Hektoen International

A Journal of Medical Humanities

Tag: James L. Franklin

  • Robert Schumann’s hand injury

    James L. Franklin Chicago, Illinois, United States The death of the American pianist Leon Fleisher (1928–2020)1 whose brilliant career as a piano soloist was upended in his mid-thirties by the development of a crippling movement disorder affecting his right hand, brings to mind the composer Robert Schumann whose youthful ambition to become a piano virtuoso was…

  • The Bengal tiger: Panthera tigris tigris

    James L. FranklinChicago, Illinois, United States The Indian subcontinent for millennia provided the ideal “jungle” habitat for the tiger. When the first Europeans arrived in India the animal was ubiquitous. At the close of the nineteenth century, when Kipling wrote The Jungle Books, 100,000 tigers were thought to roam the subcontinent. By 1971, a critical…

  • Rudyard Kipling and the medical profession

    George DuneaJames L. FranklinChicago, Illinois Born in Bombay but educated in England, the great master of the English language did not return to India until he was seventeen years old in 1882. He worked for local newspapers in Lahore and Allahabad, and in his spare time began to write the many stories that made him famous. Notable…

  • All too human: The mountain gorillas of Uganda

    James L. FranklinChicago, Illinois, United States The Ugandan mountain gorilla is a member of the Hominidae family, also known as the great Apes. The extant species include: the orangutan, the eastern and western gorilla, the chimpanzee, the bonobo, and ourselves—Homo sapiens. The mountain gorilla is one of two subspecies of the eastern gorilla. The one…

  • George Orwell and the Spanish Civil War: A brush with death

    James L. FranklinChicago, Illinois, United States Robert Capa’s “The Fallen Soldier” is the iconic photograph of the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939). The original title was “Loyalist Militiaman at the Moment of Death, Carro Muriano, September 5, 1936.” The photograph captures a Republican soldier at the very moment of his death. Dressed in civilian clothing, a…

  • A Cold War vaccine: Albert Sabin, Russia, and the oral polio vaccine

    James L. FranklinChicago, Illinois, United States In the midst of the 2020 Covid–19 pandemic, when international scientific cooperation seems to be the order of the day, it is heartening to recall that during the height of Cold War tensions between the USSR and the United States, collaboration between an American virologist and his Russian counterparts…

  • Philip Roth’s Nemesis: a lesson for today

    James L. FranklinChicago, Illinois, United States As we grapple with the impact of the current pandemic caused by the coronavirus, Covid–19, we may wish to seek understanding in works of non-fiction such as The Great Influenza: The Epic Story of the Deadliest Plague in History by John M. Barry or the writings of authors from…

  • The last illness of Édouard Manet

    George DuneaJames L. FranklinChicago, Illinois Édouard Manet (1832–1883) was one of the most famous modernist painters of nineteenth-century France. He painted life as creatively and elegantly as he lived in it, translating onto canvas the fashionable salons, racetracks, and picnics of the Parisians.  With one foot artistically in the past and another in the future,…

  • The smell of burning rubber: The fatal illness of George Gershwin

    James L. FranklinChicago, Illinois, USA On the morning of Monday July 12, 1937, New Yorkers who had just suffered through five days of a heat wave that left thirty-eight people dead, awoke to read on the front page of the New York Times about the death of George Gershwin, a native son of their city.…

  • The sound of one hand clapping: meditations on sinistrality

    James L. Franklin Paper presented to the Chicago Literary Club on April 7, 2008  It all began on the coldest morning of the season in early December 2006. Painters were still in our apartment putting the finishing touches on what had proven to be an all too prolonged renovation project. However—the end was now in…