Hektoen International

A Journal of Medical Humanities

Month: March 2018

  • How to treat a broken heart: An instruction guide

    Kate BaggottOntario, Canada Human beings are callous creatures. We pursue our own agendas, desires, and happiness at the expense of those who would love us. We have all done it. We have all disputed the purity of another’s love. We have all had our hearts broken in turn. We all know this state; of mourning,…

  • The monarch, the musician, and the medic

    Jesús Ramírez-BermúdezTranslated by Ilana Dann LunaMexico City, Mexico The history of medicine bestows us with unexpected episodes, such as the character of “The Swan King,” whose platonic love for a disgraced musician sparked the artistic transformation of a kingdom. A physician’s intervention led to a tragic scene in a castle by a lake, where a…

  • Mental health in Michel Foucault’s The Birth of the Clinic and the limits of medical positivism

    Taylor TsoSt. Louis, Missouri, United States In The Birth of the Clinic, Michel Foucault traces the history of our present-day understanding of disease. One of the most significant and more recent problems this understanding had to confront was the pre-nineteenth century outlook that “neuroses and essential fevers were fairly generally regarded as diseases without organic…

  • Geza Csath, in defense of interconnectedness

    Gerda KovacsAalborg, Denmark “I would like to explode, flow, crumble into dust, and my disintegration would be my masterpiece.”– Emil Cioran, On the Heights of Despair Geza Csath, a Hungarian psychiatrist and writer, was born in 1887 and died in 1919. During his short life, he worked at the Moravcsik Psychiatric Hospital in Budapest, produced…

  • “…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.…