Hektoen International

A Journal of Medical Humanities

Tag: neurasthenia

  • 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…

  • Hypochondria

    JMS PearceHull, England, United Kingdom In words, as fashions, the same rule will hold;Alike fantastic, if too new, or old:Be not the first by whom the new are tried,Nor yet the last to lay the old aside.— Alexander Pope The changing use and meaning of words are the daily bread of dictionary compilers. Long ago…

  • Dr. Susan LaFlesche Picotte: Tradition, assimilation, and healing

    Mariel TishmaChicago, Illinois, United States “My office hours are any and all hours of the day and night.”—Susan LaFlesche Picotte1 It was August of 1889 and Dr. Susan LaFlesche Picotte was suffering a sleepless night. She had just treated her first patient and she doubted her diagnosis. She was a new doctor after all, and…

  • 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…

  • A Tale of Two Tonics: Sino-Western psychopharmaceutical modernity in Shanghai, 1936

    Richard ZhangPhiladelphia, Pennsylvania, United States Shanghai, 1936: Positioned at the Yangtze Delta, this sprawling, bustling seaport was a multiplicity of cities. It was China’s most lucrative commercial hub for many business elites; a lavish, cosmopolitan adopted home for expatriates from at least forty-eight different nationalities; and a chaotic urban jungle for prostitutes, gangsters, and slum-dwellers…

  • W.H.R. Rivers and the humane treatment of shell shock

    Soleil ShahLondon, UK “Wherever the art of medicine is loved, there is also a love of humanity.” – Hippocrates War neurosis, or “shell shock” as it was referred to in the twentieth century, could be considered the signature injury of World War I. These disorders involved nervous ailments with no apparent organic lesion. Symptoms included…