Hektoen International

A Journal of Medical Humanities

Category: Education

  • Scars

    Morgan AlexanderDayton, Ohio, United States “I see you’ve got some scars here,” the doctor said, gesturing to two faint, thin lines that ran down both sides of the patient’s neck. “What’s that about?” The patient in the room with us was covered in scars across his neck and abdomen. Hesitantly, he confessed that the scars…

  • Becoming Judith: The connection between Italian Baroque and anatomy lab

    Emily NghiemDetroit, Michigan, USA Art and medicine are not two things that seem to fall together naturally. When considering an example of medicine depicted in art, a reasonable and literal choice would be Thomas Eakins’ The Gross Clinic, where a team of doctors is performing live surgery before an intently fascinated audience. So many depictions…

  • Bigger than a black box

    Valeri Lantz-GefrohTexas, United States I am an actor, director, and acting teacher. And my theater is a medical school in Texas. “Wait, what?” My life in the last decade has been full of, “Wait, what?” The answers to that question have brought me profound appreciation for many things—but especially the expansiveness of theater training. I…

  • Maintaining a moral compass in medicine

    Jeffrey LeePhiladelphia, Pennsylvania, United States It seemed like just another day during my third-year surgical rotation until I heard Mrs. W. cry. It was during daily rounds in the bustling ICU, and our team was squeezed around a single computer outside another patient’s room. I tried my best to pay attention to our discussion, but…

  • A very interesting case

    Anjiya SulaimanKarachi, Pakistan By my fourth year of medical school I had learned to distill patients into a pure clinical form. Individual characteristics are routinely and expertly tweezed and condensed into an intricate framework of pathology, pharmacology, and medical jargon: we call them “cases.” I met S during my first week of an inpatient pediatric…

  • Informed consent

    Charles H. HalstedDavis, California, USA Outlined by the glimmer of eastern sun, the head nurse says: “One of your patients passed around four. His body has been sent to the hospital morgue.” You are the intern, first up on the ward to see all the patients ahead of your team. After four years of schooling,…

  • Tales out of medical school

    Charles H. HalstedDavis, California, USA In first-year anatomy class, I shared a rectangular metal table with three other twenty-one-year-old men and our assigned corpse, a blank-eyed, obese, and lifeless white seventyish woman. Half of my classmates were former Eastern prep school boys, the others mostly Jewish men from New York City. There were two women…

  • Beginnings of bedside teaching in Padua: Montanus

    Medical historians seem to agree that the first teacher of medicine to instruct his students at the bedside was Giovanni Batista de Monte (1498–1552), better known by his Latin name of Montanus. In 1543 Montanus was appointed to the Chair of Medicine at the University of Padua, a state institution of the Republic of Venice.…

  • Special abilities for a brave new world

    Elida MelovaThe Republic of Macedonia “If you have integrity, nothing else matters. If you don’t have integrity, nothing else matters.”—Alan K. Simpson This quote has found its true home in education. Receiving a degree in education is only the first step in becoming a teacher. The unspoken truth is that university training hardly prepares teachers…

  • Cultivating clinical compassion with cultural encounters

    Jeffrey LeePhiladelphia, Pennsylvania, United States The calm waves of the Mediterranean played a lullaby as I walked along the beach, the fine-grained sand gently caressing my toes. I noticed a small group of women massaging each other’s backs. I awkwardly watched them from the corner of my eye and wondered what was going on. Every…