Hektoen International

A Journal of Medical Humanities

Tag: Friar Maurizio Bialek

  • The paradox of neurology

    Panayiota AntypasLaunceston, Tasmania, Australia Neurologists occupy a liminal zone, oscillating between a fascination with the complexity of the nervous system and an understanding of the devastating impact these diseases have on patients’ lives. During my medical student elective, I became immersed in this duality. Neurology… Read more

  • A wartime disaster that led to a cure in oncology

    Prasad IyerSingapore In the harbor of Bari on the night of December 2, 1943, the German Luftwaffe punctured the Italian coastline with fire and hit the SS John Harvey, a ship secretly carrying two thousand mustard gas bombs. A toxic soup of fuel oil and… Read more

  • The violent death of Alexander Pushkin, Russia’s tragic poet

    Alexander Pushkin, the “Sun of Russian Poetry,” is credited with transforming old-fashioned Russian into a rich, modern, and vibrant language. According to Dostoevsky, “Pushkin came to Russia as a new guiding light, a brilliant illumination of our dark ways.” Nikolai Gogol wrote that “To move… Read more

  • The bomb that fizzled

    Simon WeinPetach Tikvah, Israel The recent death of Paul R. Ehrlich (1932–2026) reminds us of the risks of hubris when prognosticating, ignoring human inventiveness, and promoting authoritarian control of society. Paul Ehrlich won the Swedish Crafoord Prize in 1990 (which is awarded in fields not… Read more

  • Freud, Mesmer, and Charcot in modern literature

    Stephen McWilliamsDublin, Ireland In modern literature, historical psychiatrists and neurologists sometimes appear as fictional characters. A case in point is found in Jed Rubenfeld’s novel The Interpretation of Murder, which opens with Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung, and Sándor Ferenczi arriving in New York in 1909… Read more

  • Ernest Hemingway: A medical portrait

    From a medical point of view, the life of Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961) was shaped by repeated physical trauma, chronic disease, hereditary factors, and profound psychological influences. In the world of literature, he is remembered for his minimalist prose—spare, direct, “bare-bones”, and stripped of ornamentation. But… Read more

  • The medical life of Louisa May Alcott

    Louisa May Alcott (1832–1888) was a novelist, short story writer, and poet. Raised in New England, she was an abolitionist and feminist, remained unmarried, and became active in reform movements such as temperance and women’s suffrage. As her family always lived on the poverty line,… Read more

  • C.S. Lewis and the medieval model of the universe

    Philip LiebsonChicago, Illinois, United States Clive Staples Lewis (1898–1963) was a famous author and professor of English literature at both Oxford and Cambridge. Much of his scholarly work focused on the Middle Ages. His work The Discarded Image (1964) concerned the medieval concept of the… Read more

  • Public health awareness of cataract

    Hosam Halim Amal Halim Menna Elbendary Walaa Asaad Salah Eldean Elsherbini Dalia SabryEgypt During our humanitarian medical outreach campaigns in poor and remote areas, we observed a high prevalence of visual impairment among many patients who presented with advanced medical, surgical, and oncological diseases. Their… Read more

  • Herman Boerhaave

    Arpan K. Banerjee Solihull, UK Herman Boerhaave was born on December 13, 1668, in Voorhout, a small village north of Leiden, Holland, an area known for its tulip-growing. He initially studied divinity, intending to be a priest, then continued his philosophy studies in Leiden on… Read more

  • The guinea pig’s gift: Serendipity and the starvation of leukemia

    Prasad IyerSingapore Medical breakthroughs often arrive not with a fanfare of logic, but with the quiet, baffling persistence of a laboratory anomaly that refuses to be ignored. In 1953, the laboratories of Cornell University Medical College operated in a world away from the high-stakes precision… Read more

  • The treatment of achalasia: A historical analysis

    Piyush PillarisettiPennsylvania, United States Achalasia is an esophageal motility disorder characterized by impaired lower esophageal sphincter (LES) relaxation and absent or spastic esophageal peristalsis. Typically, the condition leads to solid and liquid dysphagia at symptom onset. After the pathophysiology of achalasia was described in the… Read more