Hektoen International

A Journal of Medical Humanities

Tag: John Keats

  • John Keats statue

    Arpan K. BanerjeeSolihull, England John Keats, born in London in 1795, is one of the finest Romantic poets of the English language. He died at the age of twenty-five in Rome, where he had gone to recover from tuberculosis. The house where he spent the last years of his life, at the base of the…

  • Dr. Edward Livingston Trudeau and aeration of the White Plague

    Philip R. Liebson Chicago, Illinois, United States   Photo from the Adirondack Experience Museum. Circa 1895. Edward Livingston Trudeau was born in 1848, one year before Frédéric Chopin died of tuberculosis. Trudeau’s extended family eventually included Justin Trudeau, the Prime Minister of Canada, and Garry Trudeau of Doonesbury fame. In his time tuberculosis was killing…

  • Medical and literary coupling

    Stephen Finn South Africa   (To be read aloud, with gusto and with a strong beat) Collage created by Hektoen staff. Images from left to right. Top row: Portrait of Rabelais, circa 1820. By Louis-François Durrans. From the Rabelais Museum, via Wikimedia; Anton Chekhov, via Wikimedia. Center: Photo by National Cancer Institute on Unsplash Bottom…

  • C. Louis Leipoldt: The polymath physician and literary giant

    Stephen FinnSouth Africa Looking out across a landscape of dramatic mountains and purple and orange sunsets is a small cave. Listen carefully in this desolate place in a western corner of South Africa, and you will hear in the distance the sound of a banjo being plucked. Interred in this cave at his request are…

  • Why do physicians write so badly?

    Peter ArnoldSydney, Australia An old joke is that pharmacists are the only people who can read physicians’ handwriting. This piece is not about handwriting, but about writing style. Compared with great medical authors, like Somerset Maugham, Conan Doyle, Anton Chekhov, John Keats, and Friedrich von Schiller, most physicians are not good writers. (I could have…

  • Book review: John Keats’ Medical Notebook

    Arpan K. BanerjeeSolihull, United Kingdom February 23, 2021 marked the bicentenary of the death of the great Romantic poet John Keats. Born in 1795, Keats lived a tragically short life, dying at the age of only twenty-five. It is perhaps little known that he first qualified as an apothecary doctor before giving up medicine for…

  • The most enduring fictional character in literature, Sherlock Holmes, created by a physician

    Marshall Lichtman Rochester, New York, United States   Figure 1. Basil Rathbone (Sherlock Homes) with pipe and Nigel Bruce (Dr. John H. Watson). A scene from the film “The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes” in 1939. The plots rarely adhered to the Conan Doyle story plots and Inspector Lestrade of Scotland Yard and Dr. Watson were…

  • Letting go of logic

    Nimisha Bajaj Columbus, Ohio, United States   Last Supper by Leonardo DaVinci. Photo by Paris Orlando. November 2019. Public Domain “He’s here for aspiration pneumonia. He doesn’t want a G-tube even though we tried to explain to him that if he continues to eat and drink by mouth, this will keep happening and he will…

  • The female body dissected: Anatomy and John Keats

    Niamh Davies-Branch Aberdeen, United Kingdom   A boiled gland with rose-like folds from Sir Astley Cooper’s Plates of the Anatomy of the Breast. Plates of the Anatomy of the Breast by Sir Astley Cooper in Sir Duncan Rice Library Special Collections, Aberdeen, UK John Keats, poet of the great odes, was also a surgical apprentice…

  • Reading the brain in John Keats’s “Ode to Psyche”

    Kathryne DycusMadrid, Spain The Romantic poet John Keats wrote in a letter dated May 18, 1818, “I am glad at not having given away my medical books, which I shall look over again to keep alive the little I knew towards that work.”1 Though the Romantic poet abandoned a career in medicine, the knowledge he…