Hektoen International

A Journal of Medical Humanities

Tag: The Life of Man

  • The botched autopsy of president John F. Kennedy

    Adrian HernandezNoel BrownleeBlacksburg, Virginia The forensic autopsy of U.S. President John F. Kennedy (JFK) was full of mistakes that gave rise to subsequent controversies. Kennedy was assassinated on November 22, 1963, during an official visit to Dallas, Texas. He was in the right seat of… Read more

  • Herman Melville: Medical

    Herman Melville (1819–1891), best remembered for his monumental novel Moby-Dick, was a writer whose life and work were profoundly shaped by medical themes. Although he is often placed within the canon of American Romanticism, Melville’s writings reveal not only philosophical and theological concerns but also… Read more

  • “The pissing evil” before insulin

    JMS PearceHull, England There are many excellent descriptions of the history of diabetes, and of the nineteenth- and particularly twentieth-century discoveries of the secretion of insulin by the beta cells of the pancreatic islets of Langerhans.1,2 (See Table) However, the earlier history of diabetes is… Read more

  • Childbirth’s hidden revolution: The origins of obstetric forceps

    Mariam BanoubMatthew HillJulius BonelloPeoria, Illinois, United States The Chamberlen family of barber-surgeons had a secret, an invention unknown to anyone else at the time. They protected this invention at all costs, even when it cost a human life. To ensure their secrecy, they always arrived… Read more

  • Leukemia: White blood

    Jayant RadhakrishnanChicago, Illinois, United States Leukemia may have afflicted humans as long as 7,000 years ago,1 but it was not diagnosed until the middle of the nineteenth century. Successful treatment would not be available for another 100 years. Peter Cullen described “splenitis acutus” with milky… Read more

  • The attempted poisoning of Pope John XXII in 1317

    Christopher DuffinLondon, England Rome was the traditional home of the papacy, but tension with the French crown (Philip IV, 1268–1314) led to a move to Avignon, then in the Kingdom of Arles, which was part of the Holy Roman Empire, in 1309. The second (and… Read more

  • George Bernard Shaw: Medical

    George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950), the Irish playwright, critic, polemicist, and Nobel Prize winner, was one of the great satirists of modern times. He left his mark not only on literature and theater but also on social and political thought. Among his many lifelong concerns, medicine… Read more

  • Caligula revisited

    Caligula, the third Roman Emperor, reigned from 37 to 41 CE and has been described in history as a cruel, perverted tyrant. His full name was Gaius Julius Caesar Augustus Germanicus. Born in 12 CE, he was the son of Germanicus (a beloved Roman general,… Read more

  • Pauline Chaponnière-Chaix

    Avi OhryTel Aviv, Israel Pauline Chaponnière-Chaix (1850–1934) was a nurse and activist born in Geneva, Switzerland. After her husband died, she went to Paris to join the House of Deaconesses of Reuilly, a Protestant religious community founded in 1841 that provided outreach to the poor. Chaponnière-Chaix worked… Read more

  • Rudyard Kipling: Medical

    Rudyard Kipling (1865–1936), the British writer best known for The Jungle Book, Kim, and his haunting short stories, lived a life profoundly intertwined with medicine. Though not a physician, Kipling’s experiences of illness, grief, and global travel exposed him to medical realities that shaped both… Read more

  • Samuel Johnson: Medical

    Samuel Johnson, immortalized as “Dr. Johnson,” was not only the towering man of letters of eighteenth-century England but also a figure whose life was profoundly shaped by medicine—or the lack of it. His Dictionary of the English Language (1755) cemented his place in literary history,… Read more

  • Ernest Hemingway: Medical

    Ernest Hemingway, a figure of immense influence in the 20th century, is often remembered for his public persona as an adventurer, hunter, and war correspondent. His adventurous life, well-documented and marked by personal struggles, began with the outbreak of the First World War in 1914.… Read more