Hektoen International

A Journal of Medical Humanities

Month: October 2019

  • Forever young: The history and promise of young blood therapeutics

    Kelly ChenBirmingham, Alabama, United States Two mice waddle in unison. They eat together, drink together, and nest together. Their closeness is no act of nature—for on closer inspection a delicate line of sutures is seen connecting them from forelimb to hindlimb. They are linked by parabiosis, the surgical joining of two organisms. Parabiosis was first…

  • John of Arderne, founder of English surgery

    John of Arderne (1307–1392) practiced in London during the reigns of Edward II and Edward III, surviving several cycles of the Black Death, and serving as military surgeon in the Hundred Years’ War as well as in European conflicts in which gunpowder was used for the first time. Believed to have studied at the University of Montpellier,…

  • Réquiem

    Prasad Iyer Singapore   Poet’s statement: This poem expresses the feelings of parents who have recently lost a child to cancer. The first stanza deals with sadness, the second with guilt, and the last one with acceptance.   Death with a Child, from the series The Five Deaths. Stefano della Bella. 1648. Fine Arts Museum…

  • Para site

    Sophia Wilson New Zealand   Photo by Camila Quintero Franco on Unsplash they burrow, gnaw and niggle I scratch, claw and wriggle they linger, lurk and loom I pick, and probe and groom they crawl, revolt, return I rip and pull and squirm they bite, prick, sting and tunnel under skin I battle, bawl, hand-wring…

  • Sleep

    Sophia Wilson New Zealand   Photo by Snapwire on Pexels The fabric of sleep descends like a tired paw, turns off our lights, offers mouth-to-mouth oblivion. For a while we can pretend we’re like stars and that we don’t reside here anymore, between impossible grindstones and the birth-death quandary; We drift weightless as falling leaves,…

  • Ford Madox Brown: His model and his medical grandfather

    Few ladies would look their best when painted in bed with their hair down while recovering from a dangerous infection. But Emma Hill looks beautiful, resting, her coiffure immaculate, sheets unruffled, a flower in her hand. In 1848 while still in her teens, she had become the model and then mistress of Ford Madox Brown,…

  • The old women of Francisco Goya

      Time is running out for these two decrepit old crones who clearly have seen better days. In this 1820 painting titled El Tiempo, Francisco Goya shows the figure of Cronos hovering over the two women, ready to sweep them away with a broom into the memory of time. The woman in white, her face…

  • Gordon Morgan Holmes MD., FRS.

    JMS Pearce Hull, England Figure 1: Gordon Holmes “Beneath the exterior of a martinet there was an Irish heart of gold” Wilder Penfield Gordon Holmes (1876-1965) was born in Castlebellingham, Ireland. He was named after his father, a landowner, descended from a Yorkshire family that had settled in King’s County (County Offaly) in the mid-seventeenth…

  • The illness of Tom Wedgwood: A tragic episode in a family saga

    John Hayman Melbourne, Australia Figure 1. Tom Wedgwood, from the frontispiece of Tom Wedgwood, the First Photographer, by R.B. Litchfield (1903). The inscription reads: “From a chalk drawing belonging to Miss Wedgwood, of Leith Hill Place. Artist unknown.” Print in public domain. Tom Wedgwood (1771-1805) was born into the famous pottery dynasty as the third…

  • Whose blood is it anyway?

    Felicity SelfPacific North West I am ashamed. I am ashamed because I have only given blood once in my entire adult life. I am forty-eight years old and eligible to donate blood since I was seventeen, which means I have had thirty-one years in which I could have given blood. And I know the importance:…