Hektoen International

A Journal of Medical Humanities

Day: March 8, 2018

  • “…One must imagine Sisyphus happy”

    Katerina DimaPreveza, Greece Ancient Greek mythology teems with stories of morality, despair, and the philosophy of the absurd. No story, however, had a greater impact on this young, impressionable medical student than the story of Sisyphus. Sisyphus was a popular and prominent figure of Ancient Greece, the successful king of the city of Corinth. As…

  • Collections complete: Experiential centres of learning

    Lynsey GrosfieldRude, Denmark The period between roughly 1520 and 1590 was a time of growing efforts to understand the world of science through hands-on exercises in collecting and cataloging natural objects, observation, dissection, and experimentation in the fields of anatomy, botany, and museum science. This was also the time of the High Renaissance in the…

  • Path of compassion

    Raisa ZubarevaWarsaw, Poland In humble circumstances in one of London’s asylums for the insane, Kate Marsden, a nurse and philanthropist who devoted her life to saving others, died on 29 May 1931. She had been the ministering angel of Siberians affected with leprosy. Kate Marsden was born in May 1859, the youngest of seven children.…

  • The unsexed woman: Depictions of women in 19th century fictional literature

    Katherina BaranovaLondon, Canada The nineteenth century saw unprecedented changes in medicine, both technical and professional, as two parallel tales dealing with clubfoot demonstrate—Madame Bovary published in 1856 by Gustav Flaubert and “The Doctors of Hoyland” published by Arthur Conan Doyle in 1894.1,2 Both authors, though writing fiction, were well aware of the medical milieu of their time.…

  • Beyond eating yogurt

    Margad ZorigtMongolia When I was studying in Australia, an American teacher asked us what we usually did in the evening in our countries. I said Mongolians drink yogurt before sleep. The teacher was surprised at my answer: “Your country’s people drink yogurt? In my country we eat yogurt.” In the Mongolian language we say “drinking”…

  • Ghosts from the ether dome

    Isabel LegardaBelmont, Massachusetts, United States On October 16, 1846, dentist William Morton successfully demonstrated the use of ether as an anesthetic inside Massachusetts General Hospital’s Bulfinch Pavilion. That day, now passed down to us as “Ether Day,” is often seen as a turning point for surgery both in the United States and around the world.…

  • Disease mapping: Tracing the urban epidemic

    Astrid PrimadhaniJakarta, Indonesia In August 1854 a deadly cholera outbreak struck the Soho neighborhood of London.1 Within thirty-six hours, rapid death ensued as the dense and unsanitary condition of the working-class neighborhood became a haven for the spread of the bacteria. In two weeks, over seven hundred people, 10% of the neighborhood, died.2 Elsewhere around…

  • Red right hand: Ectrodactyly as a metaphor

    Erin CrouchKatelyn McDonaldTacoma, Washington Hands make us human. We lend a hand, we put all hands on deck, we know things like the back of our hands. Hands show emotion, beauty, and grace. But as Tolstoy wrote, “What a strange illusion it is to suppose that beauty is goodness.”1 Perfect hands do not make a…

  • Shackleton’s angel

    Paul G. FirthBoston, Massachusetts, United States South Georgia Island is a tortured upheaval of mountain and glacier that falls in chaos to the jagged coastline of the South Atlantic Ocean.1 From thirty miles of this wind-blasted sub-Antarctic wilderness came walking on the afternoon of the 20 May 1916 “a terrible-looking trio of scarecrows,” soaked to…

  • Joseph Roth, a visionary poet and victim of European history

    Frank WollheimSweden Joseph Roth was born on 2 September 1894 in Brody, then a Galician town in the Austrian-Hungarian Monarchy, bordering Russia. His parents married in 1892 and like two thirds of the 20,000 inhabitants were Hassidic Jews. His mother Maria came from a family of merchants. His father worked for a timber trading company…