Hektoen International

A Journal of Medical Humanities

Tag: Review of Health Humanities in Postgraduate Medical Education: A Handbook to the Heart of Medicine

  • Marie François Xavier Bichat (1771–1802)

    In the universal Pantheon of the medical greats, Xavier Bichat is remembered as “the father of modern histology.” Yet he never used a microscope. He studied the human organs with his naked eye and evaluated them for their physical features (such as elasticity, transparency, and… Read more

  • Forensic medicine and Sir Bernard Spilsbury

    JMS PearceHull, England A forensic autopsy performed to establish the cause of death is an ancient practice.1 In Europe it was preceded by conventional pathology, as started by Herophilus of Chalcedon (335–280 BC). Medicolegal autopsies to solve legal problems were first performed in Bologna in… Read more

  • The paradoxical life and art of Robert Colescott

    Mildred WilsonMichigan, United States In 1975, satirist Robert Colescott turned the art community on its head with Eat Dem Taters, a parody of van Gogh’s The Potato Eaters.1,2 He and other postmodernist painters of the period would appropriate images from other artists’ paintings, questioning the… Read more

  • Dipinto di blu: Turning blue in a Florence hospital

    Giulio NicitaFlorence, Italy We were in the middle of the 1970s in Florence, Italy. We had concluded the long, tedious years of university study. Real work awaited us in Villa Monna Tessa, a large early 1900s four-story building. It housed several departments of Medicine as… Read more

  • Drs. Joseph Bell, Arthur Conan Doyle, William Osler, and the method of Zadig

    Howard FischerUppsala, Sweden “The whole of medicine is observation.”– William Osler, M.D. M. de Voltaire, the pen name of François-Marie Arouet (1694–1778), was an Enlightenment historian, philosopher, and writer. He opposed France’s absolute monarchy and the power of the church. He wrote 2,000 books and… Read more

  • Pavel Ivanovich Jacobi (1841–1913)

    Avi OhryTel Aviv, Israel Pavel Ivanovich Jacobi (1841–1913), largely forgotten and rarely featured in the psychiatric literature, was a Russian socialist who made as great an impact on the treatment of the mentally ill as Jonathan Swift in Dublin, Phillipp Pinel in Revolutionary France, Father… Read more

  • Mental health issues in medical students: The prejudice and the injury

    Amairani Gómez RodríguezPuebla, Mexico I had my first panic attack at seventeen. Biochemistry was a total headache; no matter how hard I studied, it was never enough to pass. As a school overachiever, I had never experienced failure. I felt an existential pressure. My supportive… Read more

  • Archibald Edward Garrod: Inborn errors of metabolism

    JMS PearceHull, England It is given to very few to invent a new class of diseases and to even fewer one that has survived subsequent scrutiny. Archibald Garrod, KCMG DM LLD FRCP FRS (1857–1936) (Fig 1), was born in London into an unusually talented family.… Read more

  • The ordeal of Mary Ann Bevan

    Howard FischerUppsala, Sweden “May you be the proof that man can endure anything.” – Yiddish curse“Beauty vanishes; virtue is lasting.” – Johann Wolfgang von Goethe From the 1840s through the 1940s, “freak shows” were very popular in the western world, “a normal staple of American… Read more

  • John Haygarth, pioneer epidemiologist

    John Haygarth. 1827. US National Library of Medicine.  In one of his Table Talk essays, William Hazlitt wrote that “posterity is by no means as disinterested  as they might be supposed to be,  and that they give the gratitude and admiration in return for benefits… Read more

  • Englishes

    Peter ArnoldSydney, Australia According to Google,1 the language spoken by most people is English (1.5 billion), followed by Mandarin (1.1 billion) and Hindi (0.6 billion). However, of our approaching 8 billion, many more speak another language besides those 1.5 million in the top bracket. This… Read more

  • The death of King Mongkut

    Parnreutai ChaiyasatBangkok, Thailand King Mongkut,1 the second son of King Rama II of Siam (now known as Thailand),2 spent most of his life in scholarship as a Buddhist monk before ascending to the throne. He studied traditional Siamese astrology, scientific astronomy, and mathematics. In August… Read more