Hektoen International

A Journal of Medical Humanities

Tag: Spain

  • King Henry III of Castile, the Suffering

    Nicolas RoblesBadajoz, Spain Henry III of Castile was called “the Suffering” (in Spanish, Enrique III el Doliente) because of his ill health. He was the son of John I and Eleanor of Aragon, born in 1379 in Burgos. Henry was the first person to hold the title of Prince of Asturias as heir to the…

  • The role of doctors in the intellectual life of Spain

    “One of the aspects of Spanish intellectual life which struck me repeatedly was the fact that civic leadership so often rested in the hands of medical men. They wrote the best books, made the most daring statements and were revered as the elements of society that could be trusted to support good movements. The doctors…

  • Dancing with spiders: Tarantellas and tarantism

    Howard FischerUppsala, Sweden “There are always hysterical people undergoing extraordinary cures.”– Robertson Davies, The Cunning Man The industrial city of Taranto is in the “heel” of boot-shaped Italy. The Romans called the city Tarentum,1 and part of its historical importance comes from its name. Confusion has also arisen from that name’s overuse. A traditional folk…

  • A tangled web: Stealing newborns in twentieth-century Spain

    Howard FischerUppsala, Sweden “We were Europe’s baby supermarket and babies were stolen for sixty years.”1— Inés Madrigal Twentieth-century Spain was a politically unstable, highly divided nation. In 1931, King Alfonso XIII abdicated after the results of elections were interpreted as a plebiscite on abolishing the monarchy.2 What followed was “one weak government after another.”3 In…

  • The Queen’s quickening: The phantom pregnancies of Mary I

    Eve ElliotDublin, Ireland In November 1554, the people of England believed a miracle had taken place. Resplendent on her new throne, Queen Mary I, daughter of Henry VIII, proudly revealed that she was with child. She was thirty-seven (past the usual childbearing age in the Tudor era) and had only been married to her much…

  • Guadalupe: One of Spain’s oldest schools of medicine

    Nicolás Roberto RoblesBadajoz, Spain Guadalupe, a small Spanish town in the district of Cáceres, Extremadura, arose around a monastery. Legend says that a shepherd named Gil Cordero was looking for a stray sheep when the Virgin Mary appeared to him. When the shepherd told of this apparition, the clergymen of Cáceres went to the place…

  • The intricate forest of the neuron

    Silvia MainaTorino, Italia Entering the room, I was welcomed by some small and attractive ink drawings. In the first, like a genealogical tree or a medieval miniature, thin branches stretched to fill the frame. In the second, waves of sea anemones wrapped into the algae that populates the sea floor. The exposition, entitled Organisms and…

  • Peter Panum and the “geography of disease”

    Kathryne DycusMadrid, Spain In 1846, the Faroe Islands experienced an outbreak of measles, the likes of which had not been seen in sixty-five years. The Danish government called upon a newly graduated physician, Peter Ludwig Panum, to investigate and control its spread. Panum wrote of the experience in his seminal text, “Observations Made During the…

  • Hispanic, Latin, Latino, Latina, or Latinx?

    Bernardo NgImperial County, California, United States The first time I became aware of a scientific group using the term Latinx was in 2018 during a meeting in Austin, Texas. It is a gender-neutral alternative to Latino or Latina that does away with the gender label, making it more inclusive to the growing sexual diversity of…

  • Diego Rivera and Hernan Cortes

    Nicolas RoblesBadajoz, Spain Diego Rivera was one of Mexico’s most famous artists. Nowadays he is also known for his marriage to Frida Kahlo, another great Mexican artist. Born in Guanajuato, Mexico, Rivera was an atheist and a Communist radical who criticized the Mexican government and foreign domination. He created the History of Mexico mural in…