Hektoen International

A Journal of Medical Humanities

Month: February 2019

  • Joseph Warren: The forgotten founder

    Kevin R. LoughlinBoston, Massachusetts, United States “If Warren had lived, Washington would have remained an obscurity.”—Peter Oliver, former chief justice of the Massachusetts Supreme Court On June 17, a late spring New England morning, thousands of Bostonians will begin their day by traveling over the Zakim Bridge. Few will be aware of the significance of…

  • The doctor becomes the patient: an internist’s journey from skepticism to gratitude

    William Shimp Plantation, Florida, United States Nothing grabs our attention more than being flattened by a diagnosis of significant illness. Mine arrived just a few weeks ago. For decades I had harbored a large hiatal hernia. I had no symptoms, even though my upper stomach had pushed through the diaphragm to occupy much of my left…

  • Lost in translation

    Jonathan XianHouston, Texas, United States At the start of residency, you should make a list of five things you value most and think carefully about which ones you can live without. Cross them off one by one until only one is left, and that one is what you get to keep. My one thing was…

  • Charles VIII: the king who bumped his head

    Charles VIII was proclaimed king of France in 1470 at the age of thirteen and is remembered in history chiefly for invading Italy to assert his claim to the throne of Naples. He set in motion, by this invasion, a process that left Italy languishing under foreign domination for more than 300 years. During his…

  • A good man

    Tuhina RamanPhiladelphia, PA, USA My heart sank as soon as I saw it—tumor nodules in the trachea and a mass eroding through the stent in his airway. I had been hoping against hope. It is always difficult losing a favorite patient to a bad disease. I had biopsied and stented his airway five weeks earlier.…

  • Honoré Fragonard, anatomist: Artistic embalmer

    Honoré Fragonard (1732–1799), cousin of the much more famous Rococo painter, trained to be a surgeon but then pursued a career as an anatomist. He first worked in Lyon at the world’s first veterinary school, then served for six years as director of the veterinary school established by Louis XV in 1765 in a suburb…

  • Rachel Fleming and the non-reality of “racial types”

    Barry BoginUnited Kingdom During the early twentieth century several longitudinal studies of child growth were initiated in the United States and Europe. Such longitudinal studies take repeated measurements of the same children, usually once a year, and from the data both size and rate of growth (velocity) can be calculated. The first such study in…

  • A bit of irony: Sir William Wilde and Oscar Wilde

    James L. FranklinChicago, Illinois, United States Early in the afternoon of November 30, 1900, thirty-six hours after he had lapsed into a coma, a man named Sebastian Melmoth died at the Hotel d’Alsace in the Rue des Beaux Art. His assumed name eluded few as to his true identity, Oscar Wilde. The cause of his…

  • Qatar’s Sidra Hospital and Damien Hirst’s Miraculous Journey

    Sally MetzlerChicago, IL, USA Amazing, inspiring art and architecture seem to appear almost daily in Doha, Qatar, the host city of the 2022 World Cup. The Sidra Hospital for women and children soars among the many shining examples of architecture throughout this small Middle Eastern Gulf country. The building is graceful and sleek. Interior gardens…

  • Medicine in Greek mythology

    JMS PearceHull, England, UK Some of the earliest ideas about health and disease lie in Greek mythology. The Greeks of prehistory told, retold, and often remoulded their tales of immortal gods and goddesses that were imaginative, symbolic creations. Stories of the gods probably started with Minoan and Mycenaean writers of the eighteenth century BC. These…