Hektoen International

A Journal of Medical Humanities

Tag: 18th Century

  • The role of lullabies in mother-baby attachment

    Özge SuzanNursan ÇinarSakarya, Turkey A lullaby is defined as a sweet, gentle song that is sung to entice a baby to sleep. In Turkish folklore, a mother’s voice is very important for her baby. An example of this can be found in the following text: “Uyusun da büyüsün, ninni, tıpış tıpış yürüsün, Ninni”“Grow up in…

  • Stitches as mending, stitches as healing

    Kelley SwainOxfordshire, England Knitwear designer and disability-access advocate Kate Davies writes of discovering her love of knitting at university: “The movement of your hands helped you to find a different kind of mind space. You lost yourself in the rhythm of your own industry. You made a thing.”1 There is something extraordinary about taking one…

  • Women surgeons

    Moustapha Abousamra Ventura, California, United States   Cactus flower with buds.Image courtesy of the author. Last spring, I spent three months in the Texas Hill Country. It is a place that at once can be beautiful and hostile. The fields of blue bonnets in full bloom are breathtaking. The cacti that abound around barbed wire…

  • Under the lime tree: medicine, poetry, and the education of the senses

    Alan Bleakley Sennen, West Cornwall, United Kingdom   Portrait of Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834), by Peter Vandyke, 1795. Edited by Sue Bleakley. When in the summer of 1797 Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s wife Sara accidentally spilled hot milk over his foot, causing serious burns such that Coleridge could not walk, he sat in the garden of…

  • When Darwin was wrong

    John Hayman Victoria, Australia   Fig. 1. The Parallel Roads of Glen Roy, as would have been seen by Darwin. (Photo by Bev Biggs.) Charles Darwin (1809-1802) is rightly famous, not for the discovery of evolution but for revealing the mechanism by which it may occur, natural selection. He not only formulated this idea, but…

  • The death of James Abram Garfield

    Philip Liebson Chicago, Illinois, United States   James Abram Garfield. By Ole Peter Hansen Balling. 1881. National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution. Public Domain. The medical treatment of some US presidents and ex-presidents has been controversial. One example is George Washington, who in 1799 at age sixty-seven suffered from an acute throat ailment that was treated…

  • Peter Panum and the “geography of disease”

    Kathryne Dycus Madrid, Spain   Peter Panum. Scan from P. Hansens “Illustreret Dansk Litteraturhistorie”, anden meget forøgede udgave, 2. bind, 1902. Public Domain. Via Wikimedia. In 1846, the Faroe Islands experienced an outbreak of measles, the likes of which had not been seen in sixty-five years. The Danish government called upon a newly graduated physician,…

  • The sleep of doctors

    Barry MeisenbergAnnapolis, Maryland, United States The gods who rule 2AM summon the doctor from sleep to the sequestered place where the veneer of unearned pride is bleached away. You forgot to re-order a sodium level on the whiskered old fisherman with lung cancer. It was low last week and might be lower tomorrow. He looked…

  • Red Beard: A master clinician in nineteenth century Japan

    Howard Fischer Uppsala, Sweden   A Meeting of Japan, China, and the West, late 18th – early 19th century. Shiba Kōkan. Minneapolis Institute of Art. “One of the essential qualities of the clinician is interest in humanity, for the secret of the care of the patient is in caring for the patient.” —Francis W. Peabody,…

  • Art and alcohol

    Giovanni CeccarelliRoma, Italy In the late 1940s Elaine de Kooning, wife of one of the most eminent exponents of American abstract expressionism (Willem de Kooning), commented that the whole art world of her time had become alcoholic. Yet even earlier, perhaps always, drinking and drunkenness had attracted the interest of many artists. In a drinking…