Hektoen International

A Journal of Medical Humanities

Tag: Conan Doyle

  • Rejuvenation: “The Adventure of the Creeping Man” from The Case-Book of Sherlock Holmes

    James L. FranklinChicago, Illinois, United States Ch’ io sono quell gran medicoDottore eanciclpedico,Chiamato Dulcamara,. . . Rigiovnir bramate? I’m noted as a scientist,Practitioner and specialist.I’m Doctor Dulcamara…Would you like your youth recaptured? L’Elisir d’Amore (The Elixir of Love), music by Geatano Donizetti, Libretto by Felice Romano, Act I, scene IV1 “Rejuvenation” through medical science is the…

  • Why do physicians write so badly?

    Peter ArnoldSydney, Australia An old joke is that pharmacists are the only people who can read physicians’ handwriting. This piece is not about handwriting, but about writing style. Compared with great medical authors, like Somerset Maugham, Conan Doyle, Anton Chekhov, John Keats, and Friedrich von Schiller, most physicians are not good writers. (I could have…

  • The most enduring fictional character in literature, Sherlock Holmes, created by a physician

    Marshall LichtmanRochester, New York, United States My colleague and friend, Professor Seymour I. Schwartz, a distinguished surgeon and academician, has chronicled the careers of over 100 physicians who were notable writers in his monograph From Medicine to Manuscript: Doctors with a Literary Legacy.1 These physician-writers ranged from Maimonides to John Locke to John Keats to…

  • Through the Magic Door with Conan Doyle

    “Father said it used to be a gentleman was known by his books.” —William Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury You are invited, gentle reader, to walk through the magic door and step into the library. Smoking is allowed, says your host, as he invites you to sit on the green settee from “where you…

  • Joseph Bell, supreme diagnostician

    The professor produced a vial filled with a bitter amber-colored liquid and asked the medical students to dip a finger in it and taste it, so he could determine how many of them had developed their powers of observation. The students grimaced but did as they were told, and the professor likewise dipped his finger…