Hektoen International

A Journal of Medical Humanities

Month: January 2019

  • Physician, heal thyself

    Moustapha AbousamraVentura, California, United States “Physician, heal thyself” is a biblical reminder (Luke 4:23) that while physicians are eager and able to heal illness in others, they are often unable to heal themselves. A similar saying, “The cobbler’s children have no shoes,” was mentioned in the Oxford Dictionary as early as 1546, demonstrating that this…

  • Maimed

    Laura WendorffPlatteville, Wisconsin, United States Your friend says, think of the Amazonswho cut off their right breasts in order to easily draw back their bows. But the loss is not like that. It’s more like a flower dug out of the ground,soil still clinging to its roots like the memoryof heavy clay and earthworms. *…

  • Flyfishing and medicine

    James StollerCleveland, Ohio, United States I am one of the many doctors who relish the zen of flyfishing. Standing in a stream, reading the clues for what type of fly to cast and where to cast it, and focusing incessantly on a dry fly drifting lithely to entice a hungry trout, flyfishing invites self-reflection through…

  • Michelangelo’s The Creation of Adam

    Jessica LoboLondon, Ontario, Canada Michelangelo painted some of his most famous work on the Sistine Chapel ceiling, covering it with the world’s most beautiful frescoes, of which The Creation of Adam is the most iconic.1 He worked during the Italian Renaissance, and this was a time when “the personality of the Western artist became a…

  • Nature telling her secrets: the Kepler–Descartes connection

    Ronald FishmanChicago, Illinois, United States Nature tells us one secret in terms of another, and she may refuse to disclose one secret until another has been laid bare.– T.S. Kuhn1 In 1604, Johannes Kepler solved the problem of how light is refracted within the eye to produce an image on the surface of the retina. This problem…

  • New Year’s Eve, Old Presbyterian Hospital

    Jacob AppelNew York, New York, United States The gift shop is closed. Only a graveyardSkeleton crew in the pharmacy, a solitaryCleaner orbiting a mop across the skyway.Below lights blinking red green red throughDark and frigid silence. One more year. One more night too: cachectic, edematous,Distended — ammonia levels rising, uremiaLurking, choking up coffee grounds, bile.Unlike the…

  • Nikolai Gogol’s The Diary of a Madman

    James L. FranklinChicago, Illinois, United States Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol (1809–1852) was a member of the first wave of great Russian authors of the nineteenth century. Born in a Ukrainian Cossack village then part of the Russian Empire, he made his way to Saint Petersburg where he found his métier in the short story; a genre…

  • Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein: A cautionary tale

    James L. FranklinChicago, Illinois, United States 2018 marked the 200th anniversary of the publication of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley’s novel Frankenstein. This remarkable work of fiction has inspired a wealth of popular currency in the form of numerous cinematic productions which have grossly distorted the public understanding of the work and obscured its literary and philosophic…

  • Dr. Charles Drew, Philip Roth, and race

    James L. FranklinChicago, Illinois, United States “My point is, if you have a course on health and whatever, then you do know Dr. Charles Drew. You’ve heard of him?” “No.”“Shame on you, Mr. Zukerman. I’ll tell you in a minute” . . .“You haven’t told me who Dr. Charles Drew was.”“Dr. Charles Drew,” she told…

  • Gender identity in the twenty-first century

    Piper HaitsukaKailua-Kona, Hawaii, USA Identity characterizes who a person is. Physical, mental, or chemical identity can have an array of diverse meanings. Gender and sex are two very different concepts that influence identity, but are often confused as being interchangeable words.1 Sex is a biological classification, whereas gender is a social science concept with a…