Hektoen International

A Journal of Medical Humanities

Tag: 19th century

  • Healing in the face of cultural devastation

    Patrick Flynn Los Angeles, California, United States   Portrait of Susan La Flesche Picotte, the first Native American woman to receive a medical degree. Source. In 1855, a young Crow boy, no more than ten years old, ventured to the top of a mountain in present-day Montana. Over the next two decades, the boy would rise…

  • Book review: Albemarle Street: Portraits, personalities and presentations at the Royal Institution

    Arpan K. BanerjeeSolihull, United Kingdom In this fascinating book, the late Professor Meurig Thomas, a distinguished chemist, former Master of Peterhouse, Cambridge University, and an accomplished popularizer of science, tells the story of one of Britain’s greatest scientific institutions, which for over 200 years has been responsible for many of the great scientific advances of…

  • Elizabeth Barrett Browning—isolation and the artist

    Elizabeth Lovett Colledge  Jacksonville, Florida, United States   Portrait of Elizabeth Barrett Browning by Evert Duykinck Via Wikimedia. Elizabeth Barrett Browning is perhaps best known for the poem “How do I Love Thee,” addressed to her husband Robert Browning, as well as their courtship, elopement, and subsequent years together in Europe. However, one might revisit…

  • A “most perfect interchange”

    Satyabha TripathiLucknow, Uttar Pradesh, India “[Lydgate held] the conviction that the medical profession as it might be was the finest in the world; presenting the most perfect interchange between science and art; offering the most direct alliance between intellectual conquest and the social good […] he was an emotional creature, with a flesh-and-blood sense of…

  • The forerunner

    Shafiqah Samarasam Malaysia   Skyline in Kuala Lumpur with haze. 2004. Photo by Nesnad. Via Wikimedia. CC BY 3.0. Southeast Asia has experienced detrimental, large-scale air pollution for decades. Known as the “Southeast Asia haze,” this transboundary pollution is largely caused by illegal agricultural fires in the forests of Indonesia. The lingering smoke results in breathing…

  • The use of force in medicine

    Angad TiwariIndiaMallika KhuranaJapan William Carlos Williams (1883-1963), regarded as “the most important literary doctor since Chekhov,” was an American Pulitzer prize-winning writer and poet who stands amongst the few full-time practicing physicians to have achieved literary distinction.1 He regarded art and medicine as “two parts of a whole,” and the intimate doctor-patient interface proved a…

  • Mozart and Salieri: from Pushkin to Shaffer

    James L. Franklin1 Chicago, Illinois, United States La Calunnia La calunnia è un venticello, Un’auretta assai gentile Che insensibile, sottile, Leggermente, dolcemente, Incomincia a sussurar Piano, piano, terra, terra Sottovoce, sibilando, Va scorrendo, va ronzando S’introduce destramente E le teste ed I Cervelli . . .   Calumny is a little breeze A gentile zephyr…

  • The death of King George V

    Seamus O’Mahony London, England   Fig 1: Lord Dawson of Penn. Photograph by D. Wilding. Wellcome Collection. Copyright © National Portrait Gallery, London. Public Domain. Bertrand Dawson, Lord Dawson of Penn (1864-1945), was the most eminent British doctor in the years between the two world wars. He was both a skilled medical politician (twice president of the…

  • Mental hospital memories of another era

    Robert Craig Brisbane, Queensland, Australia   The former St. Audry’s Hospital. Photo by Adrian S Pye. CC BY-SA 2.0. In 1964, having obtained a place to study medicine at Cambridge University, I was given the opportunity as a medical student to work as an assistant nurse for three months in a large residential mental hospital…

  • Death, disease, and discrimination during the construction of the Panama Canal (1904–1914)

    Enrique Chaves-Carballo Overland Park, Kansas, United States   Theodore Roosevelt. Portrait, c. 1904. Via Wikimedia. Public domain. Theodore Roosevelt, Jr. (1858–1919) President Theodore Roosevelt envisioned an interoceanic canal as indispensable for American “dominance at the seas.”1 An isthmian canal would facilitate rapid deployment of U.S. Navy ships from Atlantic to Pacific Oceans, bypassing the arduous…