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

  • Principles and Practice of Medicine: Sir Stanley Davidson

    JMS Pearce Hull, England   Davidson’s The Principles & Practice of Medicine, 1956 edition. A textbook of medicine is a single work covering all the major specialist topics, aimed principally at the undergraduate medical student. What constitutes a good textbook of medicine is plainly a… Read more

  • Because of their race

    Ceres Alhelí Otero PenicheMexico City, Mexico When in 1948 the National Party came to power in South Africa, the all-white government put into effect the racial segregation laws known as apartheid. The non-white population was forced to live, work, and spend their free time in… Read more

  • Feast or famine: Food in the art of Bruegel

    Howard FischerUppsala, Sweden “Famine was part of everyday life.”1 Pieter Bruegel the Elder (1525–1569), one of the most accomplished Netherlandish painters, often used peasant life as his subject. The survival of peasant agricultural society depended entirely on the success of their crops. The dream of… Read more

  • Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen and X-rays

    Arpan K. Banerjee Solihull, England The name Röntgen will be familiar to most for his discovery of X-rays on November 8, 1895. This date is now celebrated as the International Day of Radiology. Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen was born in Lennep, Germany on March 27, 1845.… Read more

  • Saving the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine

    Howard FischerUppsala, Sweden “For to this lady, more than any other single person, save Johns Hopkins himself, does the School of Medicine owe its being.”1– Alan Chesney on Mary Elizabeth Garrett Johns Hopkins (1795–1873) was born in Maryland, one of eleven children of a Quaker… Read more

  • The history of fertility preservation in young people with cancer

    Terrence StephensonLondon, England A whole cohort of cancer survivors owe both their lives and the conception of their children to a group of pediatric oncologists and colleagues from many disciplines spanning medicine, science, and the humanities. Their work brought to fruition and revolutionized the long-term… Read more

  • Fear of being buried alive

    Howard FischerUppsala, Sweden “Cremation eliminates all danger of being buried alive.”– “Short reasons for cremation,” an Australian pamphlet, c. 1900 It has been said that one of our most common fears is being buried alive.1 Someone is mistakenly thought dead, placed in a coffin, and… Read more

  • Marie François Xavier Bichat (1771–1802)

    In the universal Pantheon of the medical greats, Xavier Bichat is remembered as “the father of modern histology.” Yet he never used a microscope. He studied the human organs with his naked eye and evaluated them for their physical features (such as elasticity, transparency, and… Read more

  • Forensic medicine and Sir Bernard Spilsbury

    JMS PearceHull, England A forensic autopsy performed to establish the cause of death is an ancient practice.1 In Europe it was preceded by conventional pathology, as started by Herophilus of Chalcedon (335–280 BC). Medicolegal autopsies to solve legal problems were first performed in Bologna in… Read more

  • The paradoxical life and art of Robert Colescott

    Mildred WilsonMichigan, United States In 1975, satirist Robert Colescott turned the art community on its head with Eat Dem Taters, a parody of van Gogh’s The Potato Eaters.1,2 He and other postmodernist painters of the period would appropriate images from other artists’ paintings, questioning the… Read more

  • Dipinto di blu: Turning blue in a Florence hospital

    Giulio NicitaFlorence, Italy We were in the middle of the 1970s in Florence, Italy. We had concluded the long, tedious years of university study. Real work awaited us in Villa Monna Tessa, a large early 1900s four-story building. It housed several departments of Medicine as… Read more

  • Drs. Joseph Bell, Arthur Conan Doyle, William Osler, and the method of Zadig

    Howard FischerUppsala, Sweden “The whole of medicine is observation.”– William Osler, M.D. M. de Voltaire, the pen name of François-Marie Arouet (1694–1778), was an Enlightenment historian, philosopher, and writer. He opposed France’s absolute monarchy and the power of the church. He wrote 2,000 books and… Read more