Hektoen International

A Journal of Medical Humanities

Art Essays

Zohaib Ahmad
The perfection of illness

William R. Albury and George M. Weisz
Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec and medicine: A triumph over infirmity
The model for Albrecht Dürer’s Praying Hands

Glenn Arendts
Falls and art: an evolving story 

Niyi Awofeso and Anu Rammohan
Kindred paradigms: community arts and health advocacy in HIV/AIDS activism

Sarah Bahr
Medical deafness or the madness of war: Goya’s motivation for creating the Black Paintings

Alan W. Bates
The anatomy of beauty in nineteenth-century England

Michael Baum
The beauty of nature and the nature of beauty

Markley Boyer
William Sanger – the artist as health activist

Emily Boyle
The art of consumption – TB and John Lavery
A picture of ill-health: the illness of Elizabeth Siddal

Giovanni Ceccarelli
Art and alcohol 
Love and death; painting the farewell

Enrique Chaves-Carballo
Abram Belskie: sculptor of medical medallions

Chris Clark
Signs of diseases in art

Lawrence Climo
Art appreciation under the radar

Elizabeth Colledge
Tobias and the Angel—miracle or medical? 

J.T.H. Connor
The striking social tableaux vivants of Lejaren à Hiller (1920s to 1940s)

Vincent Cracolici
Lord Howard Florey and the use of visual art in medicine

Margo Davis
The power of the creative

Vincent P. de Luise
Ghirlandaio, humanism, and truth: the portrait of an elderly man and young boy

Laurinda Dixon
Bosch’s Stone Operation: meaning, medicine, and morality
Art and the myth of the “wandering womb”

Jeanne Dsouza
The Potato Eaters: brushstrokes of sickness and sustenance

Mary Lynn Everson and Greg Halvorsen Schreck
The Marjorie Kovler Center quilts

Thom Ferrier
Cruel to be kind

Howard Fischer
Pieter Bruegel and The Parable of the Blind
Ensor’s use of emesis in art
Depiction of defecation in the works of Pieter Bruegel
Diagnosing Mona Lisa

Daniel Gelfman
A detailed depiction of a “crime scene” circa 1455

Florence Gelo
The art of loss
The painter and the potter: voices in color and texture
The vulnerability of love
Gently, Doctor, tell me what you see

Katrina Genuis
The Isenheim Altarpiece and ‘homeopathic’ hospital art

Nancy Gershman
Lost Babies: how a photosculpture is changing the etiquette of consolation
Campaigning for Craig: the healing power of a legacy T-shirt

Mark Gilbert and James E. Van Arsdall
Portraiture in the head and neck cancer clinic: A patient’s perspective

Frank Gonzalez-Crussi
Bronzino and the wages of sin
Lovesickness in art and medicine

Prudence L. Gourguechon
The Dead Mother Series of Egon Schiele: psychoanalytic use of an artist’s image

Rebecca Grossman-Kahn
Arthur Bispo do Rosário: creation in psychosis

Sarah Hartley
Architecture and the French hospital

Elizabeth Irvin
Seasick: Lessons in human anatomy from Hyman Bloom’s The Hull (1952)

Farrah Jawad
Wounded deer—medical aspects of the life of Frida Kahlo

Stephanie Jiang
Memento mori in medicine

Seth Judson
Rodin’s Large Left Hand 1903

Nicholas Kang
Letters from the asylum
The Portrait of Doctor Gachet

Zeynel Karcioglu
Edgar Degas’ light sensitivity and its effects on his art

Viney Kirpal
Using art to educate about breast cancer

Peter Kopplin
Monet and his cataracts

Maria S. Landaeta, Aldo L. Schenone, and Gregory W. Rutecki
Art, Cristobal Rojas, and tuberculosis: a Latin American cultural experience

Jorge A. Lazareff
The brain

Elizabeth Lee
Therapeutic beauty

Jeffrey M. Levine
The two hemispheres of medicine

Ruth Margalit and Christopher Leet
Finding a Voice

Jessica Lobo
Michelangelo’s The Creation of Adam

Kevin R. Loughlin
Strabismo di Venere—Michelangelo’s David

Eliette Markhbein
WHACK’ed … and then everything was different: portraits of traumatic brain injury survivors
Capturing recovery from trauma on canvas

