Hektoen International

A Journal of Medical Humanities

Tag: Cancer

  • 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 IyerSingapore 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. Réquiem Life has fragrance eternally lostPure symphony now cut shortBroken hearts disparate and newDon’t know how to restart anewThis body…

  • Some subjects are given

    Michael SalcmanBaltimore, Maryland, United States Some subjects are given to the authorsof poems and songs, of mechanical puzzlesand lives, given over and over like a spiking fever in an old TB wardor the low level irritation of a cancerraising its hand in a bone — here I am it says, conversant with any private language…

  • 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 SamsonDublin, Ireland “Everyone who is born,” Susan Sontag wrote in Illness as Metaphor, “holds dual citizenship, in the kingdom of the well and in the kingdom of the sick.”1 While the passport denoting health and vigor might get us through customs most of the time, we eventually reach that unwelcome day when it is…

  • Avulsions

    Torree McGowanCulver, Oregon, United States 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 barrier, allowing you to see so clearly through to what was, but that past is just out of reach.…

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

    Bernardo NgImperial County, California, United States 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 widely used by clinicians both to screen for cognitive deficits when a…

  • Lost in translation

    Jonathan XianHouston, Texas, United States 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 one is left, and that one is what you get to keep. My one thing was…

  • A good man

    Tuhina RamanPhiladelphia, PA, USA 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 been hoping against hope. It is always difficult losing a favorite patient to a bad disease. I had biopsied and stented his airway five weeks earlier.…

  • Maimed

    Laura WendorffPlatteville, Wisconsin, United States Your friend says, think of the Amazonswho 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 like the memoryof heavy clay and earthworms. *…