Hektoen International

A Journal of Medical Humanities

Tag: Hektoen

  • Réquiem

    Prasad IyerSingapore Poet’s statement This poem expresses the feelings of parents who have recently lost a child to cancer. The first stanza deals with sadness, the second with guilt, and the last one with acceptance. Réquiem Life has fragrance eternally lostPure symphony now cut shortBroken hearts disparate and newDon’t know how to restart anewThis body…

  • Para site

    Sophia WilsonNew Zealand they burrow, gnaw and niggleI scratch, claw and wrigglethey linger, lurk and loomI pick, and probe and groomthey crawl, revolt, returnI rip and pull and squirmthey bite, prick, sting and tunnel under skinI battle, bawl, hand-wringthey glide though veins, gnaw holes in heartprotrude as lumps and tear apart. they nip with pincersI…

  • “Moonlight” and silence

    Anne JacobsonOak Park, Illinois, United States At seventeen, I knew little about the limitations or losses that might cause a person to second-guess a vocation, deeply held belief, or identity. Perhaps those questions about the unknowable future inhabit the soul of a teenager under the guise of general angst and anxiety, or alternatively are tamped…

  • “Rich man, poor man”: A history of lead poisoning

    Mariel TishmaChicago, Illinois, United States The history of lead poisoning is the history of human industry. For unmarked time, lead has been around causing abdominal pain, constipation, nausea, and irritability, as well as conditions like heart disease, kidney disease, reduced fertility, and gout.1 Many say that the first description of the symptoms of lead poisoning…

  • Vampires and the Tuberculous Family

    Sylvia PamboukianMoon Township, PA An isolated village, a series of mysterious deaths, a mob in the graveyard at midnight—it sounds like the climax of a thrilling vampire story. However, these events occurred in 1892 Rhode Island at the gravesite of tuberculosis victim Mercy Brown five years prior to the publication of Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897).…

  • 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.…

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • Charles Darwin’s illnesses

    There is a prevalent consensus that most of Charles Darwin’s lifelong symptoms are not attributable to organic disease.1-5 It would seem unlikely that he contracted chronic Chagas disease in South America, because his symptoms began before he ever set foot on the HMS Beagle.2 His various complaints were intermittent, many improved with age, and he…

  • The last picture show

    Katherine WhiteRockville, Maryland, United States It was a cold December morning, the second day of the 2018 Hot Topics in Neonatology Conference in Washington, DC. Around 800 people trickled into the vast hotel ballroom, with its rows of long tables punctuated by aisles strewn with numbered microphones, settling in for a day of information-packed projected…