Hektoen International

A Journal of Medical Humanities

Tag: Radiology

  • Polycythemia rubra vera

    Polycythemia vera is a blood cancer in which the bone marrow generates too many red blood cells. It affects about one in every 50,000 people, primarily men over sixty years old, and is somewhat more common in subjects of Ashkenazi Jewish descent than in other… Read more

  • On quadruple amputations

    Avi OhryTel Aviv, Israel Recently I read “How Losing My Limbs Turned Me into a Different Kind of Cook.”1 It is the story of Yewande Komolafe, whose two-decade career as a cook came to an abrupt end when a catastrophic sickle cell crisis led to… Read more

  • Crimea: Past and present

    Crimea, on the Black Sea, has been successively inhabited by Cimmerians, Scythians, and Greeks. Around the sixth century BCE, colonists from Greece established important settlements in Crimea, such as Chersonesus (near modern Sevastopol) and Pantikapaion (modern Kerch). The Greek influence during the classical period is… Read more

  • Grunya Sukhareva and the early observation of autistic behavior

    Martine MussiesUtrecht, The Netherlands Grunya Efimovna Sukhareva was born and trained in Kyiv, Ukraine. By the early 1920s she had moved to Moscow, where she worked in a school for children with neurological difficulties and began keeping meticulous records of her young patients. She noted… Read more

  • Drs. William Brady and Alice Hamilton: Contrasts in public health reportage

    Saty Satya-MurtiJoseph LockhartSanta Maria, California, United States Alice Hamilton (1869–1970) and William Brady (1880–1972) were well-recognized physicians of the early twentieth century. They were united by a common goal in the emerging and “untilled” field of public health in the 1920s.1 Their mission was to improve… Read more

  • Pandemic in the palace

    Farah JasarevicIstanbul, Turkey In the sixteenth century, Istanbul was defined by constant movement of people, goods, ideas, and, inevitably, disease. Plague swept through its streets in recurring waves, shaping social patterns and medical responses. In this environment, Haseki Hürrem Sultan, wife of Sultan Süleiman the… Read more

  • Who owns a Nobel Prize? Honor, property, and ethics

    Rao UppuBaton Rouge, Louisiana, United States Every scientist harbors a quiet dream—whether openly admitted or privately held—of winning a Nobel Prize. Early in my career, I naïvely asked my late mentor, Professor William A. Pryor, a leading figure in free-radical research whose work helped shape… Read more

  • Forensic psychiatry in Marco Ricci’s Flight into Egypt

    Stephen MartinThailandAidan JonesUnited Kingdom The Venetian artist Marco Ricci1 (1676–1730) painted Flight into Egypt after being in serious trouble. (Fig 1) We know it was created in England because it is on two individual yard-wide canvases, strip-glued together, and not woven in continental meters. Initialed… Read more

  • Antezana Hospital, Spain

    Mojca RamšakLjubljana, Slovenia In the center of the Spanish city of Alcalá de Henares, near Madrid, stands an exceptional institution—the Antezana Hospital, officially Hospital de Nuestra Señora de la Misericordia. It is one of the oldest continuously operating hospitals in Western Europe, having functioned for… Read more

  • Ancient India in 1,500 words

    Homo sapiens originated in Africa about 300,000 years ago and arrived in India in waves beginning about 65,000 years ago. Early populations were hunter-gatherers and did not adopt a sedentary way of life until about 7,000 years BCE, when they began to domesticate plants and… Read more

  • Rome’s Ospedale Santo Spirito: From ruin to revival

    Sally MetzlerChicago, Illinois, United States Renowned for his restoration of the legendary Sistine Chapel at the Vatican, Pope Sixtus IV (Francesco della Rovere; 1414–1484) embellished Rome with such rapidity and magnitude that he earned the title Urbis Restaurator. Some lauded him as the new Augustus… Read more

  • The spleen and melancholy

    Old Democritus under a tree,Sits on a stone with book on knee;About him hang there many features,Of Cats, Dogs and such like creatures,Of which he makes anatomy,The seat of black choler to see.—Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy The spleen could be described as occupying… Read more