Hektoen International

A Journal of Medical Humanities

Tag: Jesús Ramírez-Bermúdez

  • Delusions of being and nothingness

    Jesús Ramírez-BermúdezMexico City, Mexico In the late nineteenth century, the French physician Jules Cotard described patients with a delusional denial of bodily organs, self-existence, and the world. The woman originally described “believed that she had no brain, nerves, chest, or bowels, and that she was only skin and bone. God and the devil did not…

  • The monarch, the musician, and the medic

    Jesús Ramírez-BermúdezTranslated by Ilana Dann LunaMexico City, Mexico The history of medicine bestows us with unexpected episodes, such as the character of “The Swan King,” whose platonic love for a disgraced musician sparked the artistic transformation of a kingdom. A physician’s intervention led to a tragic scene in a castle by a lake, where a…