Hektoen International

A Journal of Medical Humanities

Literary Vignettes

Arpan K. Banerjee
John Keats statue new

Michael Bloor
Mikhael Bulgakov’s “The Steel Windpipe” in A Country Doctor’s Notebook
Anton Chekhov and the Sakhalin Penal Colony

Paul Dakin
“Super” heroes: Special powers in deaf characters

George Dunea
PDF Document Aphorisms and facetiae of Bela Schick
All life is a gift
Consider the nails of the hand, how they grow (William Bean)
The doctor’s revenge in Jules Verne’s Mathias Sandorf
Edgar Allen Poe and The Masque of the Red Death
The real Monte Cristo
Gulliver’s visit to the Academy of Lagado
Madame Bovary: The clubfoot operation
Doctor in the House
The physician in spite of himself (Molière)
The man of one book
Jane Austen and the hypochondriacs
Doctor and dictionary
Edward Gibbon
Francis Peabody: caring for the patient
The last illness of Père Goriot
Religio Medici by Sir Thomas Browne
“The Grasshopper” by Chekhov: folly and regrets
The tree doctor
The Lord’s Prayer
Tom Jones Medical
Peter Mark Roget, MD, FRS of the Thesaurus
Lead poisoning in Northern Yorkshire
Doctor Rabelais Part I: The education of Gargantua
Doctor Rabelais Part II: The adventures of Pantagruel and Panurge
Doctor Rabelais Part III: Doctor Rondibilis on bridling the senses
Doctor Rabelais Part IV: Rabelais on women and doctors
Indo-European for health professionals
Doctor Thorne, a country apothecary
Joseph Conrad and medicine FALL ’23

Howard Fischer
Who is “Dr. Filth”?
Agatha Christie’s poisons: Better dying through chemistry FALL ’23

Jared Griffin
Thomas De Quincey and Confessions of an English Opium-Eater: Opium as Medicine and Beyond

Timo Hannu
Haunting poetic characteristics: the dissection scene from Doctor Zhivago

Juliet Beckman Hubbell
Mysterious muse

Putzer Hung
Where no birds sing: tuberculosis in Keats’ “La Belle Dame Sans Merci”

Nicholas Kang
Nabokov’s first masterpiece

Katharine Lawrence
Tolstoy, The Death of Ivan Ilych, and the five stages of grief

Mateja Lekic
James Joyce’s Ulysses and the human experience

Stephen Martin
A Regency epitaph for a child

Sally Metzler
Does art belong in a doctor’s office?
Henrik Ibsen’s diagnosis of the conscience
A Treatment for “Circular Insanity”: Joseph Roth’s Radetzky March
Joseph Andrews by Henry Fielding and the reputation of the medical profession 1742
Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones: Feeding fevers

Bernardo Ng
Mean dudes and mean deeds: Tarantino’s vision

Margaret Nowaczyk
Omphalos

Bryant Phan
The illusion of rainbows

Solomon Posen
The doctor in bed with the patient
The vindictive departmental chairman: a hospital tale of the 1970’s

Jack E. Riggs
Charlotte Gilman, Weir Mitchell, and “The Yellow Wallpaper” FALL ’23

Nicolas Roberto Robles
August Von Platen, inspiration for Death in Venice
The romantic suicide: Karoline von Günderrode

Nicolas Roberto Robles and Diego Peral
Love and syphilis: The marriage of Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer

Vignettes
The doctor as writer (William Carlos Williams)
Plato on free and slave doctors
On the skill of physicians
On being idle and a patient
From Merdle to Madoff (Charles Dickens)
The Lifted Veil by George Eliot
“How the Poor Die” by George Orwell, 1946
Companionable books
Suicide: always a tragedy? (JMS Pearce)
Famine and illness in War and Peace
The role of doctors in the intellectual life of Spain
A doctor of the old school
The birth of Oliver Twist
Englishes
(Peter Arnold)