Hektoen International

A Journal of Medical Humanities

Category: Education

  • From here

    Rasa RafieColorado, United States In college, we were the top of our class, the winners of scholarships and awards, the leaders of campus organizations. We were the ones our classmates looked up to and the names our teachers used as examples. We worked hard and those efforts delivered results—good grades, MCAT scores, and finally medical…

  • Wounding words

    Charlotte GrinbergCambridge, Massachusetts, USA In college, I majored in anthropology. I was interested in understanding the political, social, legal, and economic forces that influence behavior. As language is inherently related to consciousness and culture, its study was central to my learning. In my medical anthropology course, for example, we spent hours discussing the linguistic difference…

  • Simulation-based education and training: The reproduction of expert knowledge from military to healthcare applications

    Marco LuchettiMilano, Italy Introduction Simulation can be defined as a technique or method to artificially reproduce the conditions of a phenomenon.1 Simulation-based training and education are designed to teach individuals the basic elements of a system by observing the results of actions or decisions through a feedback process generated by the simulation itself. Participants are…

  • A house call

    Martin DukeMystic, Connecticut, United States Many years ago, in the mid 1980s, when I was still in clinical practice, I made a house call accompanied by a second year medical student who was coming to my office one day a week as part of her course in physical diagnosis. The patient I had been called…

  • A Dickensian medical education

    Gregory RuteckiLyndhurst, Ohio, United States My four grandparents were Polish immigrants who came to America in the early twentieth century. They had no formal education, neither in Poland nor in their new home in Chicago, but worked hard and saved money to pay for the college education of their grandchildren. Life was not easy for…

  • A quiet night

    Henry BairPalo Alto, California, United States It was the end of the week, the middle of the night, and the beginning of my ER shift. All was quiet, and I was studying at the nurses’ station, still riding the high of having just aced a cardiology exam that was widely regarded as one of the…

  • The time between our hands

    Samantha BelowMilwaukee, Wisconsin, United States Thread passes from the tools in your hands to be pulled by mine. You suture the vessels. I clear the path of knots. Our posture is separated by inches, our hearts by hand-breadths. Our hands are identical in the vibrations of our nervous systems; mine reflect a lack of experience,…

  • Defining medicine

    Amira AthanasiosWalnut Creek, California, United States Defining Medicine. The bolded script screamed at me from a massive poster hung six stories high along the side of the university hospital on my first day of medical school. Like most millennials, I pursued medicine with a deep conviction to make a difference. Coming from a humanities background,…

  • A jigsaw puzzle

    Julia NguyenPhoenix, Arizona, USA Imagine yourself browsing the Entertainment section at the local store. Of all the sections you could possibly be in—Beauty, Grocery, Household, Pharmacy—here you are at the Entertainment section, looking for a jigsaw puzzle. There are so many choices: outdoor scenery or abstract? A 1,000-piece puzzle or just 500? Whatever you choose,…

  • Ports of Calls: Toward a taxonomy of hospital on-call rooms

    Mike WongHalifax, Nova Scotia, Canada Glancing around the dimly lit 10’ x 10’ chamber, I placed my backpack on a wilting twin mattress enveloped in standard issue, blue striped flannel sheets neatly folded into hospital corners. Between the doorframe and water-stained ceiling, with indifference, flakes of glossy white paint continued a months-long endeavor to divorce…