Hektoen International

A Journal of Medical Humanities

Tag: Hodgkin’s Lymphoma

  • The illness and death of Jane Austen

    The final years of Jane Austen were overshadowed by a mysterious illness that has long since been a subject of speculation and debate. Her health began to decline in early 1816, when she was around forty years old. Her letters from that period make occasional references to fatigue and bouts of illness, but she tended…

  • What did Dorothy Reed See?

    Sara NassarCairo, Egypt “They say that genius is an infinite capacity for taking pains.”1—Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, A Study in Scarlet Dorothy Mabel Reed Mendenhall opened the doors of medicine at a time when women were considered incapable of managing this “gory” field. Although Reed’s eponymous Reed-Sternberg cell was a pivotal discovery for the diagnosis…

  • A painful but tender embrace: Robert Pope’s Aesculapius

    Caroline WellberyWashington, DC, United States Robert Pope, early in childhood a student gifted in science, chose art as his career, and no one better melds the observing eye with the understanding heart. The shadow of cancer hung over him during the most productive years of his life: he died of Hodgkin’s lymphoma at the age…

  • Night upon the moaning ward

    James Rickert Poet’s statement: This poem was written during the final days of my stem cell transplant for non-Hodgkin’s Lymphoma and just after a fellow patient on the ward had died of complications similar to those from which I was suffering. It and other poems written during that time helped me face the physical suffering…