Hektoen International

A Journal of Medical Humanities

Tag: Fall 2015

  • Oppression in nursing practice

    Denise Pasieka University of Alberta, Edmonton, Alberta, Canada (Fall 2015) Oppression is the dehumanization of another and is often viewed as a negative result of power. It occurs when there are efforts to reduce, confine, and discipline people into subordination.1Oppressive behaviours are noted in nursing practice today but are often not questioned; instead, they are…

  • Gilyarovsky and Gannushkin psychiatric hospitals in Moscow

    Sergei JarginMoscow, Russia The Gilyarovsky and Gannushkin psychiatric hospitals can be discussed together because the latter was founded in 1913 as a branch of the former, becoming a separate institution only in 1931. Both hospitals are located not far from each other, near the Sokolniki Park and Yauza River.1 The Gilyarovsky hospital, founded 1808 (Fig.…

  • The Old Cook County Hospital of Chicago

    George Dunea This venerable hospital still exists, but in some ways it exists no more, because in 2002 it was renamed, rebuilt, and drastically reduced in size. But some half a century ago it was one the largest hospitals in the world. It had a bed capacity of 4,500, almost 100,000 admissions each year, and…

  • Westerbork Hospital—a blessing in disguise

    Annabelle S. SlingerlandLeiden, the Netherlands This year Westerbork Hospital in the east of the Netherlands celebrates its seventieth anniversary, not of its birth but of its closure. Despite its well-deserved reputation for medical care, it was part of Polizeiliches Durchgangslager Westerbork, a Nazi concentration camp that held persons selected for transport to the death camps. The…

  • Consumption, Collapse, and Family by Alice Neel

    Gregory Rutecki “The personal images in Alice Neel’s work not only reflect her life, they also provide metaphors …There is no peace…in (her) paintings, only agitated recognition of inevitable struggles.”1 “…Alice Neel described the 20th Century as she experienced it, living in the ghetto with those against whom most of society discriminated. She has provided…

  • Tuberculosis Retrenched at Saranac Lake: A Herald for Contemporary Hospitals

    Gregory M. Rutecki “…progress is the retrenchment of diseases.”1 “In 1870, physicians could do little to cure…A hundred years later they intervene…in many…diseases. In a single century…understanding of disease increased more than in the previous forty centuries combined.”2 At the fin de siècle, American Medicine acquired a Promethean fire. Weapons would be forged against a…

  • A Return to a Moralistic Perception of Disease: Prudence in the Time of Cholera

    Lauren Lewis During the 1830s, a critical shift in thinking occurred about the causes of disease as medical practitioners increasingly shifted their views of causation towards the environment and away from morality and the individual. However, not all followed this shift in thinking, as evinced by Sylvester Graham, a deeply spiritual Presbyterian minister and dedicated…

  • Observations on acronyms

    JMS PearceHull, England, United Kingdom When Prime Minister David Cameron recently thought that LOL meant lots of love, not laugh out loud, he appeared out of touch. (The Guardian, May 11, 2012) He illustrated the difficulties that acronyms can cause. But acronyms are not new. The Romans used SPQR to abbreviate Senatus populusque Romanus, inscribed…

  • Anton Chekhov and the Sakhalin Penal Colony

    Michael BloorUnited Kingdom In the nineteenth century the Czarist Government wanted to create an Arctic Australia by establishing a penal colony on Sakhalin Island, off the eastern coast of Siberia some five thousand miles from European Russia. There convicts who had served out their sentences would be obliged to stay as settlers, albeit in a…

  • Washer of the dead

    Ruth DemingWillow Grove, Pennsylvania, United States Dead bodies were nothing new to Sarah Washington. As a registered nurse, she peacefully viewed the stunning poses of the dead at her first job, a suburban hospital that closed shortly after she was hired. God had chosen her, she was assured, as she closed the eyes of an…