Hektoen International

A Journal of Medical Humanities

Tag: eye

  • William Wordsworth: “The blind poet”?

    JMS PearceHull, England, United Kingdom William Wordsworth (1770–1850) was born in Cockermouth, Cumberland, on April 7, 1770. He was the totemic father of the Lakeland poets, who extolled the relation between man and the natural world: a wedding between nature and the human mind that to him symbolized the mind of God. A prolific writer…

  • Half-skull

    Sophia Wilson New Zealand   Photo © Chris Downer / Twelfth century headache / (cc-by-sa/2.0) a ghost shrieks at the window, threatens to break through, shatter eye-cover. throbbing fingers infiltrate soft crevices; neuronal mass pulsates. knife twists, gristle-turning; stoat gnaw, rat’s claw. mind summersaults to snap-trap pain, can’t let go its axon’s branch. cerebral crevices convolute;…

  • Monet and his cataracts

    Peter KopplinToronto, Ontario, Canada In January 1923, the elderly artist Claude Monet struggled restlessly in his room after his cataract surgery. He got up and tore at his bandages.1 His family put it down to his temperament. But an elderly man in his eighties, immobilized, recovering from surgery with limited sight in the left eye…