Hektoen International

A Journal of Medical Humanities

Tag: Philip R. Liebson

  • Walter E. Dandy, one of the founders of neurosurgery

    Philip R. Liebson Chicago, Illinois, United States   Johns Hopkins, where Dandy studied. Photo by Lizardraley99, 2012. Via Wikimedia. CC BY-SA 3.0 Three pioneers established the discipline of neurosurgery. They were the British surgeon Victor Horsley and the Americans Harvey Cushing and Walter Dandy. Both Americans were surgeons at Johns Hopkins Hospital and Dandy (1886-1946)…

  • Alexis Carrel: the sunshine and the shadow

    Philip R. Liebson Chicago, Illinois, United States   Alexis Carrel. Unknown photographer. 1912. From Popular Science Monthly Volume 81, on the Internet Archive. Via Wikimedia. Dr. Alexis Carrel (1873-1944) was as complex as his glass perfusion pump apparatus. A brilliant research surgeon, he won the Nobel Prize in Medicine before his fortieth birthday for his…

  • Dr. Aufderheide and the mummies

    Philip R. LiebsonChicago, Illinois, United States Paleopathology, the study of early animal and human artifacts, offers a historical perspective of disease and injury in the distant past. It uses skeletal and mummified remains as the substrate for this analysis. The discipline is about 200 years old and initially the analysis was based on abnormalities of…

  • Dr. Edward Livingston Trudeau and aeration of the White Plague

    Philip R. Liebson Chicago, Illinois, United States   Photo from the Adirondack Experience Museum. Circa 1895. Edward Livingston Trudeau was born in 1848, one year before Frédéric Chopin died of tuberculosis. Trudeau’s extended family eventually included Justin Trudeau, the Prime Minister of Canada, and Garry Trudeau of Doonesbury fame. In his time tuberculosis was killing…

  • The talented Dr. Cotton and other quacks

    Philip R. Liebson Chicago, Illinois, United States   Portrait of Henry Andrews Cotton from Appleton’s Cyclopædia of American Biography. 1924. Via Wikimedia. Over the centuries there has been a surfeit of talented medical quacks in all parts of the world. The word “quack,” indeed, is derived from the archaic Dutch word “quacksalver,” meaning “boaster who…

  • Theme

    AMERICAN HEART PIONEERS Published in November, 2019 H E K T O R A M A     .     ALFRED BLALOCK & VIVIEN THOMAS     1930 Nashville. A twenty-year old African American man, honors student, and son of a carpenter had his eyes set on becoming a physician. This was not unfounded.…

  • Citizen Zinsser: portrait of a Renaissance man

    Philip R. Liebson In the September 16, 1940 issue of TIME Magazine an intriguing obituary was found: After a patient wait, death came last week to Hans Zinsser, bacteriologist, physician, philosopher, poet, ironist, historian, raconteur. At 61, he died of chronic leukemia, a slow-moving, mysterious disease of the blood for which there is no known…

  • The sweating sickness in Tudor England: a plague of the Renaissance

    Philip R. Liebson Chicago, Illinois, United States   Portrait of Henry VIII, c. 1537 Hans Holbein the Younger Oil on canvas 11” × 8” Introduction In the recent semi-fictional work by Hilary Mantel, Wolf Hall, which takes place in the early 16th century, the protagonist Thomas Cromwell, counsel and henchman of Henry VIII, awakens in…

  • Paul Dudley White

    Philip R. Liebson Chicago, Illinois, United States   In September 1955 President Dwight Eisenhower suffered a myocardial infarction. Dr. Paul Dudley White (1886–1973) was called in to attend to him. For a time, Dr. White was probably the most famous cardiologist in the US because of his attendance to the president. A noted photograph of…

  • Samuel A. Levine

    Philip R. Liebson Chicago, Illinois, United States   In an era where the use of imaging and other technological testing frequently takes the place of bedside diagnosis, it is intriguing to recall the state of cardiovascular diagnosis when the clinician relied on his or her eyes, ears, and hands—with a little help from the stethoscope…