Hektoen International

A Journal of Medical Humanities

Tag: Washington

  • It always comes down to medicine

    Matthew TurnerWashington, United States For six days, the brigands held a knife to the city’s throat. Outside a handful of settlements far to the northeast—which any of the city’s inhabitants would firmly tell you didn’t count—Charleston was the jewel of England’s possessions in the New World. The wealth that the port city generated had fattened…

  • As my mother lay dying

    Peter MeyersWashington, D.C., United States My mother was sitting up in bed when I walked into her hospital room. When I asked her how she was doing, she grinned and responded, “Super!” Her doctor, standing nearby, added that she was the happiest and most easygoing patient on the ward. That was not the mother I…

  • Dr. Joycelyn Elders: An unwelcome prophet

    Howard Fischer Uppsala, Sweden “No prophet is welcome in his hometown.”— The Gospel of Saint Luke, 4:24. New American Standard Bible Joycelyn Elders, MD (b. 1933) was Surgeon General of the United States of America from 1993 to 1994. She was the second woman and the first Black person to have that position. Her life story…

  • History of medicine in ancient India

    Keerthana KallaSeattle, Washington, United States The chronicle of medicine is the story of man’s struggle against illness. As early as 5000 BC, India developed a comprehensive form of healing called Ayurveda. Such traditional healing was first recorded between 4500 and 1600 BC. It is believed that sages were the early practitioners of Ayurveda around 2500…

  • Abraham Lincoln’s smallpox

    Howard FischerUppsala, Sweden A brutal, bloody civil war had been tearing the United States of America apart for two years when President Abraham Lincoln arrived in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania on November 19, 1863. Four months before his visit, Gettysburg had been the site of a major battle between the secessionist Confederacy of the southern, slave-holding states…

  • Tobias and the Angel—Miracle or medical?

    Elizabeth Colledge Jacksonville, Florida, United States Admirers of Andrea del Verrocchio’s painting Tobias and the Angel (circa 1470–1475) may be unaware of the purpose of Tobias’s journey with the archangel Raphael. The Book of Tobit in the Apocrypha posits a story of love and not-so-miraculous healing in seventh century B.C. Nineveh. Tobit, a devout Hebrew, suffers…

  • The amnesic jokester

    Jason BrandtBaltimore, Maryland, United States Bob T. had suffered a stroke. Not the kind of massive, devastating stroke that left him bereft of language (aphasia), or that rendered him paralyzed on one side of his body (hemiplegia). No, this was a very small stroke deep within his brain; in the medial-dorsal thalamus of the left…

  • Gospel Argonaut

    Josephine EnsignSeattle, Washington, United States Short of stature and tall of tales, Alexander de Soto was by some accounts a highly educated, skilled, compassionate physician and surgeon, and by other accounts a charlatan, medical quack, faith healer, and quixotic dreamer. Born on July 24, 1840, in the Canary Islands to the Spaniard Alexander de Soto…

  • The global journey of variolation

    Mariel TishmaChicago, Illinois, United States Humanity has eliminated only one infectious disease—smallpox. Smallpox is a very old disease and efforts to prevent it are almost as old. They included a technique called variolation, also known as inoculation or engrafting, in which individuals were infected with live smallpox virus to produce a milder form of the…

  • The scourge, the scientist, and the swindle

    Anne JacobsonOak Park, Illinois, United States “The leprous person who has the disease shall wear torn clothes and let the hair of his head hang loose, and he shall cover his upper lip and cry out, ‘Unclean, unclean.’ He shall remain unclean as long as he has the disease. He is unclean. He shall live…