Hektoen International

A Journal of Medical Humanities

Tag: Paul Dakin

  • Professionalism in crisis: Dr. Winkel and The Third Man

    Paul Dakin London, United Kingdom   Film Forum: The Third Man Times of crisis may highlight the best and worst characteristics of people. Many of us yearn to be heroes and yet what is revealed under pressure may fall short of our ideal. Doctors share this human frailty. Is medical training and professionalism enough to…

  • Sign Gene: The first deaf superhero film

    Paul Dakin North London, United Kingdom   Sign Gene, the world’s first deaf superhero film. Written and directed by Emilio Insolera. Image published with permission. If the superhero genre really is “about transformation, about identity, about difference,”1 then the description can readily be applied to Sign Gene, the world’s first deaf superhero film. Written and…

  • Francis St. Vincent Morris: the pilot poet

    Paul Dakin North London, UK   Francis St. Vincent Morris I discovered his original notebook and correspondence when sorting my late uncle’s effects. They were given to him by Morris’ sister Ruth. Francis St. Vincent Morris was a pilot in the Royal Flying Corps. Three weeks after arriving in France he crashed in a snowstorm…

  • Sir Roderick Glossop: Wodehouse’s “eminent loony doctor”

    Paul Dakin North London, UK   Sir Roderick Glossop (right) and J Washburn Stoker appear in court following Jeeves’ intervention P.G. Wodehouse is one of the greatest comic authors of the twentieth century. He wrote nearly a hundred books containing a fascinating array of characters. Many inhabited the confined geography of 1920’s London and country…

  • “Super” heroes: Special powers in deaf characters

    Paul DakinLondon, United Kingdom In 2012 Marvel Comics produced a cover featuring New Hampshire Senator Lou D’Allesandro’s four-year-old grandson Anthony as Blue Ear, a superhero wearing a hearing aid. Anthony refused the prosthetic because superheroes did not wear them. His mother contacted the company hoping to find an inspirational example and received the specially-created artwork…

  • John Wesley: Amateur physician and health crusader

    Paul DakinLondon, United Kingdom John Wesley was an 18th century Anglican priest, Fellow of Lincoln College and Oxford don, with an intellect and energy that resulted in over 400 publications and the riding of a quarter of a million miles to preach forty thousand sermons.1 The movement he reluctantly founded, disparagingly called “Methodism,” channeled the…