Hektoen International

A Journal of Medical Humanities

Month: January 2019

  • Byzantine physicians

    Greek physicians dominated medicine for almost two thousand years, beginning with the school of Hippocrates, of Herophilus and Erasistratus in Alexandria, and continuing after the Roman conquest. Celsus and Galen were in Rome; Dioscorides was in the Roman army during the reign of the Emperor Nero. Aretaeus of Cappadocia practiced sometime during the second century.…

  • Washington and his spectacles

    Ronald FishmanChicago, Illinois, United States After accepting the surrender of General Cornwallis at Yorktown, Virginia, Washington took most of the Continental Army back up to the Northeast to cover the main British army based around New York City. In the winter of 1782-1783, with the peace negotiations going on in Paris, the encampment was located…

  • Gingerbread

    Olga Diganchina Astana, Kazakhstan   “Happy Memories” by Ekaterina Chingilidi. 2014. Published with Permission. The two most important days in your life are the day you are born and the day you find out why. -Mark Twain   Patients had mostly become faceless for me. I had treated and discharged so many of them as…

  • Reading the brain in John Keats’s “Ode to Psyche”

    Kathryne DycusMadrid, Spain The Romantic poet John Keats wrote in a letter dated May 18, 1818, “I am glad at not having given away my medical books, which I shall look over again to keep alive the little I knew towards that work.”1 Though the Romantic poet abandoned a career in medicine, the knowledge he…

  • Psychological preparation for war: Early life experiences

    Jack RiggsMorgantown, West Virginia, United States I suspect that few early life experiences fully prepare one psychologically for the realities of war. Mine certainly did not. However, my introduction to post-traumatic stress and moral injury, frequent war sequelae, occurred at home while I was growing up. When I was nine years old, my younger brother…

  • A very interesting case

    Anjiya Sulaiman Karachi, Pakistan   Image by Khan Osama bin Fraz By my fourth year of medical school I had learned to distill patients into a pure clinical form. Individual characteristics are routinely and expertly tweezed and condensed into an intricate framework of pathology, pharmacology, and medical jargon: we call them “cases.” I met S…

  • They would rather go alone

    Kera Morris Denver, Colorado, USA   La Solitude du Christ by French artist Alphonse Osbert, 1897. Wikimedia Commons/Public Domain Dad had been in and out of hospice for years. It had not occurred to me that you could go into hospice and come out on your own two feet, but it was apparently the case. When I got…

  • Sir George Frederick Still (1868-1941): the constant pediatrician

    Joseph deBettencourt Chicago, Illinois, United States   Portrait of George Frederic Still, while he was working at King’s College Hospital in the early 1900’s. By Gerald Festus Kelly, date unknown, UK Wellcome Collection. licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license (CC BY 4.0) Coursing through the heart of Salisbury, a historic cathedral city in Wiltshire, England,…

  • What could have been

    Gordon SunDowney, California, United States       By Stephanie Chen and Gordon Sun Every year, there are 400 stories like these. The second-year medical student. The social butterfly of her 106 classmates, yet her bubbly personality masks the loneliness of living on one coast after spending the first twenty-five years of her life on…