Hektoen International

A Journal of Medical Humanities

Tag: End of Life

  • One chaplain’s journey: Teaching, hospice, and humanities

    Terry McIntyreForest Park, Illinois, United States Auburn University was an easy choice for a graduate student with two preschool youngsters. Teaching medieval literature was the draw. Later, a divorce necessitated working as a project manager in sub-contracting. When the Lutheran campus pastor in Ann Arbor wanted me on the property committee, I declined. Instead, I…

  • Gulliver at Luggnagg — Learning about the immortal struldbrugs (abridged)

    The Luggnaggians are a polite and generous people . . . they show themselves courteous to strangers. One day . . . I was asked by a person of quality, “whether I had seen any of their struldbrugs, or immortals?” . . . He told me “that sometimes, though very rarely, a child happened to…

  • Sarah’s lesson

    Henri ColtLaguna Beach, California, United States Sarah put her hand on my forearm and dug a fingernail into my white coat. “Doc, I druther you not call my husband in just yet,” she said. “Doc?” I smiled. “You never call me Doc.” I finished installing the morphine pump and set the dose at an hourly…

  • Great expectations

    Anthony PapagiannisThessaloniki, Greece “Doctor, I want you to treat her as a forty-year old!” What is the appropriate answer to a demand like that from a daughter about the treatment of her eighty-eight-year-old mother? Any suggestion that her mother might not do well even with the best treatment in the world is anathema to her.…

  • Effervesce

    Catalina Florina Florescu  Hoboken, New Jersey, United States   Note: Scroll to continue the comic     CATALINA FLORINA FLORESCU holds a Ph.D. in Medical Humanities from Purdue University. She is the curator of the New Plays Festival at JCTC. Her next and last book is under contract with Routledge, Female Playwrights Intersectionality in Contemporary Romanian…

  • Tracing wisps of hair

    Miriam RosenPittsburgh, Pennsylvania, United States My mother was diagnosed with cancer when I was fourteen. For the next nine years, she lived her life with elegance and seemed to do it with ease. She continued her psychiatry practice, only gradually reducing the number of patients she saw. She read the New York Times cover to…

  • An unseen border

    T.Y. EulianoGainesville, Florida, United States “Please let me have the chest pain in 3,” I said. “I can’t take any more whiny kids today.” Clare raised an eyebrow. “You can have the next trauma.” “Two traumas,” she said. “I can’t stand any more whiny parents.” “Deal.” She wrote my initials by Room 3. “Remind me…

  • The African Savannah

    Steve AblonChestnut Hill, Massachusetts Forty years ago, my fatherwore his safari hat, squintedthrough binoculars, told us thosegiraffes, the dark ones, are older,and soon will not be able to outrunlions or will break a leg, be eaten.That is the cycle of life he said.Now he needs a walker. My teacherbroke her hip, my colleague torehis anterior…

  • Me, my father, and the angels

    Hope AtlasLivingston, New Jersey, United States The handle of the dresser drawer talks to my father while he sits in bedWhenever he likes he can conjure up the face of the dresser drawerwith its pointy ears, droopy mouth and metal earringsThe angels are comingHe laughs, pointing at the dresser drawerThey are singing, “It’s time to…

  • Some subjects are given

    Michael SalcmanBaltimore, Maryland, United States Some subjects are given to the authorsof poems and songs, of mechanical puzzlesand lives, given over and over like a spiking fever in an old TB wardor the low level irritation of a cancerraising its hand in a bone — here I am it says, conversant with any private language…