Hektoen International

A Journal of Medical Humanities

Tag: breast cancer

  • Using art to educate about breast cancer

    Viney KirpalIndia The World Health Organization Global Cancer Observatory states that in India in 2020, more than 178,361 new cases of breast cancer were diagnosed in women.1 Some of these cases, of which 90,408 were fatal, could have been diagnosed and treated earlier, but a lack of awareness persists throughout the country. Comparatively, in the…

  • Dream on

    Paul Rousseau Charleston, South Carolina, United States   Footsteps in the forest. Photo by Nicholas D. on Flickr. CC BY-NC 2.0. Chart This is a 32-year-old female with widely metastatic breast cancer admitted to the hospital for control of shortness of breath and pain. ____ Melissa sits slumped, mouth open, snoring. I pull a chair…

  • Hieroglyphics

    Gail GhaiSarasota, Florida, United States The room shuffles nervously as the oncologist takes the microphone. He’s the first speaker at the breast cancer lecture and he does not hesitate. Opens with a memorable phrase: Cancer comes to the warm parts of the body. I’ve read that ancient Egyptians noted how malignancy loved those cozy corners…

  • Unfettered grief

    Lealani Acosta Nashville, Tennessee, United States   Innocence behind the bangs of a child. Innocence by Lealani Mae Acosta. My first glimpse of unfettered grief was through shaggy six-year-old bangs, watching my mother weep, hunched over the toilet and framed by moonlight that cast the pale blue tiles of their master bathroom into darkness. I…

  • Tracing wisps of hair

    Miriam Rosen Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, United States   Child’s Play by Miriam Rosen  My mother was diagnosed with cancer when I was fourteen. For the next nine years, she lived her life with elegance and seemed to do it with ease. She continued her psychiatry practice, only gradually reducing the number of patients she saw. She…

  • Signs of diseases in art

    Chris ClarkExeter, United Kingdom “Every human being tells a story even if he never speaks.”1 Two paintings hang next to each other in the sumptuous Palazzo Doria Pamphilj in Rome: The Rest on the flight to Egypt and Penitent Magdalen. Both are early works by Caravaggio, and these two diverse biblical women appear to have…

  • The female body dissected: Anatomy and John Keats

    Niamh Davies-Branch Aberdeen, United Kingdom   A boiled gland with rose-like folds from Sir Astley Cooper’s Plates of the Anatomy of the Breast. Plates of the Anatomy of the Breast by Sir Astley Cooper in Sir Duncan Rice Library Special Collections, Aberdeen, UK John Keats, poet of the great odes, was also a surgical apprentice…

  • Maimed

    Laura Wendorff Platteville, Wisconsin, United States   Your friend says, Photo by Laura Wendorff think of the Amazons who cut off their right breasts in order to easily draw back their bows. But the loss is not like that. It’s more like a flower dug out of the ground, soil still clinging to its roots…

  • Surrealist art and the resolution of absurd

    Simon WeinPetach Tikvah, Israel Epigram “There must be a clear preoccupation with death—intimations of mortality . . . Tragic art, romantic art, etc., deals with the knowledge of death.” Mark Rothko, 1958, The Pratt Institute, on the function of art The Problem Fear of death permeates medical practice despite our best efforts to modulate serotonin,…

  • A Web of Days – This is a Test – Not Again

    Joannie Stangeland   Poet’s Statement: Joannie Stangeland wrote these poems for a friend who was fighting breast cancer. Her friend didn’t need help with cooking or driving—and Joannie wanted to support her in some way, so she wrote. What began as one poem flooded into a collection of about 20, and the poems helped Joannie…