Hektoen International

A Journal of Medical Humanities

Tag: George Eliot

  • Middle Ages, Middlemarch, and the mid-twentieth century: Idealism at risk

    William Marshall Tucson, AZ   From Stories of a Country Doctor (1891) by Willis P. King, p. 155. Philadelphia: Hummel and Parmele. Via Internet Archive. Public domain. The dissatisfaction with modern medicine felt by both patients and doctors occurs despite unprecedented advances and successes in disease treatment and prevention. Corporate Medicine (huge healthcare conglomerates that…

  • A “most perfect interchange”

    Satyabha TripathiLucknow, Uttar Pradesh, India “[Lydgate held] the conviction that the medical profession as it might be was the finest in the world; presenting the most perfect interchange between science and art; offering the most direct alliance between intellectual conquest and the social good […] he was an emotional creature, with a flesh-and-blood sense of…

  • Spinoza and medical practice: can the philosophy of Baruch Spinoza enrich the thinking of doctors?

    Norelle Lickiss Hobart, Tasmania, Australia   Portrait of Baruch de Spinoza (1632–1677), ca. 1665. Unknown. c. 1665. Gemäldesammlung der Herzog August Bibliothek, Wolfenbüttel, Germany. As doctors we seek to assuage the distress of our patients by relieving symptoms, guarding personal dignity, and remaining present even as they are dying. Yet despite these lofty goals, there…

  • Queer and unked: Disability, monstrosity, and George Eliot’s “Sympathy”

    Christina Lee Kent, United Kingdom   Silas finds Eppie. Eliot, George. The Jenson Society, NY. In The Mill on the Floss, the intellectual and sensitive Philip Wakem, who has a curved spine from a fall in infancy, is called “a queer fellow, a humpback, and the son of a rogue.”1(II.vi) In the manuscript Philip Wakem is branded…

  • Pushing back at perceptions of epilepsy: the interplay between medicine and literature in three 19th-century British novels

    Laura Fitzpatrick New York, United States   If I wished to show a student the difficulties of getting at truth from medical experience, I would give him the history of epilepsy to read. —Oliver Wendell Holmes, 1891.1 As the nineteenth century dawned, the average Briton still understood epilepsy much in the way his ancient Greek…

  • The Lifted Veil by George Eliot

    A young and celebrated doctor, friend of M***, attempts a transfusion with his own blood. The operation succeeds and the dead woman is revived. In this brief flash of life, she recognizes Mme *** who has just entered the room, and “unveils” her guilt: “You plan to poison your husband,” she cries.— George Eliot, The…