Hektoen International

A Journal of Medical Humanities

Category: Art Flashes

  • Down syndrome through the centuries in art

    Bojana CokićZajecar, Serbia  Though fully described by John Langdon Down in 1862, this syndrome of delayed growth, characteristic facial features, and intellectual impairment has been featured in numerous works of art since antiquity. References BOJANA COKIĆ, MD, is a pediatrician specialized in clinical genetics at the Children’s Hospital in Zajecar, Serbia, where she was been…

  • Obesity and art

    Bojana CokićZajecar, Serbia Obesity is the oldest and most common metabolic disorder of humans, as shown even by the sculptures of ancient civilizations, the Greek caryatids, and Egyptian sphinxes and mummies. Many artists have painted it on their canvases as seen through the prism of their artistic eye and in accordance with the prevalent conceptions…

  • Reflections on medicine and art

    Bojana CokićZajecar, Serbia Oscar Wilde believed that life imitates art and that what we perceive is beautiful only because “art” has taught us to regard it as such. But if indeed “life is art,” as Maxim Gorki wrote, “to be found in all its beauty and joy,” then clearly life has been with us since…

  • Saint Apollonia, patron saint of odontology

    Anna LantzStockholm, Sweden Saint Apollonia was from a Greek family and lived in Alexandria, where she was martyred in the year 249 for refusing to renounce her Christian faith. On having her teeth pulled out and jaw shattered, she threw herself into the pyre that had been lit for her.1 During the Middle Ages she was…

  • Portrait of a peasant

    Alexandru Gh. SonocSibiu, Romania This peasant is shown wearing a green shirt, decorated on the shoulders with a red line and at the neck with a white lace collar, as well as a wide brown hat. He is disfigured by a tumor on the right side of his face. A second tumor is located on…

  • Medical art from the Brukenthal Museum, Sibiu, Romania

    Alexandru SonocSibiu, Romania Several works in the European collection of the Brukenthal National Museum are of interest to the history of medicine. Most of them are works by Dutch and Flemish painters, mainly from the 17th-century: The Summer by Jakob Jordaens, The Trapped Peasant by Adriaen van der Venne, The Bloodletting and The Diagnosis by…

  • The Summer

    Alexandru Gh. SonocSibiu, Romania On the right side, darkened perhaps to suggest an approaching storm, a woman with bare breast is looking up to the left. On the left side a younger woman is holding a child on her left arm, pointing down with the right hand. Between both women another one in a wide straw…

  • Evidence of a skull trepanning

    Alexandru Gh. SonocSibiu, Romania The man shown here wears a blue velvet hat with a white feather and a brown-reddish cloak. Around his neck he has a brocade scarf in red, ocher, and blue. He has long hair, a short moustache, and a short square-shaped facial hair spot (Fliege) on the lower lip. The right…

  • The village’s physician

    Alexandru SonocSibiu, Romania In a peasant house a sick woman lies in bed. An old physician is writing a prescription on a table on which there are already three small bottles of medicine. He is surrounded by the patient’s relatives, concerned but full of hope, all wearing traditional peasant costumes. An old man and a…

  • The trapped peasant

    Alexandru Gh. SonocSibiu, Romania A strange looking dentist (tall hat, long hair, goatee, sword, tall boots) is pulling a peasant’s tooth. Behind the peasant, a woman (traditionally considered as his wife, but more likely a prostitute) opens a purse hanging together with a dagger on his belt, and picks some coins from it. Behind the…