Hektoen International

A Journal of Medical Humanities

Tag: Anne Jacobson

  • Viktor Frankl: The meaning of a life

    Anne JacobsonOak Park, Illinois, United States Not long before the Dachau concentration camp was liberated in April 1945, Viktor Emil Frankl was seriously ill with typhus and writing feverishly on stolen scraps of paper, determined to keep himself and his ideas alive. Faced with the prospect of his own death and helpless as a physician…

  • Carl Gustav Jung

    Anne JacobsonOak Park, Illinois, United States In the autumn of 1913, Carl Gustav Jung was traveling alone by train through the rust and amber forest of the Swiss countryside. The thirty-eight-year-old psychiatrist had been lately troubled by strange dreams and a rising sense of tension, but the snow-capped peaks of his beloved Alps soothed him…

  • The scourge, the scientist, and the swindle

    Anne JacobsonOak Park, Illinois, United States “The leprous person who has the disease shall wear torn clothes and let the hair of his head hang loose, and he shall cover his upper lip and cry out, ‘Unclean, unclean.’ He shall remain unclean as long as he has the disease. He is unclean. He shall live…

  • Plagues and prejudice

    Anne JacobsonOak Park, Illinois, United States It was a calm, clear January morning on the gritty streets of paradise. Honolulu, the capital of the newly-annexed U.S. territory of Hawaii, was ushering out a century of upheaval that had included the arrival of explorers, missionaries, and deadly diseases such as smallpox and measles; the overthrow of…

  • Theme

    WOMEN IN MEDICINE Published in November, 2019 H E K T O R A M A     .     ALICE HAMILTON     The squalid streets of working-class Chicago in the late nineteenth century would have been something of a shock to the girl who grew up in a sheltered but educated household…

  • “Moonlight” and silence

    Anne JacobsonOak Park, Illinois, United States At seventeen, I knew little about the limitations or losses that might cause a person to second-guess a vocation, deeply held belief, or identity. Perhaps those questions about the unknowable future inhabit the soul of a teenager under the guise of general angst and anxiety, or alternatively are tamped…

  • Alice Hamilton: Physician and scientist of the dangerous trades

    Anne JacobsonOak Park, Illinois, United States It is a gritty, frozen day in winter-weary Chicago, one that does little to inspire action; perhaps least of all a frigid walk around the salty, potholed neighborhood. In a month or two a lunchtime walk would be a welcome idea; university students will gather on park benches, and…

  • The “English Hippocrates” and the disease of kings

    Anne JacobsonOak Park, Illinois, United States Thomas Sydenham (1624-1689) is known as “The English Hippocrates” because of his detailed physical examinations, painstaking record keeping, and attention to the treatment of illness.1  At a time when the medical profession espoused theory and systemization, his belief in the power of observation and primary experience over scientific theory…

  • The Great Rift Valley

    Anne JacobsonOak Park, Illinois, United States In the vast, parched desert of Africa’s Great Rift Valley, night fell like an ocean wave, predictable yet unexpected, with weight and substance and astonishing force. The darkness filled our eyes and expanded our lungs, enveloped our salty skin. Each evening the last rays of equatorial sun bathed our…

  • Christmas with Dupuytren and Lisfranc

    Anne JacobsonOak Park, Illinois, United States It is Christmas afternoon and I am nestled under a decades-old afghan on my parents’ couch, watching snow drift and swirl across oak-studded fields beneath a pewter sky. My left foot is wrapped and strapped in a comically oversized boot, and the companion crutches at my side reflect the steady…