Hektoen International

A Journal of Medical Humanities

Tag: Austro-Hungarian Empire

  • Professor Bernhardi, a play by Arthur Schnitzler, M.D.

    Howard Fischer Uppsala, Sweden Tug-of-war. Photo by KamPraProductions for Foreign Affairs’s production of Professor Bernhardi. Used with permission.   “A spiteful something has been fabricated out of an innocent nothing.” — Dr. Löwenstein in Professor Bernhardi       Professor Bernhardi: A Comedy in Five Acts (1912) is one of seventeen plays written by Arthur…

  • Dr. Fanny Halpern, a psychiatric go-between of 1930s Shanghai

    Richard Zhang Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, United States   “Dr. F.G. Halpern” in an advertisement for the Puci Sanatorium in the Shen Bao, September 20, 1935. source On September 20, 1935, a lengthy advertisement in one of Shanghai’s most popular newspapers, the Shen Bao, celebrated the recent opening of the Shanghai Puci Sanatorium (上海普濨療養院).1 The sanatorium would…

  • The special art of Vienna

    Irving RosenToronto, Ontario, Canada Vienna, capital of the former Austro-Hungarian Empire, has always promised intellectual fervor, Strauss waltzes, Schnitzlerian flirtations, Sachertorte, and the beautiful golden women painted by Gustav Klimt (fig. 1).1 Others such as Eduard Pernkopf, head of anatomy at Vienna’s renowned medical school, achieved artistic brilliance by creating a beautiful, internationally acclaimed atlas…

  • A treatment for “circular insanity”: Joseph Roth’s Radetzky March

    Sally MetzlerChicago, Illinois, United States Madness and decay of society permeate Joseph Roth’s brooding novel The Radetsky March (1932). One character, Herr von Taussig, experiences attacks of “circular insanity.”1 The recommended cure is an institution on Lake Constance, where Von Taussig receives treatment by “mundane and feather-brained physicians who prescribe ‘spiritual emotions,’ just as frivolously…