Hektoen International

A Journal of Medical Humanities

Tag: Science

  • Emily, Usher, and American Gothic perspectives on mortality

    Olga ReykhartLiam ButchartStony Brook, New York, United States In an editorial for Medical Humanities, Gillie Bolton notes that death is a common theme in literature and also in medicine. She writes, “Death, dying, and bereavement are dark threads running through all literature. Not only are they life’s sole certainties, along with birth; they are also…

  • Ernest Henry Starling and the birth of English Physiology

    JMS Pearce Hull, England Science has only one language, quantity, and only one argument, the experiment-EH Starling Ernest Henry Starling (1866-1927) (Fig 1) was an outstanding figure in the development of physiology whose prolific contributions made him one of the foremost scientists of his time. He was born on 17 April 1866 at 2 Barnsbury Square,…

  • Tu Youyou, discoverer of artemisinin for resistant malaria

    The Chinese scientist Tu Youyou received the 2011 Lasker–DeBakey Clinical Medical Research Award and the 2015 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for isolating a chemical agent to be used in the treatment of resistant malaria. Born in 1930, Tu came from a distinguished family of scholars; studied at the University of Beijing; and early…

  • Animality revisited in times of the coronavirus: A fable

    Frank Gonzalez-CrussiChicago, Illinois, United States Imagine, as painters have done, representatives of animal species congregated in an assembly (Fig. 1). A man comes to address this motley crowd in this way: “You guys [he purposefully adopts this condescending language] have recently wronged us. Let me start by reminding you that you did not discover fire;…

  • The wife of Antoine Lavoisier

    Born in 1758 and described as beautiful and intellectually curious, Marie-Anne Pierrette Paulze became the wife of the famous chemist and scientist Antoine Lavoisier, acting as his laboratory assistant and contributing to his work. After her husband’s execution during the French Revolution, she assembled and published his papers and remarried in 1804. She lived until…

  • “Loathsome Beasts: Images of reptiles and amphibians in art and science”

    The history of how reptiles and amphibians have been represented throughout history has been well covered by Professor Kay Etheridge of Gettysburg College in a learned article in 2007. She starts off by reminding her readers that “loathsome beasts” have received less attention than higher vertebrates, largely as they are not useful for food, sport,…

  • Albert Einstein headed off at the “Nobel pass” by Alvar Gullstrand

    Jayant RadhakrishnanDarien, Illinois, United States Allvar Gullstrand was a brilliant ophthalmologist and the second of eleven surgeons who have received the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine. He was awarded the prize in 1911 “for his work on the dioptrics of the eye.”1 A self-taught mathematician, he calculated the path of light through the layers…

  • William Beaumont and Alexis St. Martin

    The picturesque island of Mackinac lies three miles off the coast of Michigan, at the junction of Lakes Huron and Michigan. It is a favorite resort where tourists can admire old French-style buildings with tall slated roofs, ride in open carriages pulled by horses that know when to turn or stop, and stay at the…

  • Blood, black bile, yellow bile, phlegm: An inseparable balance?

    John Graham-PoleClydesdale, NS, Canada Life blood: Humor and health In 1960, I entered St. Bartholomew’s Medical School on a full classics scholarship. I was a devotee of Hippocrates, with high hopes of embarking on a path of uniting medical science with the healing arts. “Let food be thy medicine and medicine be thy food” was…

  • Photography in medicine

    Doctors adopted the idea of using photography in medicine within one year of its invention. In 1840 at the Charité Hospital in Paris, Alfred François Donné photographed sections of bones and teeth by making daguerreotypes through a microscope. Between from 1848 to 1858 the British psychiatrist Hugh Welch Diamond photographed patients in an asylum and…