Hektoen International

A Journal of Medical Humanities

Tag: The psychological impact of facial injury in the First World War: outcomes from the Queen’s Hospital Sidcup

  • Fred Gey, father of the antioxidant hypothesis

    Alun EvansBelfast, United Kingdom Fred Gey was a German scientist who developed the concept that antioxidant vitamin deficiency caused certain diseases. He qualified as an MD at the University of Basel in 1952, having first researched clinical biochemistry. He then spent two years in the… Read more

  • Polluting puberty, monstrous menstruation, and fatal femininity

    Howard FischerUppsala, Sweden “[If] men could menstruate…menstruation would become an enviable, boast-worthy, masculine event.”1—Gloria Steinem, journalist and political activist Ancient history has shown us that men sometimes looked upon women’s menstrual periods with perplexity, wonder, and fear.2 While it has been suggested that some men… Read more

  • Chemical origins of terrestrial biology

    David GreenChicago, Illinois, United States As an undergraduate at the University of Pennsylvania in the 1950s, I attended a lecture by Harold C. Urey, a Nobel laureate. The subject of his lecture was the origin of life, and he described an experiment that he and… Read more

  • John Woodall, author of The Surgeon’s Mate

    John Woodall was a seventeenth century English physician and Paracelsian chemist known for his writings on medicine and health. Born around 1570 in Warwickshire, he was apprenticed at the age of sixteen to a London barber surgeon but did not finish his apprenticeship. From the… Read more

  • Miguel Hernández

    Nicolas Roberto RoblesBadajoz, Spain Miguel Hernández was born on October 30, 1910, in Orihuela (Alicante, Spain). His father, Miguel Hernández Sánchez, was a cattle dealer, and his mother, Concepción Gilabert Giner, did the housework and took care of their four children. Miguel had very few… Read more

  • The Madonna of Impruneta: Icons and processions

    The Madonna of Impruneta is an icon showing the Virgin Mary holding the infant Jesus. Its origins can be traced to the year 1060, when some woodcutters found it in the woods of Tuscany and brought it to the church at Impruneta. According to an… Read more

  • The surgeon who invented the Penrose drain

    Charles Bingham Penrose was born in Pennsylvania in 1862. Tall and athletic, he once traveled on horseback from Philadelphia to Niagara Falls and back. He also swam fifteen miles in the ocean in five hours. In 1897 on a hunting trip in Montana he killed… Read more

  • Other distinguished physicians

    Caton, Richard (1842–1926) – English physician, discovered in 1875 the brain’s electricity by placing direct electrodes on the exposed cortexes of cats and monkeys Dietl, Józef (1804–1878) – Austro-Polish physician, Prof. at Jagiellonian University in Kraków, described the symptom of loin pain after drinking a… Read more

  • The parallel paths of opera and medicine

    In 1597 when Jacopo Peri composed Dafne, the first opera ever written, sporadic epidemics of bubonic plague were still striking his city of Florence. Venice was also suffering greatly. It had been visited by the plague twenty-two times, and some 50,000 of its people had… Read more

  • The Lambs’ Tale

    JMS PearceHull, England Many children and young people struggle with the plays of Shakespeare, whose language, poetic meters, and historical content are often baffling at first sight. Those who persevere and overcome these difficulties learn to love and wonder at Shakespeare’s unsurpassed language and humane… Read more

  • Book review: Foreign Bodies: Pandemics, Vaccines and the Health of Nations

    Arpan K. BanerjeeSolihull, United Kingdom Simon Schama, the eminent historian and broadcaster, has turned his attention to medical history. His new book, gestated and born during the COVID pandemic, is a chronicle of three pandemic diseases that have afflicted humans for centuries: smallpox, cholera, and… Read more

  • Eating cheese as medicine

    Cheese has been part of human fare since the dawn of history. Already about 7,000 to 8,000 years ago the Sumerians were making cheese from milk by curdling it with enzymes from animal stomachs to prevent it from spoiling. They used it for food, but… Read more