. BanerjeeSolihull, United Kingdom Making the right diagnosis is central to the medical encounter. A doctor always started off by taking a history, examining the patient, and sometimes performing additional tests. But when a creditable diagnosis could not be made, the medical profession often invented conditions that later were shown not to exist. Such…

  • Robert Bentley Todd

    JMS Pearce Hull, England, United Kingdom   Fig 1. Todd prize for Clinical Medicine (left). Medal by Joseph Shepherd Wyon, 1861. Science Museum, London, United Kingdom. Via Google Arts & Culture.  Robert Bentley Todd (right). Mezzotint by G. Zobel, 1860, after D. Y. Blakiston. Wellcome Collection. Public domain.  Students of King’s College Hospital London are…

  • On suffering and its depiction in William Carlos Williams’s “The Yellow Flower”

    Negin Rezaei Tehran, Iran   Passport photograph of William Carlos Williams. Courtesy of the Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Yale University. Circa 1920. Via Wikimedia Eric Cassell observed that physical pain and suffering are two distinct experiences and that pain is only one of the infinite number of sources that may cause suffering in…

  • Ode to baroque and other musical genres

    George ChristopherAda, Michigan, United States Imagine a musical style that is emotionally evocative yet highly organized, thereby conferring structure to emotion; that gives artistic expression of the fusion of emotion and reason; that mimics biology at cellular through ecological levels through its organized complexity; that brings unity from the diversity of multiple simultaneous melodic lines;…

  • William Halse Rivers Rivers

    JMS Pearce Hull, England   Figure 1 WHR Rivers in public domain, from Wikimedia William Rivers MD FRCP FRS (1864-1922) William Rivers (Fig 1) was a most unusual man, a polymath with careers in neuroscience, ethnology, and psychology. But above all—notwithstanding or perhaps because of personal nervous constraints—he was a man of originality and great…

  • Two odes to Santiago Ramón y Cajal

    Lazaros C. Triarhou Thessalonica, Greece   (Left) Reproduction of the original Spanish version of the poem in the memory of Ramón y Cajal by “Rafael de Córdoba” (aka Marcos Rafael Blanco Belmonte) from the periodical Blanco y Negro, published in 1934. (Right) A handwritten ode to Ramón y Cajal by Manuel Laza Zerón, dated February…

  • Walter Russell Brain DM FRCP FRS (1895–1966)

    JMS Pearce  East Yorks, England   Lord Brain. From The Royal London Hospital. Source Russell Brain (Fig 1) was born at Clovelly, Denmark Road, Reading, on 23 October 1895, the only son of Walter John Brain, solicitor, and his wife, Edith Alice. A quiet, reserved man of enormous intellect and integrity, he was revered as…

  • Samuel Solly—distinguished surgeon and educator

    Arpan K. Banerjee Solihull, UK   Samuel Solly. Wood engraving, 1871. Credit: Wellcome Collection. (CC BY 4.0) Samuel Solly was born in St. Mary Axe, London, on May 13, 1805. He attended school in Walthamstow, East London, where his contemporaries included the future British Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli.1 In May 1822 he became an apprentice to…

  • Gordon Morgan Holmes MD., FRS.

    JMS Pearce Hull, England Figure 1: Gordon Holmes “Beneath the exterior of a martinet there was an Irish heart of gold” Wilder Penfield Gordon Holmes (1876-1965) was born in Castlebellingham, Ireland. He was named after his father, a landowner, descended from a Yorkshire family that had settled in King’s County (County Offaly) in the mid-seventeenth…