Hektoen International

A Journal of Medical Humanities

Tag: Ophthalmology

  • Beyond the scope

    Nathan CannonHershey, Pennsylvania, United States Hushed hum of voices. Open, dimly lit room. Slit lamps gliding, knobs turning, lenses gently flashing. Clinical officers hard at work, diagnosing, assessing, treating. “Next!” I am seated beside the attending, a retina specialist. Together, we have been seeing his patients, who have had a remarkable array of corneal transplants,…

  • Book review: Greco-Roman Medicine and What it Can Teach Us Today

    Arpan K. BanerjeeSolihull, United Kingdom The Republic of Rome was founded in the sixth century BC. In the third century BC, the western Roman Empire began to spread outside the borders of Italy. Roman rule came to Britain in AD 43 with the invasion by Claudius and ended in AD 476. The eastern Roman Empire,…

  • The good, the bad, and the regrettable

    Howard FischerUppsala, Sweden “Man . . . cannot learn to forget, but hangs on the past: however far or fast he runs, that chain runs with him.”— Frederick Nietzsche What follows is a description of different aspects of studying medicine at an old, highly regarded Catholic university in Europe a half-century ago. The Good For…

  • Albert C. Barnes, MD: the physician who spun silver into gold

    Sylvia KarasuNew York, New York, United States Albert C. Barnes is known as the man who accumulated an incomparable art collection for a foundation that bears his name. Few, though, may know how he earned a place in the history of medicine, specifically through his development of Argyrol, the unique compound that was the source…

  • Dirty, dark, dangerous: Coal miners’ nystagmus

    Ronald FishmanChicago, Illinois, United States It’s dark as a dungeon and damp as the dew,Where the danger is double and pleasures are fewWhere the rain never falls and the sun never shinesIt’s dark as a dungeon way down in the mine. From the song “Dark as a Dungeon” – Merle Travis Nystagmus is a repetitive oscillation of the…

  • Georg Bartisch, early Renaissance eye-surgeon

    Georg Bartisch (1535–1607) became an apprentice to a barber-surgeon at age thirteen, followed by two additional apprenticeships to an oculist and a lithotomist. He worked as itinerant surgeon in Germany and Bohemia, but eventually become court oculist to Duke Augustus I of Saxony in Dresden. A highly superstitious man, he believed in astronomy and witchcraft,…

  • Konrad Langenbeck 1776-1851

    Son of a pastor, Konrad Johann Martin Langenbeck attended medical school in Jena, Germany, from 1794 to 1798, then practiced surgery in his home town of Horneburg. There he was so successful in carrying out eye operations that he received a stipend from the then court of Hanover for further studies in Vienna and Wurzburg.…

  • Pig-tail probe

    Zeynel KarciogluCharlottesville, Virginia, United States I read with great interest Dr. Stanley Gutiontov’s article entitled “Pig man: pigs in medicine from Galen to transgenic xenotransplantation” in Hektoen International, and it reminded me of an amusing “pig-related” experience I had years ago. The twisted tobacco leaves that sailors smoked in the 1700s resembled the curly tail…

  • Portraits of vision: Sir Joshua Reynolds

    Sally MetzlerChicago, Illinois, United States The subject of this portrait wears wiry, diminutive round spectacles, lending a distinctly pedantic flair. Yet gazing out is none other than Sir Joshua Reynolds (1723–1792), one of the greatest English painters in history (fig. 1). Sir Joshua headed the Royal Academy of Painters for twenty-four years, and wielded enormous…