Hektoen International

A Journal of Medical Humanities

Day: January 30, 2017

  • Horace Wells

    Roshan RadhakrishnanKerala, India In 1845, a dentist stepped onto the spotlight at the revered Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston. He wanted to show his medical brethren something unique, something unheard of back then in the field of surgery. He wanted to show them how the world could finally be rid of pain. The young man…

  • Medicine musica: the eighteenth-century rationalization of music and medicine

    Daisy FancourtLondon, United Kingdom Legends of music’s healing powers on both the mind and the body are estimated to go as far back as Paleolithic times, when music was believed to be a magic that could drive away the angry spirits that caused illness.1 It wasn’t until the beginnings of learned medicine in the Greek-Roman,…

  • Madness at the opera

    It is ironic and tragic that Gaetano Donizetti, author of the most famous mad scenes in the history of opera, should himself have died in a state of utter madness from what has been described “as the most terrible of all brain diseases.”1 In two of his operas, Anna Bolena and Lucia di Lammermoor, the…

  • Schubert, Schumann, and the Spirochete

    Their names sound Germanic and are somewhat similar, as are their portraits. They wrote beautiful music and rank high among the great composers of the romantic era. To confuse their names would constitute an unforgivable crime, especially in the eye of music lovers. Yet in 1956 fallible East German authorities issued a stamp featuring an…

  • Surgery, note by note: Marin Marais’ “Tableau de l’Opération de la Taille”

    James L. FranklinChicago, Illinois, United States How has medicine been depicted in music? Examples from the operatic stage come to mind: tuberculosis in Verdi’s La Traviata and Puccini’s La Bohème; madness or delirium in the mad scene in Donizetti’s Lucia Da Lammermoor and Lady Macbeth’s sleepwalking scene in Verdi’s Macbeth. It is harder to find…

  • The sound of one hand clapping: meditations on sinistrality

    James L. FranklinChicago, IL Paper presented to the Chicago Literary Club on April 7, 2008  It all began on the coldest morning of the season in early December 2006. Painters were still in our apartment putting the finishing touches on what had proven to be an all too prolonged renovation project. However—the end was now…

  • The castrati: A physician’s perspective, part 2

    James L. FranklinChicago, Illinois, United States The first half of this article was previously published in Hektoen International, Summer 2010, as The castrati: A physician’s perspective, part I Medical aspects In this second part, we turn to the medical aspects of our subject and questions of by whom and by what methods were these operations performed.…

  • The castrati: A physician’s perspective, part 1

    James L. FranklinChicago, Illinois, United States A modified version of this paper was presented on March 1, 2010 to the Chicago Literary Club. “The castrati: a physician’s perspective” will appear in two installments. The first one in this issue details the history, sociology and musical history relevant to the rise of the castrato in the 17th…

  • Mozart, Mesmer and medicine

    James L. FranklinChicago, IL Paper given at the Chicago Literary Club on February 16, 2004 As a physician, I have long been interested in representations of medical topics in literature, art and music. Examples quickly come to mind: the world of the tuberculosis sanatorium in “The Magic Mountain” of Thomas Mann or an epidemic in…

  • “Breath of life you’ll be to me”—The portrayal of tuberculosis in the opera La Traviata

    Judith WagnerMunich, Germany The white half-round of the stage is illuminated with an eerie blue light. The only prop is a large clock on the right-hand side. A dark figure is seated beside it. The door on the left opens and the heroine—clad all in red—enters the stage. Strings accompany her appearance with a low…