Hektoen International

A Journal of Medical Humanities

Tag: Down syndrome

  • Down’s syndrome

    JMS PearceHull, England Amongst the residents he attended at Earlswood Asylum for Idiots in Redhill, Surrey, John Langdon Down in 1865 began to use an anthropological classification. He identified a group of patients who were mentally delayed and showed a remarkably similar, but previously unrecognized distinctive facial appearance that he described using the language of…

  • Beauty in breaking

    Lealani AcostaNashville, Tennessee, United States I had a succulent hanging from my office cabinet, suspended in a clear teardrop-shaped terrarium: its spiny green arches floated above a mound of fake snow, which I intermittently illuminated by touching the built-in switch that electrified interwoven fairy lights. It was a Christmas present from James’s sister. She had come…

  • Nazi doctors and medical eponyms

    Howard FischerUppsala, Sweden The tradition in medicine has been to name a pathological condition after the person who first described it in the medical literature. Thus we have Addison’s disease, Down’s syndrome, and several hundred others. The tendency now is to eliminate the possessive,1 giving Addison disease and Down syndrome. Presently, “new” diseases are named…

  • Rethinking the impulse to empathize: a sister’s perspective on sympathy and stigma

    Jeanne FarnanPennsylvania, United States “I am so sorry.” My youngest sister, Annie, was born during the spring semester of my first year of high school. These four words are etched into my memory, integrally intertwined with the events of that spring. “I am so sorry.” I remember these words so clearly because they clashed dramatically…

  • The boy with two dads

    David ThoeleChicago, Illinois, United States The first time I met Martin in my clinic, the 7-year-old seemed friendly, but shy.  He was a bit chubby, with dark, short-cropped hair, rounded fingernails, and blue-tinged skin. He was short for his age, with features of Down syndrome, which his mother confirmed. Since half of people with Down…

  • Down syndrome through the centuries in art

    Bojana CokićZajecar, Serbia  Though fully described by John Langdon Down in 1862, this syndrome of delayed growth, characteristic facial features, and intellectual impairment has been featured in numerous works of art since antiquity. References BOJANA COKIĆ, MD, is a pediatrician specialized in clinical genetics at the Children’s Hospital in Zajecar, Serbia, where she was been…

  • Reflections on medicine and art

    Bojana CokićZajecar, Serbia Oscar Wilde believed that life imitates art and that what we perceive is beautiful only because “art” has taught us to regard it as such. But if indeed “life is art,” as Maxim Gorki wrote, “to be found in all its beauty and joy,” then clearly life has been with us since…