Hektoen International

A Journal of Medical Humanities

Tag: neurosurgeon

  • Diana Beck, neurosurgery pioneer

    Born in Chester, England, in 1902, Diana Beck attended the University of Oxford and studied medicine at the School of Medicine for Women (later renamed the Royal Free Hospital School of Medicine). She graduated in 1925, and, after working as a surgical registrar, took her FRCS London and Edinburgh. Her exceptional surgical skills led her…

  • Alexa Canady, MD: The first Black woman neurosurgeon

    Howard FischerUppsala, Sweden “Only a life lived for others is a life worthwhile.”– Albert Einstein Alexa Canady (b. 1950) was the daughter of Clinton Canady, Jr., DDS, and Elizabeth Canady, a civil rights activist and the first African American to serve on the Michigan Board of Education. Alexa’s maternal grandmother taught at Lane College, a…

  • Book review: John Hughlings Jackson: Clinical Neurology, Evolution and Victorian Brain Science

    Arpan K. BanerjeeSolihull, United Kingdom John Hughlings Jackson is often considered to be the father of clinical neurology, although his contemporary in France, Jean-Martin Charcot, could also justifiably lay claim to that title. Both men made gigantic contributions in the latter half of the nineteenth century, a golden age of clinical neurology in which many…

  • Women surgeons

    Moustapha AbousamraVentura, California, United States Last spring, I spent three months in the Texas Hill Country. It is a place that at once can be beautiful and hostile. The fields of blue bonnets in full bloom are breathtaking. The cacti that abound around barbed wire fences at first glance appear ominous with their threatening thorns,…

  • Some subjects are given

    Michael SalcmanBaltimore, Maryland, United States Some subjects are given to the authorsof poems and songs, of mechanical puzzlesand lives, given over and over like a spiking fever in an old TB wardor the low level irritation of a cancerraising its hand in a bone — here I am it says, conversant with any private language…