Hektoen International

A Journal of Medical Humanities

Month: May 2017

  • Which weighs upon the heart

    Murad KhanKarachi, Pakistan I seldom see patients without an appointment, which for an initial patient can take up to an hour, often longer. Fortunately for this couple, the booked patient rang in to say he could not come because of some transport problem, so I was able to see them. “Doctor saheb- we have come…

  • At the turning point

    Anthony PapagiannisThessaloniki, Greece Eva was born the year I entered medical school; our life paths would cross two decades later. She went through school, played volleyball regularly, married, and lived a normal and carefree life. Then in her early twenties she gradually began getting breathless and increasingly tired, and had dizzy spells, fainting episodes, palpitations,…

  • The divine leaf: Physick and the cause for physick

    Lynn Veach SadlerBurlington, NC, United States Columbus is believed to have rebuked his crew for sharing the Indians’ “drinking” of the smoke of tobacco through toboca/tobaga pipes and chewing its dried leaves. He was among the first to discover its addictiveness. The Whites in his wake also smoked the calumet and received, legend claims, knowledge from…

  • Charite hospital

    Annabelle SlingerlandLeiden, the Netherlands On November 14, 1709, King Frederik I of Prussia planted a small seed that over the following three centuries grew, branch by branch, into one of the foremost medical research and treatment centers in the world. Plague House, 1709 In 1709 a malignant outbreak of bubonic plague that had almost depopulated…

  • The flu vaccine: Transparency, uncertainty, and trust in medicine

    Anthony PapagiannisThessaloniki, Greece A few years ago the fear of ‘pandemic flu’ was spread widely all over the world, causing what has been termed an “emotional epidemic.”1 The disease itself, its social dimensions, and the ways it was publicly handled could form the subject for an academic thesis. Those events led me to a series of…

  • The girl on the gurney

    Diana PiWestlake, Ohio, United States A month before my gig as senior medical resident at Bellevue Hospital was up, I spent a morning in the New York City morgue. Why? I lost a patient. A young man with end-stage AIDS, a prisoner from Rikers Island. The morgue, a stone’s throw from Bellevue Hospital, was what…

  • How a bishop unwittingly kick-started the DNA revolution

    William KingstonDublin, Ireland In 1943 a series of lectures was delivered in Trinity College, Dublin, which had profound scientific and medical consequences. Their title was What is Life? and it is no exaggeration to claim that they led to a revolution in our knowledge and use of genes. The lecturer was Erwin Schrödinger, who had…

  • Outsourced clinical trials and ethical implications: India the most preferred global clinical trial hub

    Persis NaumannPittsburg, Pennsylvania Introduction Pharmaceutical research is a complex social enterprise. With the proliferation of corporate globalization in the healthcare industry, pharmaceutical companies from western developed countries have increasingly offshored and outsourced global biopharmaceutical clinical trials to developing countries. The power of global pharmaceutical industries is extensive. It is important to understand the structure of…

  • Nutritional disruption in the Marshall Islands

    Carley TrentmanKansas, United States When one mentions World War II, vivid images come to mind. The controversial decision to use the atomic bomb in Hiroshima and Nagasaki marked the end of the war in 1945. Subsequent testing of  hydrogen bombs occurred in the 1950s on the Marshall Islands, where “Ivy Mike” and “Castle Bravo” were…