Hektoen International

A Journal of Medical Humanities

Tag: Jane Austen

  • Catching Your Death: Infectious rain in the works of Jane Austen

    Eve Elliot Dublin, Ireland   Willoughby Carries Marianne Home. Image: Carried Her Down the Hill, 1908. By C.E Brock. Wikimedia Commons. Fans of the Netflix romp Bridgerton or any of the Jane Austen film adaptations will likely be familiar with the important social etiquette of inquiring after someone’s health. Unlike the modern throwaway how are…

  • Sir Geoffrey Langdon Keynes

    JMS Pearce East Yorks, UK   Fig 1.  Sir Geoffrey Langdon Keynes. Reproduction after a pencil drawing by G. Shaw, 1957. Credit: Wellcome Collection.  (CC BY 4.0) Mention the name Keynes in Britain and most people think of the Buckinghamshire town Milton Keynes or the celebrated twentieth-century economist John Maynard Keynes. In the thirteenth century…

  • Is history good for you? Pros and cons

    Pro “ . . . a page of history is worth a volume of logic.” – Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it” – George Santayana “A people without history is like wind on the buffalo grass.” – Sioux proverb “[History is] a pact between the dead,…

  • Jane Austen and the hypochondriacs

    George DuneaChicago, Illinois, United States Jane Austen began working on Sanditon in January of 1817, completing only 2,600 words before she died six months later—probably from adrenal failure (Addison’s disease) caused by tuberculosis. The fragment was published in part in 1870, then in its entirety in 1925. Several authors since then have completed the story,…

  • On the skill of physicians

    “I am not partial to physicians myself. In minor matters a proper diet is better than a doctor; in major matters they do not seem to have much skill. No doctor has yet learnt to cure a broken neck. However, they have their place, like others in the world. No duel should be fought without…