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 IyerSingapore 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. Réquiem Life has fragrance eternally lostPure symphony now cut shortBroken hearts disparate and newDon’t know how to restart anewThis body…

  • Para site

    Sophia WilsonNew Zealand they burrow, gnaw and niggleI scratch, claw and wrigglethey linger, lurk and loomI pick, and probe and groomthey crawl, revolt, returnI rip and pull and squirmthey bite, prick, sting and tunnel under skinI battle, bawl, hand-wringthey glide though veins, gnaw holes in heartprotrude as lumps and tear apart. they nip with pincersI…

  • Sleep

    Sophia WilsonNew Zealand The fabric of sleepdescends like a tired paw,turns off our lights,offers mouth-to-mouth oblivion. For a while we can pretend we’re like stars andthat we don’t reside here anymore,between impossible grindstonesand the birth-death quandary; We drift weightless as falling leaves,over silver-scaled lakes;sprout fins and tresses andtransform to moon-mirrors until consciousnessdrops its arsenal, hauls us…

  • 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 besmirched…

  • Gordon Morgan Holmes MD., FRS.

    JMS PearceHull, England “Beneath the exterior of a martinetthere 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 century. In a golden era of…

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

    John Hayman Melbourne, Australia Tom Wedgwood (1771-1805) was born into the famous pottery dynasty as the third surviving son of Josiah Wedgwood (1730-1795) and his wife Sarah (1734-1815). Sarah was also a Wedgwood, a distant cousin of her husband.1 Tom was ill for all of his short life, a life recorded by his biographer, Richard…

  • 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:…