Hektoen International

A Journal of Medical Humanities

Tag: Carol Levine

  • New opioid epidemic: another long day’s journey

    Carol LevineNew York, New York, United States Edmund Tyrone, age 23 (August 1912, New London, Connecticut) “It’s pretty hard to take at times, having a dope fiend for a mother!”From Long Day’s Journey into Night by Eugene O’Neill, Act III1 Alexis Lightle, age 17 (December 2017, Chillicothe, Ohio) “My dad was on pills and opiates…

  • Aging in (another) place: Magda Szabo’s novel Iza’s Ballad

    Carol LevineNew York, New York, United States In Hungary in the early 1960s, Izabella (Iza) Szöcs is a physician, and a very good one, according to her patients and peers. Her specialty is rheumatology, but she makes “notes not just about the pain in the hands or feet or aching joint, but about the person…

  • The Lady Writer and the Valkyrie: Magda Szabo’s novel The Door

    Carol Levine New York, New York, United States   Mixed media painting “Nickels and Dimes I” by Natalie Avondet. Used by permission of the artist. An old woman desperately needs medical attention. Yet she fiercely refuses every offer of help from friends, neighbors, and the local doctor. No one will get past her door, she vows.…

  • A twice-told tale: Nabokov and Moore on mental illness and parents’ suffering

    Carol LevineNew York, New York, United States Mental illness casts a wide net, enmeshing patient, family, and doctors. When the patient is young, the main characters are usually parents, who struggle with love, guilt, fear, and despair. Yet families are often secondary, sometimes shadowy, characters in clinical accounts. Fiction allows parents to be the primary…