Hektoen International

A Journal of Medical Humanities

Tag: Careers

  • A birth remembered

    F. Gonzalez-CrussiChicago, Illinois, United States Memory is to old age as presbyopia (far-sightedness) is to eyesight. Presbyopia makes you lose the ability to see clearly at a normal near working distance while maintaining a sharp distant vision. Just so the elderly recollect in painstaking detail what happened to them fifty or sixty years ago, yet…

  • The bubonic plague in Eyam

    JMS PearceHull, England, United Kingdom In medicine most instances of outstanding acts of heroic human courage relate to individual patients or to their attendant doctors, nurses, and caregivers. Here is a unique example of the collective self-sacrifice of a tiny rural community, which probably saved the lives of thousands. The year is 1665. The Great…

  • Epidemics from plague to Coronavirus

    Michael YafiHouston, Texas, United States Throughout history humanity has faced many epidemics and pandemics that caused panic and massive casualties. Although in modern times pathogens have shifted from bacteria to viruses, each new epidemic brings back fears of diseases from the past such as bubonic plague, cholera, typhoid, and leprosy. Society has usually responded to…

  • Ferdinand Sauerbruch, father of thoracic surgery

    Annabelle SlingerlandLeon LacquetLeiden, the Netherlands Ferdinand Sauerbruch (1875-1951) was one of the most important thoracic surgeons of the first half of the twentieth century, remembered for pioneering a method that would allow access to the thoracic cavity and the heart. Three years after his death in 1954, his life was detailed in a movie authored…

  • Aniza

    Eleonore Blaurock-BuschGermany I miss my people and my home,but don’t send me back. I don’t have a passport,no papers. Dad gave them to my husband-to-be,the one who couldn’t take me now,and I am not sad about it. I am crying about my sister.They cut her up, sewed her tightand her fat, old husband, he likes…

  • Blood is the life

    Saameer Pani Sydney, Australia Vampire—the very word itself conjures up images of supernatural creatures who look not unlike you and me, prowl about at night, prey on unsuspecting souls, and sink their fangs into innumerable, hapless victims to quench their thirst for blood. Monstrous but beautiful, repulsive yet magnetic, vampires have fascinated us for centuries…

  • Leukemia past and present: Lessons learned and future opportunities

    Nada HusseinGiza, Egypt “The longer you can look back, the farther you can look forward,” said Winston Churchill in a meeting at The Royal College of Physicians in 1944. At that time, leukemia was a fatal disease.1 Representing 8% of all cancers incidence today,2 it had long been regarded as an inflammatory disorder because of…

  • Are we culturally tone-deaf?

    Clara KooNew York, United States The cultural norms of American medicine are speciously like those of traditional Korean culture, but the differences place Korean-American students at a disadvantage. When I began my third year of medical school, a fourth-year student advised, “Just do what you can do be useful.” If there is anything I know…

  • Theme

    EPIDEMICS Published in March, 2020 H E K T O R A M A   . The recent coronavirus outbreak inevitably brings to mind the Spanish flu, the deadly influenza pandemic of a century ago. Here we republish seven articles about this devastating viral disease that spread to the four corners of the world, killing…

  • Dirty, dark, dangerous: Coal miners’ nystagmus

    Ronald FishmanChicago, Illinois, United States It’s dark as a dungeon and damp as the dew,Where the danger is double and pleasures are fewWhere the rain never falls and the sun never shinesIt’s dark as a dungeon way down in the mine. From the song “Dark as a Dungeon” – Merle Travis Nystagmus is a repetitive oscillation of the…