Hektoen International

A Journal of Medical Humanities

Tag: Newton

  • William Blake

    JMS PearceHull, England William Blake (1757–1827) (Fig 1) was and still is an enigma. He was born on November 28, 1757, one of seven children to James, a hosier, and Catherine Wright Blake at 28 Broad Street in London.1 He once remarked: “Thank God I never was sent to school / To be Flogd into…

  • A “most perfect interchange”

    Satyabha TripathiLucknow, Uttar Pradesh, India [Lydgate held] the conviction that the medical profession as it might be was the finest in the world; presenting the most perfect interchange between science and art; offering the most direct alliance between intellectual conquest and the social good […] he was an emotional creature, with a flesh-and-blood sense of…

  • A moment of philosophy

    Nishitha BujalaHyderabad, Telangana, India I seem to be in a constant state of anxiety these days. With my one-year plans and goals seemingly disrupted by the pandemic, my medical licensing exams postponed, my ability to focus shrunk to the size of a peanut, my interest to study equaling that of a bored cat, I cannot…

  • The wayward Paracelsus

    JMS PearceEast Yorks, England Alterius non sit qui suus esse potestLet no man be another’s who can be himself Paracelsus 1552 Paracelsus was the most original, controversial character of the Renaissance,1 who brazenly questioned and condemned the dictates of Galen and other ancient physicians. In an age of mysticism and alchemy, this solitary figure laid…

  • John Hughlings Jackson

    JMS PearceHull, England “. . . A man among the little band of whom are Aristotle and Newton and Darwin.”  -Gustave I. Schorstein (1863-1906), physician at the London Hospital The magnitude of Hughlings Jackson’s contributions to medicine is almost impossible to encapsulate. He was the foremost figure of nineteenth-century British neurology. He has enjoyed numerous…

  • The beginnings of humane psychiatry: Pinel and the Tukes

    JMS PearceHull, England “It is perhaps not going too far to maintain that Pinel has been to eighteenth-century psychiatry what Newton was to its natural philosophy and Linnaeus to its taxonomy.”—George Rousseau, Historian, 1991 Although modern treatment of mental illness has its limitations, older methods of treatment were both crude and cruel. For centuries they…

  • The lost art and the hidden treasure

    Jennifer BinghamPittsburgh, Pennsylvania The puzzle box is empty and the pieces are scattered across the table. After all, a puzzle was never meant to stay in the box. The trouble begins when a few pieces have fallen off the table. The excitement of seeing the purpose and design of the puzzle distract from the realization…