Hektoen International

A Journal of Medical Humanities

Tag: The Odyssey

  • Musical evenings on HMS Bounty

    Stewart JustmanMissoula, Montana, United States Dispatched to Tahiti in 1787 to gather breadfruit trees to be transplanted to the West Indies, HMS Bounty was a small ship with every possible inch allotted to botanical cargo. Spare too was the crew, which included no marines who might have acted as Lieutenant William Bligh’s bodyguards in the…

  • “Uncertain disease”: The science of nostalgia

    Kevis GoodmanBerkeley, California, USA William Cullen, the well-esteemed Edinburgh physician and professor of medicine at Glasgow and later Edinburgh, shared the “love of system” praised by no less than Adam Smith, who—not coincidentally—happened to be Cullen’s patient and friend.1 Cullen set out to gather all existing medical nosologies (the disease classifications that imitated Linnaean botanical…