Hektoen International

A Journal of Medical Humanities

Tag: neurosyphilis

  • Smetana, his music, his illness

    Bedřich (Frederic) Smetana was one of the major figures of nineteenth century European music. Regarded as the founder of the Czech national school of music, he composed The Bartered Bride opera and the symphonic poem “Má Vlast” (My Homeland) with its beloved Vlatava (The Moldau) melody. Like Ludwig van Beethoven, he composed exceptional music even…

  • William Richard Gowers MD., FRS.

    JMS PearceHull, England The name Gowers is a name hallowed in the minds of most neurologists as one of the great founders of neurological medicine in the Victorian era. He is probably best remembered for his A Manual of Diseases of the Nervous System (1886) (Fig 1.), a rich source of wisdom and clinical description…

  • Delusions of being and nothingness

    Jesús Ramírez-BermúdezMexico City, Mexico In the late nineteenth century, the French physician Jules Cotard described patients with a delusional denial of bodily organs, self-existence, and the world. The woman originally described “believed that she had no brain, nerves, chest, or bowels, and that she was only skin and bone. God and the devil did not…

  • The forgotten many of the Guatemalan Syphilis Experiments

    Harsh PatoliaRoanoke, Virginia, United States In 2005, medical historian Dr. Susan Reverby foraged through boxes in the stuffy archives of the library of the University of Pittsburgh for the papers of Thomas Parran, the surgeon general who oversaw the infamous Tuskegee syphilis experiments of the mid-twentieth century. She had embarked on a quest to expose…

  • Joseph Babinski of the Babinski Sign

    In 1848 populist revolutions swept across Europe, in Germany, France, and Italy—and also in Poland, where an uprising to gain independence from Russia was ruthlessly suppressed. To escape the repression that followed, Aleksander and Henryieta Babinski fled to France. Their son Joseph was born there in 1857, in Paris—not in Poland or even in Chile…