Hektoen International

A Journal of Medical Humanities

Tag: Summer 2022

  • To my colleagues in Ukraine whom I saw on TV

    Barry Meisenberg Baltimore, Maryland, United States   Limestone fragments of the “Vulture Stele” now in the Louvre Museum, Paris, France. A stele is a stone pillar erected as a monument to some great event. This stele was created circa 2500 BC to celebrate the victory of King Eannatum of Lagash over Ush, king of Umma.…

  • India’s oldest medical schools

    Arpan K. BanerjeeSolihull, United Kingdom 15 August 2022 marked the 75th anniversary of Indian independence from British rule. Since independence, the Indian medical diaspora has successfully settled in countries around the world and contributed greatly to their health care systems. Outside India, few are familiar with the history of modern Indian medicine. India was long…

  • The Citadel and the Dilemma: Medicine corrupted

    Simon WeinPetach Tikvah, Israel Ethical behaviour of doctors is a timeless issue. A recent television investigation in Australia looked at legal but hardly ethical behaviour of doctors performing plastic surgery.1 Two books, a novel and a play written a century ago, remind us that problems with medical ethics are not new under the sun. A.J.…

  • Leprosy and armadillos: Handle with care

    Howard Fischer Uppsala, Sweden   A nine-banded armadillo in the Green Swamp, central Florida. Photo by Tomfriedel (BirdPhotos.com), June 27, 2008, on Wikimedia. CC BY 3.0. Leprosy (Hansen’s disease) is a chronic, disfiguring, and handicapping infectious disease. It was known in the ancient world, and evidence of the disease has been found from 2000 B.C.1…

  • “Phossy jaw”: an industrial horror story

    Howard FischerUppsala, Sweden “The greatest tragedy in the whole story of occupational diseases.”1– Donald Hunter, M.D. (1898–1978) The development of cheap, reliable, and reasonably safe matches became possible with the addition of white phosphorus (P4O10) to the match head mixture. The first factory to use white phosphorus (also called “yellow phosphorus”) in match manufacturing opened…

  • Suicide: always a tragedy?

    JMS PearceHull, England The tragedy of suicide is well expressed in “The romantic suicide: Karoline von Günderrode” by Nicolás Roberto Robles.1 We all try hard to understand this act. Self-destructive urges are an ubiquitous but often ignored or suppressed aspect of all human life. But what makes a person take their own life is often…

  • Isaac Bashevis Singer describes koro

    Howard FischerUppsala, Sweden “When I was a little boy, they called me a liar, but now that I am grown up, they call me a writer.”– Isaac Bashevis Singer I. B. Singer (1903–1991) was born in Warsaw, Poland. He lived there and also in rural Poland during the First World War. In 1935 he immigrated…

  • Lumbar puncture

    JMS Pearce Hull, England   Fig 1. Dominici Cotugno’s De Ischiade Nervosa, 1764. 1770. Access to cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) in life as an aid to diagnosis proved impossible until lumbar puncture. Galen of Pergamon (AD 130–200) failed to recognize CSF; he described a vaporous, not aqueous, humor that he called περιττώματα (residues) in the cerebral ventricles.…

  • Dr. Alice Miller on Hitler’s childhood

    Howard Fischer Uppsala, Sweden   “All it took was a Führer’s madness and several million well-raised Germans to extinguish the lives of countless millions of innocent human beings in the space of a few short years.” – Alice Miller, Ph.D.   Jewish women and children removed from a bunker. From the Stroop Report, a report…

  • The surgeon’s photograph of the Loch Ness monster

    Howard FischerUppsala, Sweden “Whatever is the truth, there is no denying that Nessie will continue to intrigue the world for years to come.”– Johnathan Bright, Oxford Internet Institute Loch Ness, at thirty-seven kilometers long and 230 meters deep at its deepest point, is the second largest lake in Scotland.1 Stories about a creature of great…