Hektoen International

A Journal of Medical Humanities

Tag: neurosurgeon

  • 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. Banerjee Solihull, United Kingdom   Cover of John Hughlings Jackson: Clinical Neurology, Evolution and Victorian Brain Science by Samuel H. Greenblatt. Oxford University Press, 2022. ISBN 9780192897640. 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…

  • Women surgeons

    Moustapha Abousamra Ventura, California, United States   Cactus flower with buds.Image courtesy of the author. 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…

  • Some subjects are given

    Michael Salcman Baltimore, Maryland, United States   Self-portrait with fiddling Death. Arnold Böcklin. 1872. Alte Nationalgalerie Berlin   Some subjects are given to the authors of poems and songs, of mechanical puzzles and lives, given over and over like a spiking fever in an old TB ward or the low level irritation of a cancer…