Hektoen International

A Journal of Medical Humanities

Tag: Frida Kahlo

  • Ellen Powell Tiberino’s The Operation

    Cody RitzPhiladelphia, Pennsylvania, United States In the graphite drawing by the late Ellen Powell Tiberino titled The Operation (1980), a tangled chaos emanates from an operating table surrounded by medical professionals of varying expressions—the two closest of whom hunch over the mess of contraptions and viscera with claw-like hands. Another healthcare worker stares directly at…

  • Gav’s Frida Kahlo: Heroine of Pain

    Jimin MathewBangalore, IndiaLucy SamuelPuducherry, India In Frida Kahlo: Heroine of Pain (2017), Gavin Aung Than (Gav), an Australian artist, uses comics to capture the lingering pain and excruciating maladies of the famous Mexican artist Frida Kahlo and her evolution towards artistic excellence. This article analyzes the visual and verbal metaphors deployed by Gav to limn…

  • Diego Rivera and Hernan Cortes

    Nicolas RoblesBadajoz, Spain Diego Rivera was one of Mexico’s most famous artists. Nowadays he is also known for his marriage to Frida Kahlo, another great Mexican artist. Born in Guanajuato, Mexico, Rivera was an atheist and a Communist radical who criticized the Mexican government and foreign domination. He created the History of Mexico mural in…

  • Review of Fracture: Stories of How Great Lives Take Root in Trauma

    Arpan K. BanerjeeSolihull, United Kingdom The lives of people who seem to be endowed with extraordinary abilities have long been a source of fascination. The famous Italian physician, researcher, and founder of the science of criminology, Cesare Lombroso, professed this interest in his 1889 book The Man of Genius, stating that genius was a form…

  • Lessons from the black hole

    Columba QuigleyLondon, United Kingdom The episode occurred some few years ago, when I was working in palliative medicine, caring for those with advanced and often incurable disease. As I walked onto the ward early one morning, a woman whom I had been seeing on a daily basis for symptom control started screaming at me. Only…

  • Frida Kahlo

    Now recognized as one of the great painters of the 20th century, Frida Kahlo’s life had been one of suffering and pain. Born in Mexico, she had polio at age six, leaving her with a contracted left leg. At the age of 20 she had a serious bus accident that fractured her spinal column, clavicle, ribs,…

  • Wounded deer—Medical aspects of the life of Frida Kahlo

    Farrah JawadLondon, UK “I paint myself because I am so often alone and because I am the subject I know best.” — Frida Kahlo Frida Kahlo was born Magdalena Carmen Frieda Kahlo y Calderon in Coyocan, Mexico City, on July 6, 1907, to Matilde Calderon y Gonzalez, a woman of mixed Spanish and Mexican heritage, and…