Hektoen International

A Journal of Medical Humanities

Tag: Covid 19

  • The Call of the Wild and COVID-19

    Liam Butchart Stony Brook, New York, United States Samantha Rizzo Washington DC, United States   Winter Scene in Moonlight. Henry Farrer. 1869. The Metropolitan Museum of Art.  The COVID-19 pandemic has wrought a terrible toll upon all of us and has brought the medical system—and the providers who inhabit it—to its knees. There is a…

  • Covid cascade killed my father

    Helen Meldrum Waltham, Maine, United States   Photo by Craig Whitehead on Unsplash My father died last year from what I call “Covid cascade,” a series of unforeseen consequences that ensue when Covid-19 breaks out in a healthcare facility. My father did not have the virus at the time he died—in fact, he tested negative…

  • A return to The Plague

    Bonnie Salomon Chicago, Illinois, United States   Cover of 1991 edition of The Plague by Albert Camus. For the past fifteen months, I have been reading and returning to Albert Camus’ 1947 novel, The Plague. Chronicling a fictional plague epidemic in Oran, Algeria, the narrator Dr. Rieux tells the saga of a city’s horrific struggle.…

  • Boccaccio’s Decameron in the world of the coronavirus pandemic

    Mateja Lekic Phoenix, Arizona, United States   A Tale from the Decameron, by John William Waterhouse, 1916. Source. Licensed for Public Use. Giovanni Boccaccio wrote the Decameron after the carnage of the bubonic plague in the late 1340s.1 Caused by the highly virulent bacterium Yersinia pestis, the bubonic plague, or Black Death, killed an estimated one quarter…

  • A day in Texas

    Steven Perez Virginia, United States   A photo of Steven J. Perez, MD, 2010, New York City. Photographer: Margie Eyman Perez. Published with permission. It was the late 1980s. I had just been discharged from the Air Force and returned to my hometown of San Antonio, Texas, to look for an internal medicine practice to…

  • COVID-19 and 1665: Learning from Daniel Defoe

    Brian Birch Southampton, Hampshire, UK   London plague victims being buried in 1665, one of nine scenes from John Dunstall’s Plague broadsheet (1666). Wellcome Collection. CC BY 4.0. Daniel Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year is an account of the 1665 Great Plague of London. Based on eyewitness experience, the undersigned initials “H. F.”…

  • The history of quarantine and contact tracing as surveillance strategies

    Mariella Scerri Victor Grech Malta   A view of the city of Malta, on the side of the Lazaretto or pest-house, where ships perform quarantine, by Joseph Goupy, around 1740-1760. Public Domain. Source. Quarantine, from the Italian quaranta, meaning forty, is a centuries-old public health measure instituted to control the spread of infectious diseases by…

  • Covid battleground

    Elena Wilson Rockville, Maryland, United States   A collage showcasing the way COVID-19 cases have dominated our minds. Edited to include a trend line of cases. Original by Gerd Altmann, via Pixabay. Up and down, up and down they rise Forgetting so easily all of the cries Cries for help, cries for change Cries for…

  • Book Review of Intensive Care: A GP, A Community and COVID-19

    Arpan K. Banerjee Solihull, United Kingdom   Intensive Care: A GP, A Community and COVID-19. Gavin Francis is a family doctor in Scotland who has written several critically-acclaimed books. In his latest work, he chronicles his experience of the COVID-19 pandemic as a family doctor (general practitioner or GP) and the effects of the virus…

  • Ancient Greek plague and coronavirus

    Patrick Bell Belfast, Northern Ireland   Plague in an Ancient City by Michael Sweerts, ca 1650. Credit Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Introduction Homer’s Iliad, Sophocles’ Oedipus the King, and Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War have been termed “the three earliest, and arguably most influential, representations of the plague in Western narrative.”1 This…