Hektoen International

A Journal of Medical Humanities

Tag: Covid 19

  • Questioning immunology and the soul

    Vani GhaiPune, India The long and tiring battle with COVID has stimulated modern medicine to investigate new approaches to understanding the science of immunity. It has long been apparent that immune systems exist almost ubiquitously across the living and that all diseases involve the immune system. But even though immunology plays a decisive role in…

  • Book review: How the NHS Coped with COVID-19

    Arpan K. BanerjeeSolihull, United Kingdom This work is a timely and important contribution to the literature on the COVID-19 pandemic, which has wreaked havoc worldwide. Following the cluster of pneumonia cases of unknown cause in Wuhan, China at the end of 2019, things would never be the same again. In this book, the author has…

  • Rapid testing for the masses

    Anthony PapagiannisThessaloniki, Greece Ten young girls are queueing outside the makeshift surgery. They are between eleven and fifteen, they wear face masks, they giggle and tease each other and try to encourage the timid ones before the coming ordeal. What is this going to be? Their first visit to a gynecologist? Nothing so memorable. They…

  • Gain of function

    Jayant RadhakrishnanDarien, Illinois, United States “It is no good to try to stop knowledge from going forward. Ignorance is never better than knowledge.”– Enrico Fermi (1901–1954) “Gain of Function” (GoF) burst into the general lexicon in 2021 during two shouting matches in the US Senate between the Junior Senator from Kentucky and the Director of…

  • A poet for a patient: A tenth century poem by al Mutanabbi

    Sama AlreddawiBarry MeisenbergAnnapolis, Maryland, United States “The Night Visitor”1 Sick of body, unable to rise up…Vehemently intoxicated without wine …And it is as though she who visits me were filled with modesty…For she does not pay her visits save under cover of darkness …I freely offered her my linen and my pillows…But she refused them,…

  • Book review: Understanding the NHS

    Arpan K. BanerjeeSolihull, United Kingdom The National Health Service in the United Kingdom was founded in 1948 by Aneurin Bevan, a Welsh Labour Party politician and health minister in Clement Attlee’s post-war Labour government. Bevan was a coal miner before entering Parliament in 1928. He had long campaigned for a free health service for all…

  • Dr. Oriol Mitjà: seeking to understand old and new infectious diseases

    Howard FischerUppsala, Sweden “Research needs to give answers to real problems.”– Dr. Oriol Mitjà Dr. Oriol Mitjà (b. 1980) earned his M.D. degree from the University of Barcelona. He then completed an internal medicine residency, followed by a fellowship in infectious disease. He earned a Diploma in Tropical Medicine and Hygiene from the London School…

  • “Panama disease”: A pandemic…for bananas

    Elizabeth RudaChicago, Illinois, United States The average person does not go to the grocery store, look around the produce section, and think, “Wow, these foods could be extinct within the next few years.” Yet extinction is possible in the case of the most common cultivar of banana sold today, the Cavendish.1 At the same time…

  • Revising my bargain with the deity

    Barry PerlmanNew York, New York, United States My parents lived into their nineties. Before they died, they endured years of dementia. Aware of my potential genetic inheritance, I have long harbored a deep dread of what my future might hold. If my curved pinky fingers were inherited from my mother and my flat feet and…

  • Battle of six feet

    Mark MosleyWichita, Kansas, United States They die alone now;jet pilots soaring solo upwardmuffled voices sucked into machinesspeaking a language we recognizebut too distant to quite understanduntil their plastic faces hardenand eyes glaze over like cloudsbreathing in rhythm into the beyond. We watch them curiously like fishin an aquarium fluorescent behind glass;heads inside our own bubbles,yellow…