Hektoen International

A Journal of Medical Humanities

Tag: oxygen

  • Omphalos

    Margaret NowaczykHamilton, Ontario, Canada Once, I linked you to the woman who gave birth to you: for forty weeks, a twisted pearly cord, pulsing with two syncopated heartbeats, bound you two together. It fed you and gave you oxygen. It attached you to life. In Greek mythology, the omphalos is the center of the universe,…

  • Ode to baroque and other musical genres

    George ChristopherAda, Michigan, United States Imagine a musical style that is emotionally evocative yet highly organized, thereby conferring structure to emotion; that gives artistic expression of the fusion of emotion and reason; that mimics biology at cellular through ecological levels through its organized complexity; that brings unity from the diversity of multiple simultaneous melodic lines;…

  • Young, pretty, and not quite right

    Anthony Papagiannis Thessaloniki, Greece   Photo by Anthony Papagiannis. Unless we are in pediatrics, we start in clinical practice with our patients tending to be in the age range of our parents, or even older. Increasingly, as the grey in our temples is promoted to silver, their mean age gets closer to ours, and the…

  • The discovery of oxygen

    David Poole Michael White Kansas, United States Brian Whipp Powys, Wales   Jacques-Louis David’s (1788) painting of Marie-Anne and Antoine-Laurent Lavoisier which now hangs in New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art. Note flasks for collection and analysis of expired gases. We live submerged in a sea of life-preserving oxygen. As I sit at my desk,…