Tag: Hekint
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Gordon Morgan Holmes MD., FRS.
JMS PearceHull, England “Beneath the exterior of a martinetthere was an Irish heart of gold” Wilder Penfield Gordon Holmes (1876-1965) was born in Castlebellingham, Ireland. He was named after his father, a landowner, descended from a Yorkshire family that had settled in King’s County (County Offaly) in the mid-seventeenth century. In a golden era of…
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The illness of Tom Wedgwood: A tragic episode in a family saga
John Hayman Melbourne, Australia Tom Wedgwood (1771-1805) was born into the famous pottery dynasty as the third surviving son of Josiah Wedgwood (1730-1795) and his wife Sarah (1734-1815). Sarah was also a Wedgwood, a distant cousin of her husband.1 Tom was ill for all of his short life, a life recorded by his biographer, Richard…
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We are all hospitalized (metaphorically speaking)
F. Gonzalez-CrussiChicago, Illinois, United States Among the many species of adversity that unavoidably befall us during life, to become a hospitalized patient is not the slightest. Today, hardly anyone is exempted: life begins and ends inside hospital quarters. We are born in some obstetrics suite and die amid beeps of life-supporting equipment, the hiss of…
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Burnout: Are we looking at it through the wrong lens?
Elizabeth CerceoCamden, New Jersey, United States The epidemic of burnout seems to afflict ever more populations as it insidiously creeps into the workplace of everyone from nurses to teachers, from medical students to seasoned clinicians, from Amazon to Apple. As physicians, we are trained to identify a condition, make a diagnosis, and prescribe a treatment.…
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It’s elementary: The addictions of Sherlock Holmes
Kevin R. LoughlinBoston, Massachusetts, USA One might ask, why write about the addictions of a fictional character? The answer is that there is often a fine line between reality and fiction. The New York Times columnist Bret Stephens recently quoted a survey that found 20% of British teenagers thought that Winston Churchill was a fictional…
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Cranium: The symbolic powers of the skull
F. Gonzalez-CrussiChicago, Illinois, USA Of all bodily parts, the head has traditionally enjoyed the greatest prestige. The Platonic Timaeus tells us that secondary gods (themselves created by the Demiurge) copied the round form of the universe to make the head, divinest part of our anatomy. In order to avoid its rolling on the ground like…
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Otto von Bismarck, the Iron Chancellor
Otto von Bismarck was born into a family of Junkers in Brandenburg in 1815. Becoming prime minister of Prussia at the age of forty-seven in 1862, he remained in power for twenty-eight years. During this time he united Germany under Prussian hegemony; defeated Denmark, Austria, and France in three wars; annexed Schleswig-Holstein, Alsace, and Lorraine…
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Madness and gender in Gregory Doran’s Hamlet
Sarah BahrIndianapolis, Indiana, United States In director Gregory Doran’s 2009 film adaptation of Shakespeare’s Hamlet, David Tennant’s Hamlet becomes a bawdy lunatic who consciously or unconsciously uncouples himself from reality. The intentionality of Hamlet’s madness is more muddled than in Shakespeare’s text because of the confrontational quality Tennant lends to the prince’s mental angst. Tennant…