Hektoen International

A Journal of Medical Humanities

Tag: Vicent Rodilla

  • Salernitan women

    Vicent RodillaAlicia López-CastellanoValencia, Spain The first medical school in the Western world is thought to be the Schola Medica Salernitana (Figure 1), which traces its origins to the dispensary of an early medieval monastery.1 The medical school at Salerno achieved celebrity between the tenth and thirteenth centuries, before it was overshadowed by universities at Bologna…

  • Tooth extraction in art: from the dental key to the forceps

    Vicent RodillaAlicia López-CastellanoChristina Ribes-VallésValencia, Spain Tooth extraction has been practiced for centuries, being carried out first by often itinerant barber-surgeons, and, once the profession became regulated in the late 1800s, by licenced dentists. Hippocrates gives one of the oldest written accounts of tooth extraction, which he considered along with cauterization to be a remedial measure…

  • El garrotillo: On diphtheria and Goya

    Vicent RodillaValencia, Spain Diphtheria is a bacterial infectious disease caused by Corynebacterium diphtheriae that affects mostly children. Although by 2017 some 85% of infants worldwide have been vaccinated for DTP (diphtheria-tetanus-pertussis), some 19.9 million children remain unvaccinated.1 According to the World Health Organization, reported cases of diphtheria have decreased from nearly 100,000 in 1980 to…