Hektoen International

A Journal of Medical Humanities

Month: January 2020

  • Blood and pernicious anemia

    Omar AlzarkaliBatavia, New York, United States Blood is powerful. The mere sight of it can cause an adult to fall to the ground; as a medical student, I have seen it happen. Faces go pale and legs can no longer carry their weight as they succumb to this primitive reflex. Perhaps this vasovagal response happens…

  • Health, wellness, and their determinants

    Travis KirkwoodOttawa, Ontario, Canada John Snow is often referred to as the father of modern epidemiology. His work is certainly worthy of this1 and present-day public health2 still strives toward upstream approaches, primordial prevention, and redress on the social determinants of health. It seems however that the core lessons from John Snow back in 1854 have…

  • Hidden heroes

    Candace ThomasSalt Lake City, Utah, United States Being a blood banker is an interesting job and one not many understand. “So you draw people’s blood?” No, that’s a phlebotomist. “Oh, but you work in a hospital. Are you a nurse?” No. “If I donate blood, can I request you?” Still no. Everything a blood banker…

  • Blood at Maidan—Kyiv, Ukraine 2014

    Olena KaguiRhode Island, United States There was no physical blood present when I stepped onto Maidan Square in Kyiv, Ukraine. Yet signs of it were everywhere. Bullet holes pierced the shields and helmets that memorialized the fallen. Flowers, the color of blood, sat inside the cavern of the helmet. The space, once occupied by a…

  • Red Cross targets emotional impact of climate change

    Sharon CohenNewtown, Connecticut, United States Natural disasters are growing in frequency and intensity worldwide. Mother Nature demonstrated her devastating fury in over 300 global events of intense wind, rain, floods, and fire in 2019, and the 2020s should see more of the same. Other issues, such as excessive heat and drought, are causing diminished availability…

  • Training wheels

    Shannon KernaghanAlberta, Canada From the beginning of Paul’s dance with doctors, I have sat next to him and squeezed his hand through the pronouncement of hemochromatosis. The first doctor said his high iron level, if left untreated, would make him sicker than he already felt, possibly kill him. The laundry list of complications started with…

  • The history and significance of voluntary, non-remunerated blood donation

    Hans Erik HeierOslo, Norway “While we have now begun to understand the cost of everything, we are in danger of losing track of the value of anything”—Ann Oakley and John Ashton, 1993 Voluntary, non-remunerated blood donation in catastrophe September 11, 2001: Two passenger airplanes are crashed into the World Trade Towers in New York, and…

  • What did Dorothy Reed See?

    Sara NassarCairo, Egypt “They say that genius is an infinite capacity for taking pains.”1—Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, A Study in Scarlet Dorothy Mabel Reed Mendenhall opened the doors of medicine at a time when women were considered incapable of managing this “gory” field. Although Reed’s eponymous Reed-Sternberg cell was a pivotal discovery for the diagnosis…

  • Wilder Penfield

    JMS PearceHull, England, United Kingdom Wilder Penfield was not only a great surgeon and a great scientist, he was an even greater human being. -Sir George Pickering, Regius Professor of Medicine at Oxford University Wilder Penfield (1891-1976) (Fig. 1) was the most gifted pioneer of Canadian neurosurgery. He devised effective surgery for controlling intractable epilepsy…

  • From eponym to advocate: The story of Stephen Christmas

    Peter Kopplin Toronto, Canada The 1952 Christmas issue of the British Medical Journal (BMJ) had an unusual but fitting article. It was titled “Christmas Disease, a condition previously mistaken for haemophilia.”1 The seminal patient was five-year-old Stephen Christmas and the title suggested an unusual lack of British reserve. Rosemary Biggs and colleagues were giving the…