Hektoen International

A Journal of Medical Humanities

Tag: spinal cord

  • Humans with tails

    Howard FischerUppsala, Sweden “…he had been born and had grown up with a cartilaginous tail in the shape of acorkscrew with a small tuft of hair on the tip.”— Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude1 The chance of a child being born with a tail-like lumbosacral appendage is small. About sixty cases have…

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

    Philip R. LiebsonChicago, Illinois, United States 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) was the youngest. His innovations include the first clipping of an intracranial aneurysm, the surgical management…

  • Sympathectomy for hypertension

    Sympathectomy for essential hypertension was introduced in the late 1920s at a time when no effective medical treatment was available. It consisted of resecting several sympathetic neurons that exit the spinal cord from the mid to lower spinal cord and are arranged in two columns of nodules called ganglia on either side of it. Sympathetic…

  • Origins of the knee jerk

    JMS Pearce East Yorks, England Reflex hammers are the icon or hallmark of every neurologist. How important are the reflexes they elicit? What is their mechanism? The advent of modern technology has made it easy to forget how important the skills and means in eliciting physical signs were to clinicians of the nineteenth and early twentieth…

  • Gerard Blasius (1627–1682)

    Gerard Blaes (Blasius) was a Dutch physician and anatomist, famous for his work on the spinal cord and for one of his students discovering the parotid (Stensen’s) duct. As a young man he had lived and studied in Copenhagen, where his father was architect to the king of Denmark. When his father died, his family returned…

  • The future of medicine

    Hannah WilsonCambridge, Massachusetts, United States “Nobody can be told what the Matrix is, you have to see it for yourself. … Morpheus: If real is what you can feel, smell, taste and see, then ‘real’ is simply electrical signals interpreted by your brain.” —Neo (The Matrix, 1999) Tomorrow was louder than I had expected, the…

  • Duke of Edinburgh’s Award

    Christopher H. CameronKelso, Scottish Borders, United Kingdom The call came at two o’clock from John, a far-flung hill farmer/patient, who sounded puzzled and alarmed. Two teenage girls had arrived at his door in distress and with a garbled tale. They and a third young girl had been dropped at first light by one set of…