Hektoen International

A Journal of Medical Humanities

Tag: Spring 2022

  • The painting of the Good Samaritan in Bracciano Castle

    Stephen MartinThailand The Orsini of Bracciano were one of the richest and most powerful aristocratic families in early modern Italy.1 Much of their impressive collection remains in Bracciano Castle, Lazio,2 and includes an early painting of the Good Samaritan described by Saint Luke. It is unusual in style and dates from about 1570 to 1630,…

  • Going berserk

    Howard Fischer Uppsala, Sweden   Berserk: frenzied, furiously, or madly violent. – Oxford English Dictionary   Imaginative drawing of a berserker in a fur loincloth. From Den Skandinavska Nordens Historia (The Scandinavian North’s History) by Gustaf Henrik Mellin, published 1850. The British Library on Flickr via Norwegian Wikipedia. No known copyright restrictions. The word berserkr…

  • Dream on

    Paul Rousseau Charleston, South Carolina, United States   Footsteps in the forest. Photo by Nicholas D. on Flickr. CC BY-NC 2.0. Chart This is a 32-year-old female with widely metastatic breast cancer admitted to the hospital for control of shortness of breath and pain. ____ Melissa sits slumped, mouth open, snoring. I pull a chair…

  • Berzelius, father of Swedish chemistry

      Jons Jakob Berzelius. Engraving by Charles W. Sharpe and published by William Mackenzie, 1860. After Johan Olaf Sodermark. Smithsonian Libraries Image Gallery via Wikimedia. Public domain. Born in 1779 in East Gotland in the southern part of Sweden, Jons Jacob Berzelius descended from an old Swedish family in which many of his ancestors had…

  • The Scriblerus and other clubs

    JMS Pearce Hull, England, United Kingdom   Fig 1. John Gay, John Arbuthnot, and Thomas Parnell. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, when transport was by horse and carriage, the opportunities for scholars and inventors to exchange ideas was limited. Consequently, there arose a number of small private gentlemen’s clubs, where members gathered for congenial…

  • Dr. Oriol Mitjà: seeking to understand old and new infectious diseases

    Howard Fischer Uppsala, Sweden   “Research needs to give answers to real problems.” – Dr. Oriol Mitjà   Oriol Mitjà. Photo by Oriol.mitja, 2016, on Wikimedia. CC BY-SA 4.0. Dr. Oriol Mitjà (b. 1980) earned his M.D. degree from the University of Barcelona. He then completed an internal medicine residency, followed by a fellowship in…

  • Egg rhapsody

      Girl with a basket of eggs. Painting by Joachim Beuckelaer or his follower, early 17th century. National Museum in Warsaw via Wikimedia. Public domain. In 1490, the famous author and publisher William Caxton wrote of a merchant sailing to France. Stranded on the coast of Kent, he tried to buy some eggs from a…

  • Medicine’s pandemonium of paradoxes

    Fergus ShanahanDublin, Ireland “You live and breathe paradox and contradiction, but you can no moresee the beauty of them than the fish can see the beauty of the water.”– Michael Frayn (Bohr to Heisenberg), Copenhagen1 The language of medicine is loaded with misnomers, inaccuracies, and ambiguities, and is in need of reform.2 Paradoxes, on the…

  • Long before Pearl Harbor, an entire hospital was sent to help England in World War II

    Edward TaborBethesda, MD, United States Harvard University President James B. Conant had the idea of sending a fully staffed hospital to England to help the British in their war with Germany in 1939, more than two years before the US entered the war. It became a collaboration between Harvard University and the American Red Cross.…

  • Marmite: Its place in medical history, Lucy Wills, and the discovery of folic acid

    James L. FranklinChicago, Illinois, United States On a recent visit to Botswana in southern Africa, the author was introduced to a food spread known as Marmite.* Apparently very popular in Africa, a distinctive jar of this condiment was present on the table at every meal. Our South African Apex Expedition guide, Liam Rainier, a consummate…