Andrea Marks
An image in time: medical photography in dermatology

Stephen Martin
Anatomy and pathology in Zurbaran’s Jewish and Christian figures
Ophthalmology in Regency era China: a portrait of Thomas Richardson Colledge by George Chinnery
The painting of the Good Samaritan in Bracciano Castle
Blindness and visual sensory distortion in Thomas Bewick’s woodcuts
Medical monuments in St. John’s Church, Kolkata FALL ’23

Stephen Martin and Aidan Jones
Anatomy and psychology in George Stubbs’ portrait of Joseph Banks FALL ’23

Jimin Mathew and Lucy Samuel
Gav’s Frida Kahlo: Heroine of Pain

JH McAuley
Migrainous scotomata in art

Adil Menon
Manga as medical critique

Sally Metzler
A Night with Venus, a lifetime with Mercury: syphilis among the British aristocracy in William Hogarth’s marriage à-la-mode
Death by Dysentery? Artist Frank Russell Wadsworth in Madrid
Monet’s illnesses: beyond cataracts

Emilio Mordini
Tithonus and Eos

Alejandro Ortiz Bullé Goyri and Carlos Valverde-R
The anonymous Olmec artisan and Velázquez
Francisco Goya’s “black period”

Roger Paden
Philosophy and Medicine

Michelle Paff
The tracheotomy

JMS Pearce
Art and Medicine
The anatomy of Michelangelo (1475-1564)
Mental illness in art
Richard Dadd: art and madness 
Leonardo’s Vitruvian Man
The vision of a visionary: JMW Turner RA new

Arabella Proffer
Imaging in medicine: fine art to medical art

Susan Brunn Puett and J. David Puett
Partners in healing: an early renaissance painting depicting the partnership of the divine with the physicians Cosmas and Damian

Mark Ransom
The artistic depiction of Christ’s crucifixion: history meets biomechanics

Cody Ritz
Ellen Powell Tiberino’s The Operation

Nicolas Robles
Diego Rivera and Hernan Cortes

Vicent Rodilla, Alicia López-Castellano, and Christina Ribes-Vallés
Tooth extraction in art: from the dental key to the forceps 

Irving Rosen
The special art of Vienna

Julia van Rosmalen and Thomas van Gulik
The wounds of Christ and Prometheus – two of a kind?

Douglas Russell
Mindfulness in art: Robert Rauschenberg’s White Painting

Gregory Rutecki
When the sensory lens is an artistic prism: the brain, Kandinsky, and multisensory art
Abbott Handerson Thayer’s art and fin de siècle American culture

Mary T. Shannon
Crossing boundaries: visual representations of death and dying

Adam R. Shapiro
The Gross Clinic as religious painting: Eakins, affect, and anatomy

Sam Shuster
Darwin at the Chinese opera
Michelangelo’s David and the anatomical politics of religious art

Scott Sikkema
Piero della Francesca and Paul Klee (and cancer)

Mirjana Stojkovic-Ivkovic
Alcohol and the art of David Terniers Jr
Art therapy: a historical perspective
Traumatic experience and creativity: René Magritte

Kelley Swain
Stitches as mending, stitches as healing

Kateryna Tsoi
How black turned white

Kierstin Utter and Kyle Utter
Wyeth and the symbolism of immobility

Sathyaraj Venkatesan and Anu Mary Peter
Life is a game: visual metaphors in Brian Fies’s Mom’s Cancer

Natalia Angeles Vieyra
Illuminating addiction: morphinomania in fin-de-siècle visual culture

Yvonne Pepin-Wakefield
Color, image and symbol: memory recalling the 1990 Iraqi invasion of Kuwait through drawings

Christopher Walker
Painter, interrupted: Mary Cassatt and illness

Simon Wein
Surrealist art and the resolution of absurd

Caroline Wellbery
A painful but tender embrace: Robert Pope’s Aesculapius

Göran Wettrell
“The Sick Child” in Scandinavian art

Steve Wheeler
A proliferation of monsters: art of the weird as expressions of anxiety in Britain and Japan

Eric Will
The incidental reach of pattern in Medicine and Art

Ian Williams
Graphic medicine

Mildred Wilson
Passion, paint, and pain: The journey of Robert Seldon Duncanson
Mark Rothko and the dialogue in his mind
The paradoxical life and art of Robert Colescott

Sam Woodworth
A trip to the museum

Serena Yue
Dear brainstem, you remind me of the Mona Lisa