Hektoen International

A Journal of Medical Humanities

Tag: ophthalmologist

  • Douglas Argyll Robertson and his pupils

    JMS PearceHull, England In my student days, the Wasserman reaction (WR), though not specific, was performed almost routinely in patients on medical wards to detect syphilis. Several direct and serological tests of varying sensitivity and specificity have now replaced the WR. Since reaching a historic low in 2000 and 2001, the incidence of syphilis has increased…

  • Rejuvenation: “The Adventure of the Creeping Man” from The Case-Book of Sherlock Holmes

    James L. FranklinChicago, Illinois, United States Ch’ io sono quell gran medicoDottore eanciclpedico,Chiamato Dulcamara,. . . Rigiovnir bramate? I’m noted as a scientist,Practitioner and specialist.I’m Doctor Dulcamara…Would you like your youth recaptured? L’Elisir d’Amore (The Elixir of Love), music by Geatano Donizetti, Libretto by Felice Romano, Act I, scene IV1 “Rejuvenation” through medical science is the…

  • No complaints, only symptoms

    Peter Arnold Sydney, Australia “No complaints, only symptoms,” I told my cardiologist this year. How dare I complain? I am eighty-four. Thirty-two years have passed since my quintuple coronary artery bypass; eighteen years since a diagnosis, in one of eleven biopsy samples, of invasive prostate cancer—left untreated, because so few of us die from it; five…

  • Albert Einstein headed off at the “Nobel pass” by Alvar Gullstrand

    Jayant RadhakrishnanDarien, Illinois, United States Allvar Gullstrand was a brilliant ophthalmologist and the second of eleven surgeons who have received the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine. He was awarded the prize in 1911 “for his work on the dioptrics of the eye.”1 A self-taught mathematician, he calculated the path of light through the layers…

  • Waiting for the darkness to lift

    Sheila KlassNew York, New York, United States From early childhood I wanted to be a writer and tell stories. But Mama and Papa, impoverished and struggling to survive at the end of the Great Depression, scoffed at such ideas and insisted I should be enrolled in a commercial course so that I could have a…

  • Monet and his cataracts

    Peter KopplinToronto, Ontario, Canada In January 1923, the elderly artist Claude Monet struggled restlessly in his room after his cataract surgery. He got up and tore at his bandages.1 His family put it down to his temperament. But an elderly man in his eighties, immobilized, recovering from surgery with limited sight in the left eye…