Hektoen International

A Journal of Medical Humanities

Month: April 2019

  • Avulsions

    Torree McGowan Culver, Oregon, United States   The Chasm between the Then and The Now. Photo by the author, taken near Denali National Park. There are moments in life that serve as a dividing line. These instants sharply incise our worlds into before and after, the then and the now. Moments shimmer like a crystalline…

  • The time between our hands

    Samantha Below Milwaukee, Wisconsin, United States   The hospital. Photo by Piron Guillaume on Unsplash Thread passes from the tools in your hands to be pulled by mine. You suture the vessels. I clear the path of knots. Our posture is separated by inches, our hearts by hand-breadths. Our hands are identical in the vibrations…

  • Defining medicine

    Amira Athanasios Walnut Creek, California, United States   Image by Amira Athanasios Defining Medicine. The bolded script screamed at me from a massive poster hung six stories high along the side of the university hospital on my first day of medical school. Like most millennials, I pursued medicine with a deep conviction to make a…

  • Enfreakment in the medicalization of difference

    Camille Kroll Chicago, Illinois, USA   An advertisement for the Barnum and Bailey circus, of which P.T. Barnum was a cofounder Credit: Wellcome Collection License: Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY 4.0) terms and conditions Exalted showman P.T. Barnum was thrilled when he discovered Joice Heth, a severely disabled elderly slave woman. In grotesque detail, he…

  • Character, genius, and a missing person in medicine

    Carrie BarronAustin, Texas, USA “He is the most un-talked about, unacknowledged, unknown and most important figure in the African American community…A genius.”1 In 1944, a surgeon with his trusted guide by his side performed the very first open-heart surgery on a fifteen-month-old, nine-pound girl. 1930, Nashville. A twenty-year old African-American man, honors student, and son…

  • The incidental reach of pattern in Medicine and Art

    Eric WillUnited Kingdom “Ah, but a man’s reach should exceed his grasp,Or what’s a(n artist’s) Heaven for? . . .”— After Robert Browning’s “Andrea del Sarto,” 1855 1,2 (author’s italics) The bedside is a comfortable thinking space for clinicians. On occasion, just there, they bring to mind the clinical patterns that point to a differential…

  • The promise of a perfect smile

    Liz Jones Aberystwyth, Wales, UK   Enamel plaque advertising the dentist Templar Malins, featuring the Novocaine- based anaesthetic Sinedol. Cardiff, circa 1907. Teeth. 17-May – 16 Sept. 2018, Wellcome Collection, London, UK My gran would pull a miniature silver blade from its mother-of-pearl handle and slice the apple into six pieces to share between the…

  • How not to make the consultation sexy

    Claire Elliott London, Ukrain   A lecherous doctor taking the pulse of an old woman while fondling a young one. Coloured etching by T. Rowlandson, 1810. Wellcome Collection Why do patients allow physicians to carry out an intimate examination barely ten minutes after they have met? As John Berger wrote in 1967, “We give the…

  • Our divisive political climate and our ability to treat patients without bias

    Shane SobrioWashington, DC, United States Politics are divisive. That should not be a shock to anyone. However, the political climate in the USA at the moment is more than just divisive. Lately, there seems to be an underlying disdain for those we disagree with, in a way that even my grandparents say they have never…

  • Amnesia remembered

    Karen Langer New York, New York, United States   Amnesia, the medical record noted. He developed amnesia after a mechanical fall on black ice, resulting in a mild traumatic brain injury and a hip fracture. After surgery to repair the hip, there was onset of metabolic encephalopathy, and between the encephalopathy and the brain injury…