Hektoen International

A Journal of Medical Humanities

Tag: Winter 2023

  • Spoonerisms

    JMS PearceHull, England The name of the Rev. William Archibald Spooner (1844–1930), warden of New College Oxford 1903–24, is preserved, some would say hallowed, for his involuntary invention of a verbal curiosity. Many found it amusing and the eponym Spoonerism came into colloquial use in Oxford from about 1885. Spoonerisms are the accidental transpositions of…

  • Can headless martyrs really walk? The belief in cephalophores in the Middle Ages

    Andrew WodrichWashington, DC “By the temple of Mercury, [he was] beheaded with [an] axe. And anon the body of St. Denis raised himself up, and bare his head between his arms, as the angel led him two leagues … unto the place where he now resteth, by his election, and by the purveyance of God.”1…

  • Painter Milene Pavlović Barili (1909–1945)

    Mirjana Stojkovic-IvkovicBelgrade, Serbia Milena Pavlović Barili was one of the most avant-garde and interesting personalities of the world art scene in the first half of the twentieth century. Suffering was inextricably linked to her life. Through suffering, pain, and dreams colored with melancholy, she experienced her own existence and created in solitude. Loneliness, isolation, and…

  • Ruggero Oddi: Brilliant physician and victim of gaslighting by the Congo Free State

    Eli EhrenpreisSkokie, Illinois, United States When Ruggero Oddi (1864–1913) was a medical student at the University of Bologna, he performed studies detailing the physiology of the biliary sphincter. This work became Oddi’s legacy, setting the stage for modern biliary and pancreatic clinical science. Without Oddi’s research, we would not have reached our current state-of-the-art in…

  • A brief history of ulcerative colitis

    Parnita KesarSouth Carolina, United States The symptoms of ulcerative colitis have been documented since the eighteenth century. From 1745, there is evidence that Prince Charles, the Young Pretender to the English crown, had symptoms consistent with the condition we now know as ulcerative colitis. He treated these symptoms by adopting a milk-free diet.1 But the…

  • Abraham de Balmes ben Meir, Jewish Italian physician and polymath

    Avi OhryTel Aviv, Israel Abraham de Balmes ben Meir (c. 1460–1523) was a Jewish physician and polymath from the baroque Italian city of Lecce in the south of Italy, where his grandfather had served as personal physician to King Ferdinand I of Naples. He studied medicine in Naples but left in 1510 when Jewish people…

  • King Wamba’s poisoning with cytisine

    Nicolas Roberto RoblesBadajoz, Spain In AD 409, the Iberian Peninsula was invaded by the Suevi and the Vandals (of Germanic stock) and the Alans (of Asian origin). The Visigoths came next. They had entered into an alliance with imperial Rome with the purpose of ejecting these invaders from Iberia, and after several years of warfare,…

  • Conflict about the clitoris: Colombo versus Fallopio

    Howard FischerUppsala, Sweden “The truth is rarely pure and never simple.”– Oscar Wilde The clitoris, a female genital structure anatomically homologous to the penis, was known to the ancients. In 540 BC, the Greek Hipponax made one of the earliest references to it. It was not mentioned by Hippocrates,1 but Arabic, Persian, and Roman writers…

  • Books, bangles, and bravado

    Jill KarNew Delhi, India Anandibai Joshee (Anandi) set sail from India at the age of eighteen. Bartering her bangles for books, she traded convention for an education, which was considered shameful in nineteenth-century India.1 In doing so, she was the first Indian woman to become a physician (Fig. 1). Born to a traditional Hindu Brahmin…

  • A time to live and a time to die

    Amera HassanMinneapolis, Minnesota “Well to be honest, doc, I don’t quite care whether I do live or die.” He said it so nonchalantly and he was smiling too, a crow-footed wrinkle on either side of his eyes. When this patient was first admitted to the floor, he was in an undignified state, with flies wafting…