Hektoen International

A Journal of Medical Humanities

Tag: Vesalius

  • Herophilus, the true father of anatomy?

    Philip LiebsonChicago, Illinois, United States Although Andreas Vesalius has been considered the modern father of anatomy, long before his time there lived a Greek anatomist and physician, Herophilus (?335–255 BC), who was accused of human vivisection. He may be the true father of anatomy because of his contributions to the understanding and differentiation of organ…

  • Christopher Wren’s contributions to medicine

    JMS PearceHull, England An extraordinary natural philosopher and Renaissance man, Christopher Wren (1632–1723) (Fig 1) was primarily an astronomer and architect.1 He is remembered mostly for his work after the Great Fire of London of 1666 as designer of St. Paul’s Cathedral, originally erected in AD 604. Wren laid the first stone at on Ludgate…

  • Lumbar puncture

    JMS PearceHull, England Access to cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) in life as an aid to diagnosis proved impossible until lumbar puncture. Galen of Pergamon (AD 130–200) failed to recognize CSF; he described a vaporous, not aqueous, humor that he called περιττώματα (residues) in the cerebral ventricles. Cerebrospinal fluid in the ventricles was probably first shown by…

  • Dr. Fritz Kahn and medical infographics

    Howard FischerUppsala, Sweden “If I were…an intern just getting ready to begin, I would be apprehensive that my real job, caring for sick people, might soon be taken away, leaving me with the quite different occupation of looking after machines.” — Lewis Thomas, MD, 1983 Dr. Fritz Kahn (1888–1968), a Berlin gynecologist, realized that society’s…

  • Between Vesalius and the CAT scan

    Howard FischerUppsala, Sweden Scribe: noun. A person who copies documents, especially a person who made handwritten copies before the invention of printing.— Dictionary.com The first reliable anatomic drawings based on human dissections may have been those of Leonardo Da Vinci (1452–1519). Later, Andreas Vesalius (1514–1564), born in Brussels as Andries van Wesel and having taken a…

  • Harvey Cushing and pituitary diseases

    JMS PearceHull, England, UK Of the many aspects and contributions of Harvey Williams Cushing (1869-1939) (Fig 1), this sketch concentrates on his identification of a basophilic tumor of the pituitary with adrenal hyperfunction that he called pituitary basophilism1 (Fig 2). It is now known as Cushing’s disease. Symptoms caused by primary adrenal, iatrogenic, and ectopic…

  • The striking social tableaux vivants of Lejaren à Hiller (1920s to 1940s)

    J.T.H. ConnorSt. John’s, Newfoundland, Canada In 1927 the Davis & Geck (DG) company commissioned artist Lejaren à Hiller to promote its surgical sutures. Hiller’s subsequent advertising campaign of modern art photographs was distributed to doctors across the United States and Canada during the 1920s to 1940s in simulated leather portfolios titled Sutures in Ancient Surgery…

  • Book review: The Origins of Modern Science

    Arpan K. BanerjeeSolihull, United Kingdom Science and medicine have long been intertwined: many advances in the field of medicine would not have been possible without prior knowledge of fundamental science. It is not surprising, therefore, that a medical historian would also find the history of science fascinating. In this book, Ofer Gal has described the…

  • Berengario da Carpi, pre-Vesalian anatomist (1460–1530)

    Berengario da Carpi was the most important anatomist of the generation preceding the so-called Anatomical Trinity of Vesalius, Fallopio, and Eustachio. He is regarded as one of the founders of scientific anatomy, challenging the reliance on ancient texts and emphasizing the primacy of direct observation based on dissecting the human body. A prolific author, he…

  • Juan Valdeverde de Amusco (1525–1588)

    In the days before intellectual property laws (and when plagiarism was sometimes viewed as a compliment to the author) Juan Valverde of Spain wrote a book on anatomy so successful that it went through sixteen editions in four languages and its illustrations remain popular to this day. It was composed in 1556 and titled Anatomia…