Hektoen International

A Journal of Medical Humanities

Month: May 2021

  • Morris Fishbein, MD—foe of four-flushers, flimflammers, and fakes

    Laura King Atlanta, Georgia, United States     Morris Fishbein. Harris & Ewing, photographer. [ca. 1938]. Via Library of Congress  Born in St. Louis, Missouri, on July 22, 1889, and raised in Indianapolis, Morris Fishbein emerged from his humble origins as the second eldest of eight children born to a Jewish immigrant tin peddler (Benjamin…

  • Viktor Frankl: the meaning of a life

    Anne Jacobson Oak Park, Illinois, United States   Figure 1. Viktor Frankl, 1965. Photo by Prof. Dr. Franz Vesely via Wikimedia. CC BY-SA 3.0 DE. Not long before the Dachau concentration camp was liberated in April 1945, Viktor Emil Frankl was seriously ill with typhus and writing feverishly on stolen scraps of paper, determined to…

  • The patient who provided his own placebo and fully recovered

    Lawrence Climo Lincoln, Massachusetts, United States   Photo by Zach Lezniewicz on Unsplash My elderly patient began his treatment by complaining about how his mother had behaved towards him in his boyhood. She had hurt him with her name-calling and humiliating insults, and these had apparently resulted in a lifetime of a negativism towards her. He…

  • Tutorial for surgeons by Lawrence Peter Berra

    Jayant RadhakrishnanChicago, Illinois, United States Since the turn of this century, and more so over the past decade, surgeons at various stages of their careers have been dissatisfied with their work and the surgical lifestyle. The main reason for their dissatisfaction seems to be an ever-increasing burden of administrative work, leaving them with little time…

  • Early lessons

    Howard Fischer Uppsala, Sweden   Virginia Emergency Room, image from “Historic VCU: A VCU Images Special Collection” VCU Libraries from Richmond, VA, USA, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons Finally, it was my first day in a US hospital after studying medicine in Europe for five and a half years. A medical education at the…

  • St. Audrey Etheldrida

    JMS Pearce Hull, England, UK   Medicine is full of strange tales, some with unforeseen ramifications. I recently discovered that the origins of the useful word “tawdry” surprisingly lay in a tumor of the throat—nature unspecified—of a seventh-century saint. St. Audrey, Etheldrida, or Æþelðryþ, born c. 636 AD, was an English princess generally referred to…

  • Parental grief

    Ellen Zhang Boston, Massachusetts, United States   Photo by RODNAE Productions from Pexels We didn’t know the ending because this was us back then. Sometimes wanting is not enough. When the oncologist spoke. While you started to cry only because your mother did. As we cradled you gently. Beyond the singularity of such moments. There…

  • The striking social tableaux vivants of Lejaren à Hiller (1920s to 1940s)

    J.T.H. ConnorSt. John’s, Newfoundland, Canada In 1927 the Davis & Geck (DG) company commissioned artist Lejaren à Hiller to promote its surgical sutures. Hiller’s subsequent advertising campaign of modern art photographs was distributed to doctors across the United States and Canada during the 1920s to 1940s in simulated leather portfolios titled Sutures in Ancient Surgery…

  • Bristol Children’s Hospital and esophageal atresia

    Richard Spicer Bristol, United Kingdom   Fig 1. Bristol Children’s Hospital 1885-2001. Photo by the author. Bristol Children’s Hospital The Children’s Hospital in Bristol began as the Free Institution for Diseases of Women and Children in 1857. In 1885 it moved to a purpose-built neo-Gothic building (Fig.1) and continued to treat women and children on…

  • William Halse Rivers Rivers

    JMS Pearce Hull, England   Figure 1 WHR Rivers in public domain, from Wikimedia William Rivers MD FRCP FRS (1864-1922) William Rivers (Fig 1) was a most unusual man, a polymath with careers in neuroscience, ethnology, and psychology. But above all—notwithstanding or perhaps because of personal nervous constraints—he was a man of originality and great…