Hektoen International

A Journal of Medical Humanities

Tag: Judaism

  • Revising my bargain with the deity

    Barry Perlman New York, New York, United States   Photo by S. Tsuchiya on Unsplash. My parents lived into their nineties. Before they died, they endured years of dementia. Aware of my potential genetic inheritance, I have long harbored a deep dread of what my future might hold. If my curved pinky fingers were inherited…

  • Faith, neuroscience, and “the thorn” in Paul’s side: Abrahamic interpretations of epilepsy

    Christina Perri Stony Brook, New York, United States   Despite the stigma surrounding epilepsy in the Abrahamic faith traditions, some Christian art uses the boy with epilepsy as a visual metaphor for the Passion. As the boy appears to die and rise from a seizure, so too Christ dies and rises to Heaven. The experience…

  • Public health measures derived from the Jewish tradition: III. The Bris: Jewish ritual circumcision and hemophilia

    Matthew Migliozzi David Forstein Sarah Rindner Robert Stern New York City, New York, United States   The circumcision of Isaac. The Regensburg Pentateuch, 1305, now in the Israel Museum, Jerusalem. Historically, Jewish contributions to public health measures have not been given adequate attribution. The previous articles in this series have documented (1) the ancient Jewish…

  • Is healthcare a right?

    Ronald Pies Boston, Massachusetts, United States   Of all the forms of inequality, injustice in healthcare is the most shocking and inhumane. —Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Introduction In this paper, I examine the question of whether healthcare is regarded as a “basic human right” in the three Abrahamic faiths: Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Though…