Hektoen International

A Journal of Medical Humanities

Tag: Edgar Allen Poe

  • Elizabeth Barrett Browning—isolation and the artist

    Elizabeth Lovett Colledge  Jacksonville, Florida, United States   Portrait of Elizabeth Barrett Browning by Evert Duykinck Via Wikimedia. Elizabeth Barrett Browning is perhaps best known for the poem “How do I Love Thee,” addressed to her husband Robert Browning, as well as their courtship, elopement, and subsequent years together in Europe. However, one might revisit…

  • Poe’s murder mystery as a model of neurodiverse inclusion

    Geoff HoppeVirginia, United States A murder mystery might seem like a strange place to find hope, but hope is what Edgar Allan Poe’s mysteries can provide—if you know how to look. While Poe’s stories depict the macabre, they also demonstrate how a neurodiverse mind can find inclusion in a neurotypical society. Two instances in a…

  • Stitches as mending, stitches as healing

    Kelley SwainOxfordshire, England Knitwear designer and disability-access advocate Kate Davies writes of discovering her love of knitting at university: “The movement of your hands helped you to find a different kind of mind space. You lost yourself in the rhythm of your own industry. You made a thing.”1 There is something extraordinary about taking one…

  • A picture of ill-health: The illness of Elizabeth Siddal

    Emily BoyleDublin, Ireland It is difficult to think of Ophelia, one of Shakespeare’s most famous characters, without bringing to mind the famous depiction of her by John Everett Millais. In Hamlet, the sensitive and fragile Ophelia is driven mad by grief after her lover Hamlet rejects her and kills her father Polonius. After very poetically…

  • Poe’s consumptive paradox

    Gregory Rutecki Cleveland, Ohio, United States   Tuberculosis may have killed more people than any pathogen in history1 leaving an array of terrible stigmata whenever it extinguished life. The essential image of tuberculosis in the eighteenth century was that of foul decay.2 Morgagni vividly described the road to a consumptive death as, “(she) threw up…

  • Edgar Allen Poe and The Masque of the Red Death

    The “Red Death” had long devastated the country. No pestilence had ever been so fatal, or so hideous. Blood was its Avatar and its seal—the redness and the horror of blood. There were sharp pains, and sudden dizziness, and then profuse bleeding at the pores, with dissolution. The scarlet stains upon the body and especially…

  • The first experiment

    Filip Šimunović Germany   Sebastijan’s first independent animal experiment at Harvard transpired in the manner of something Edgar Poe could have written—if he knew anything about animal experiments and stereotactic neurosurgery at his time. Sebastijan, however, wasn’t there to read about it, or to write about it. He was there to survive it. He started…

  • Edgar Allan Poe—A tormented literary genius

    Donna OlsonWhitelaw, Alberta A man attempts to hide from his sins and ultimately from himself. A murderer takes an old man’s life and hides the body under the floorboards. But he cannot silence his guilt, so he keeps on hearing the dead man’s heart in his room. This story is “The Tell-Tale Heart,” written by…