Hektoen International

A Journal of Medical Humanities

Tag: Madrid

  • Madrid’s Real Jardín Botánico

    The roots of the Real Jardín Botánico lie in medieval Madrid’s geography and its fortifications designed to secure the frontier between al‑Andalus and the northern Christian kingdoms. After Alfonso VI captured Madrid in 1083, the city expanded and walls built in the 11th–12th centuries enclosed new neighborhoods, transforming it by the late Middle Ages into…

  • Peter Panum and the “geography of disease”

    Kathryne DycusMadrid, Spain In 1846, the Faroe Islands experienced an outbreak of measles, the likes of which had not been seen in sixty-five years. The Danish government called upon a newly graduated physician, Peter Ludwig Panum, to investigate and control its spread. Panum wrote of the experience in his seminal text, “Observations Made During the…

  • Children treating children: Anne Shirley as clinician

    Kathryne DycusMadrid, Spain Childhood classics provide a range of illness narratives, reminding readers of dangers now preventable and even treatable, but also of the universal imperatives of understanding and accommodating the morbidity and mortality that can accompany childhood. Sickness in children’s literature, as in medicine, presents dramatically colorful dimensions of plot twist, character development, human…

  • Applause: Reflections on The Plague and being a doctor in a pandemic

    Roger Ruiz MoralUniversidad Francisco de Vitoria. Madrid, Spain “I imagine then what the plague must be for you.Yes, – said Rieux – an endless defeat.”1 The COVID-19 lockdown is today in its fifth week. In my country, Spain, these measures have been especially severe. I am confined to my house despite being a physician, since…

  • Blood on the road

    Anne Marie Appelgren Málaga, Spain “The wounded are dying, searching for blood. Now the blood can move, now the blood can search out the wounded.” – Norman Bethune “Bethune was a man of destiny. He lived and died for blood.” – Hazen Sise On a gray evening in London in the fall of 1936, a…