Hektoen International

A Journal of Medical Humanities

Month: November 2019

  • Embalming

    The practice of embalming the dead goes back at least to the ancient Egyptians, who wanted to ensure that they arrived in the afterworld in a presentable state as well as having their sarcophagi and pyramids provided with all the necessities required for that long journey. The page shown here is from The Champion Text…

  • An interrupted dissection

    The increasing interest in teaching anatomy by dissecting the human cadaver had a sordid side—the practice of body snatching, the illegal removal of corpses from graves, often by organized gangs of so-called resurrectionists. Body snatching was first recorded in Italy as early as the fourteenth century and as the centuries went on it became widespread…

  • Pediatric nurse

    Nurses are often the first point of contact for patients entering the medical system. They perform essential work, and often spend more time with patients then physicians do, ensuring treatment is performed and the body heals. Their essential work can include tending to children who may simply need a moment of attention, as in this…

  • The unity of nurses

    This postcard, published in the midst of World War I in 1915, represents the unity of nurses across nations. In war time, many military nurses cared for wounded soldiers regardless of country of origin thus setting military nurses and other field medics apart into an army of their own. This independence was partially out of…

  • Nurse reading

    This Turkish postcard shows a nurse reading a letter to a wounded man. The nurse appears to smile, even as her patient remains seemingly indifferent to whatever news she has brought him. The postcard conjures a number of questions. How was he injured? Is he far from home? Who has written him? Where is his…

  • Lovis Corinth and the sick father

    Franz Heinrich Lovis Corinth (1858-1925) began his career as a realistic painter, showing things on canvas as they are seen in reality. Thus in His Father on his Sickbed (Stadel Museum, Frankfurt) we see the father in bed, sick but perhaps not mortally so. His loving daughter keeps watch by the bedside. She has arranged…

  • Did Salvador Dali follow the prolactin discovery in his painting of the fountain of milk?

    Michael YafiHouston, Texas, United States The Fountain of Milk Spreading Itself Uselessly on Three Shoes by Salvador Dali remains one of his most enigmatic works. It shows a nude woman on a pedestal, milk flowing from her breasts, while an emaciated man is staring at her.1 As he was completing the painting, Dali may have…

  • The woman doctor as medical and moral authority: Helen Brent MD

    Carol-Ann FarkasBoston, Massachussetts, United States In the late nineteenth century, many women who dared to study and practice medicine tempered that radical move with the reassuring insistence that, by virtue of their sex, they could combine medical knowledge with feminine, maternal guidance for the physical and moral well-being of their patients. The gender essentialism of…

  • Gymnopédie

    Mark TanNorthwest Deanery, UK Oblique et coupant l’ombre un torrent éclatantRuisselait en flots d’or sur la dalle polieOù les atomes d’ambre au feu se miroitantMêlaient leur sarabande à la gymnopédie [English translation]: Slanting and shadow-cutting a bursting streamTrickled in gusts of gold on the shiny flagstoneWhere the amber atoms in the fire gleamingMingled their sarabande…

  • “Blood made White”: The relationship between blood and breastmilk in early modern England

    Jennifer EvansSara ReadUnited Kingdom The early modern body was thought to be composed of and ordered by an intricate balance of fluids, the most important of which was blood. Blood was universally understood to have two origins: the heart and the liver. Together with the brain, these organs formed what Galen called “the noble organs.”…