Hektoen International

A Journal of Medical Humanities

Tag: Cancer

  • The oncologist’s mask

    Prasad Iyer Timah Road, Singapore   H.J. Pollitt: Hypnotized. Frederick H. Evans. Early 20th century. Philadelphia Museum of Art. As a pediatric oncologist I have learned to put on an invisible mask before seeing my patients and their parents. I try to bring them some cheer and keep the enveloping darkness at bay, if only…

  • Origins of the Pap smear

    When Dr. Georgios Papanikolaou brought his wife to America in 1913 he had $250 in his pocket. Both had to take menial jobs, she as a seamstress, he as a rug salesman, violin player in a restaurant, and clerk at a Greek newspaper. A year later, he obtained a position as laboratory technician at Cornell…

  • Réquiem

    Prasad Iyer Singapore   Poet’s statement: This poem expresses the feelings of parents who have recently lost a child to cancer. The first stanza deals with sadness, the second with guilt, and the last one with acceptance.   Death with a Child, from the series The Five Deaths. Stefano della Bella. 1648. Fine Arts Museum…

  • Some subjects are given

    Michael Salcman Baltimore, Maryland, United States   Self-portrait with fiddling Death. Arnold Böcklin. 1872. Alte Nationalgalerie Berlin   Some subjects are given to the authors of poems and songs, of mechanical puzzles and lives, given over and over like a spiking fever in an old TB ward or the low level irritation of a cancer…

  • Drawing the chemotherapy chair

    Juliet McMullinCalifornia, United States “Arrangement in Grey and Black” is a panel from Brian Fies’ comic Mom’s Cancer (2006). Objects from Mom’s life fill this panel: a walking stick whittled on a hiking trip, her poker video game, a large Jack-in-the-Box strawberry shake, and a syringe. Moments of a life manifested on paper. Amongst the…

  • The other kingdom

    Jamie Samson Dublin, Ireland   Death and life by Gustav Klimt. The radical “otherness” of death is a fixture of art history, as illustrated here in Klimt’s ‘Death and Life’. 1915. Leopold Museum, Vienna “Everyone who is born,” Susan Sontag wrote in Illness as Metaphor, “holds dual citizenship, in the kingdom of the well and…

  • Avulsions

    Torree McGowan Culver, Oregon, United States   The Chasm between the Then and The Now. Photo by the author, taken near Denali National Park. There are moments in life that serve as a dividing line. These instants sharply incise our worlds into before and after, the then and the now. Moments shimmer like a crystalline…

  • “I’m really bad with numbers”: Using the mini mental status examination among farm workers in rural California

    Bernardo Ng Imperial County, California, United States   César Chávez visitas colegio César Chávez en 1974. Movimiento. 1974. In 1975, Dr. Marshal F. Folstein and his colleagues at Tufts University published the seminal paper “Mini-mental state. A practical method for grading the cognitive state of patients for the clinician.”1 Since then, this test has been…

  • Lost in translation

    Jonathan Xian Houston, Texas, United States   Two Human Beings. The Lonely Ones. Edvard Munch. 1894. The Art Institute of Chicago. At the start of residency, you should make a list of five things you value most and think carefully about which ones you can live without. Cross them off one by one until only…

  • A good man

    Tuhina Raman Philadelphia, PA, USA   The Liquor Bar by Wharton H. Esherick. Illustration for the book Song of the Broad-Axe by Walt Whitman. c. 1923. Philadelphia Museum of Art. My heart sank as soon as I saw it—tumor nodules in the trachea and a mass eroding through the stent in his airway. I had…