Hektoen International

A Journal of Medical Humanities

Tag: Pellagra

  • Corn, pellagra, and modern medicine—How an ancient disease was recognized in South Carolina’s state lunatic asylum

    Brody Fogleman Harsh Jha Noel Brownlee JuliSu DiMucci-Ward Spartanburg, South Carolina, United States   James Woods Babcock (1856–1922). Photo courtesy of the Waring Historical Library, MUSC, Charleston, SC. Pellagra is a disease of vitamin B3 (niacin) deficiency. Niacin is the precursor for many physiologic processes involving nicotinamide adenine dinucleotide (NAD), an enzyme that carries out…

  • Andersonville, Georgia and Elmira, New York: When Hell was on Earth

    Howard Fischer Uppsala, Sweden   “Abandon all hope, ye who enter here” — Dante Alighieri, Divine Comedy   Andersonville Prison, Georgia. South end view of the stockade, showing the sentry stands in the distance. Photographed by A.J. Riddle, August 17, 1864. Library of Congress Liljenquist Family Collection. No known restrictions on publication. Elmira Prison, Elmira,…

  • Darling of Panama

    Enrique Chaves-Carballo Kansas City, Kansas, United States   Samuel Taylor Darling at age 51, portrait by Underwwod & Underwood, 1923. Credit: Wellcome Collection. Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) Samuel Taylor Darling, widely considered as the foremost American tropical parasitologist and pathologist of his time, was born in Harrison, New Jersey on April 6, 1872.…

  • Theme

    WOMEN IN MEDICINE Published in November, 2019 H E K T O R A M A     .     ALICE HAMILTON     The squalid streets of working-class Chicago in the late nineteenth century would have been something of a shock to the girl who grew up in a sheltered but educated household…

  • Pellagra: A medical whodunit

    Putzer J. Hung Saint Louis, Missouri, United States   A girl in the London Asylum suffering from chronic pellagra. Watercolor by A. J. E. Terzi, 1925. “What you do in this world is a matter of no consequence. The question is, what can you make people believe that you have done?” – Sherlock Holmes, A…

  • Cicely Williams and kwashiorkor

    Sue Reeves Roehampton, London, UK   Figure 1. Dr Cicely Williams in later years on a visit to Ghana (The Wellcome Trust, London). Cicely Delphine Williams (1893-1992) has been described as achieving  the ‘physician’s dream’1 by diagnosing, identifying the cause, and finding a prevention and a cure for a disease.2  The disease she identified was…