Hektoen International

A Journal of Medical Humanities

Tag: Tuberculosis

  • Vampires and the Tuberculous Family

    Sylvia PamboukianMoon Township, PA An isolated village, a series of mysterious deaths, a mob in the graveyard at midnight—it sounds like the climax of a thrilling vampire story. However, these events occurred in 1892 Rhode Island at the gravesite of tuberculosis victim Mercy Brown five years prior to the publication of Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897).…

  • George Bernard Shaw’s The Doctor’s Dilemma

    In the first act of Shaw’s play, several doctors come to congratulate Sir Colenso Ridgeon, recently knighted for discovering that white blood cells will not eat invading microbes unless they are rendered appetizing by being nicely buttered with opsonins. Patients supposedly manufacture these opsonins on and off, and would be cured if inoculated when their…

  • Gandhiji on Indianness of health and healthcare (1869–1948)

    Dhastagir SheriffChennai, Tamil Nadu, India In 2019, 150 years after Mahatma Gandhiji’s birth, India celebrates his birthday to honor his legacy and his contributions to the welfare of this nation. We remember him with his alluring smile, in loin cloth, shawl, and thin-framed glasses, his attire representing his message to lead a simple life. This…

  • Dr. Rebecca Cole and racial health disparities in nineteenth-century Philadelphia

    Meg Vigil-FowlerGrand Junction, Colorado From the beginning of black women’s professional involvement in medicine, public health marked a central component of the scope of their practice. Rebecca Cole, the second black woman physician in the United States, began her career as the “sanitary visitor” in the late 1860s for the New York Infirmary for Women…

  • John Calvin: his rule in Geneva and his many illnesses

    At the age of twenty-three the great French religious reformer abandoned his Catholic faith, becoming in time the founder of one of the most important branches of Protestantism. During his life he wrote numerous tracts on various aspects of religion, notably emphasizing predestination and the supremacy of the Trinity, and advocating a simpler and more…

  • The sweetest gift

    Subramoniam RangaswamiKarnataka, India It was the mid-1970s. We were busy packing our portmanteaus and bags in preparation for leaving our campus residence in Calicut Medical College in Kerala1 where I had been working as an assistant professor of orthopedics. I thought I heard someone cough outside on our doorstep. Sure enough, I saw a man…

  • A picture of ill-health: The illness of Elizabeth Siddal

    Emily BoyleDublin, Ireland It is difficult to think of Ophelia, one of Shakespeare’s most famous characters, without bringing to mind the famous depiction of her by John Everett Millais. In Hamlet, the sensitive and fragile Ophelia is driven mad by grief after her lover Hamlet rejects her and kills her father Polonius. After very poetically…

  • Edvard Munch: sickness and death

    These two paintings by the famous Norwegian artist Edvard Munch (1863-1944) reflect his lifelong melancholia and obsession with sickness and death. This has been attributed to his childhood experiences of his father’s drifting towards insanity, his mother’s death from tuberculosis, and the later death of two siblings from the same disease. Melancholia affected the artist…

  • The art of consumption – TB and John Lavery

    Emily BoyleBelfast, Northern Ireland Tuberculosis, (TB) is often regarded as a historical disease—in the 1880’s it caused a quarter of all deaths in the UK. Mortality rates from TB fell by 17% between 2005 and 2015,1 but it remains an important health concern. Worldwide it is still the second most common cause of death from an…

  • Poe’s consumptive paradox

    Gregory RuteckiCleveland, Ohio, United States Tuberculosis may have killed more people than any pathogen in history1 leaving an array of terrible stigmata whenever it extinguished life. The essential image of tuberculosis in the eighteenth century was that of foul decay.2 Morgagni vividly described the road to a consumptive death as, “(she) threw up pus by…