Hektoen International

A Journal of Medical Humanities

Tag: Mark Twain

  • Battling poverty, injustice, ignorance and fear, and despair

    Tonse N. K. RajuGaithersburg, Maryland, United States At the entrance hall of the Library of the Health Sciences of the University of Illinois Medical Campus in Chicago, one can see an ensemble of surgical and anesthetic equipment such as knives, forceps, speculum, towel clips, hemostats, kidney trays, IV poles, crutches, x-ray films, anesthetic balloon bags,…

  • 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, the living, and…

  • The talk

    Akshay KhatriValhalla, New York, United States I walked into the emergency department with a sense of trepidation. The patient I was evaluating was Mrs. G, a woman whom I had cared for in the hospital a few months earlier. Now she was back from the nursing home with more shortness of breath. Having received a…

  • Gingerbread

    Olga DiganchinaAstana, Kazakhstan The two most important days in your life are the day you are born and the day you find out why.-Mark Twain Patients had mostly become faceless for me. I had treated and discharged so many of them as a resident that I seemed to have a job on an assembly line.…

  • Quickly now, where does it hurt?

    Chris SumbergClinton, Tennessee, United States In Life on the Mississippi, Mark Twain chronicled his difficult apprenticeship as a steamboat captain, relating his transition from simple observer who admires the beauty of the Mississippi River to designated protector of passengers and property, one who views eddies of water not as beautiful things in themselves but as…