Hektoen International

A Journal of Medical Humanities

Tag: Anthony Papagiannis

  • Medicine as handmaiden of technology

    Anthony PapagiannisThessaloniki, Greece On the desktop, printed in fancy lettering on expensive paper, lies an invitation for the opening of yet another big diagnostic center. According to the brochure, it will provide the latest equipment in ultramodern premises, perform all sorts of investigations with faster results than ever, and have the plushest armchairs for the…

  • In a scan, darkly

    Anthony PapagiannisThessaloniki, Greece Every so often I browse through old patient records and before committing them to the shredder I read through the histories they contain. These visits to the past are useful and edifying, allowing a more detached consideration of the events. Has something changed in medical knowledge since then? Do the diagnosis and…

  • At the turning point

    Anthony PapagiannisThessaloniki, Greece Eva was born the year I entered medical school; our life paths would cross two decades later. She went through school, played volleyball regularly, married, and lived a normal and carefree life. Then in her early twenties she gradually began getting breathless and increasingly tired, and had dizzy spells, fainting episodes, palpitations,…

  • The flu vaccine: Transparency, uncertainty, and trust in medicine

    Anthony PapagiannisThessaloniki, Greece A few years ago the fear of ‘pandemic flu’ was spread widely all over the world, causing what has been termed an “emotional epidemic.”1 The disease itself, its social dimensions, and the ways it was publicly handled could form the subject for an academic thesis. Those events led me to a series of…

  • Easy come, easy go

    Anthony PapagiannisThessaloniki, Greece The invitation to talk to an informal gathering of his colleagues had come out of the blue. One of the major drug companies in his field had arranged to bring together a score of physicians in an educational opportunity to be held in one of the upper crust restaurants of the city,…

  • Death as it should be

    Anthony PapagiannisThessaloniki, Greece I had never talked with my father about his death. Even though he had had numerous and regular transactions with medicine since my penultimate year in medical school, he never touched this particular subject and I would not be the one to bring it up. Despite my training and professional involvement with…

  • Three Visits

    Anthony PapagiannisThessaloniki, Greece Prelude She rings at the recommendation of a colleague who knows my interest in lung cancer and palliative care. “It is about my father, doctor.” I suggest that she brings me his films and tests for a briefing before I get to meet him. We arrange an appointment, and she comes with…

  • Blind date

    Anthony PapagiannisThessaloniki, Greece “And who has sent you to me?” Working as a private consulting pulmonologist in a healthcare system where referral letters are virtually nonexistent, I always ask new patients to tell me who sent them—a social engagement routine before we get into purely medical matters. It works as an informal survey of the…

  • To Sir, with gratitude

    Anthony PapagiannisThessaloniki, Greece When I was twelve my late grandfather, seeing that I was disinclined to study English, made me an offer I could hardly ignore. “If you learn English,” he said, “then we shall go to America together,” knowing that this was a boyhood dream of mine. A few years later, at the age…

  • Eliot’s triad: Information, knowledge, and wisdom in medicine

    Anthony PapagiannisThessaloniki, Greece Where is the Wisdom we have lost in Knowledge?Where is the Knowledge we have lost in Information? I first saw these well-known lines by T. S. Eliot1 inscribed as a motto on the flyleaf of a Greek textbook on internal medicine. I was a student then, and almost a quarter of a…