Hektoen International

A Journal of Medical Humanities

Tag: Essays

  • Emily, Usher, and American Gothic perspectives on mortality

    Olga ReykhartLiam ButchartStony Brook, New York, United States In an editorial for Medical Humanities, Gillie Bolton notes that death is a common theme in literature and also in medicine. She writes, “Death, dying, and bereavement are dark threads running through all literature. Not only are they life’s sole certainties, along with birth; they are also…

  • Review of: Health Humanities in Postgraduate Medical Education: A Handbook to the Heart of Medicine

    J.T.H. ConnorSt. John’s, Newfoundland, Canada Review of Allan D. Peterkin and Anna Skorzewska, eds., Health Humanities in Postgraduate Medical Education: A Handbook to the Heart of Medicine (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018) The backbone of this innovative and informative collection is comprised of eleven essays that address the spectrum of the arts and humanities…

  • A birth remembered

    F. Gonzalez-CrussiChicago, Illinois, United States Memory is to old age as presbyopia (far-sightedness) is to eyesight. Presbyopia makes you lose the ability to see clearly at a normal near working distance while maintaining a sharp distant vision. Just so the elderly recollect in painstaking detail what happened to them fifty or sixty years ago, yet…

  • Ferdinand Sauerbruch, father of thoracic surgery

    Annabelle Slingerland Leon Lacquet Leiden, the Netherlands   Ferndinand Sauerbruch at a medical lecture at the University of Zurich, between 1910 and 1917. Source unknown. Accessed via Wikimedia commons. Source Ferdinand Sauerbruch (1875-1951) was one of the most important thoracic surgeons of the first half of the twentieth century, remembered for pioneering a method that…

  • Of luxuriant manes and in praise of baldness

    Frank Gonzalez-CrussiChicago, Illinois, United States The feverish imagination of poets has ever eulogized the beauty of feminine hair. The beloved’s hair has been represented as golden threads, sunrays, fragrant flowers, or astrakhan fleece (wool famous for its tight, shiny loops). Richard Lovelace spoke of it as “sunlight wound up in ribbands.”1 To Charles Baudelaire, his…

  • African American medical pioneers

    Mariel Tishma Chicago, Illinois, United States   The road for African Americans in the medical professions has not been easy. Enslaved Africans received no education.1 During the first half of the nineteenth-century medical schools in the North would admit only a very small number of black students. Even after the Civil War, African Americans continued…

  • Changes in childbirth in the United States: 1750–1950

    Laura KaplanNew York, New York, United States For most of American history, pregnancy, labor and delivery, and post-partum have been dangerous periods for mother and child. However, starting slowly in the late 18th century and accelerating into the late 19th century, labor and delivery radically changed. Initially new medical interventions, such as forceps and anesthesia,…