Hektoen International

A Journal of Medical Humanities

Tag: Medical Humanities

  • The literary breakdown in Donna Tartt’s The Goldfinch

    Carol-Ann FarkasBoston, Massachusetts, United States I. Diagnostically speaking, the “nervous” or “mental” breakdown is not a thing. The term has never been formally used in psychology, which has long preferred specific, definable categorizations of symptoms and conditions: stress, fatigue, anxiety, depression, trauma.1 And yet the phenomenon persists in popular usage.1,2 Why? We like the “breakdown”…

  • Ahab’s gift: Herman Melville’s Moby Dick and the meaning of pain

    Xi ChenRochester, New York, United States In the summer months before my first year of medical school, I unfurled the pages of Moby Dick. Immersed in the novel’s adventurous spirit and Shakespearean prose, I followed the narrator from the piers of Nantucket into the Atlantic and waded through Captain Ahab’s quest for the legendary white…

  • Review of: Health Humanities in Postgraduate Medical Education: A Handbook to the Heart of Medicine

    J.T.H. ConnorSt. John’s, Newfoundland, Canada The backbone of this innovative and informative collection is comprised of eleven essays that address the spectrum of the arts and humanities and how they relate to postgraduate medical education. Most of the authors and their experiences are grounded in Canadian medical schools, but the literature they draw from is…

  • Stanley Shaldon as I knew him

    Stanley Shaldon belonged to that first generation of nephrologists who made dialysis available at a time when uremia was a sentence of death. He was one of the bright young registrars whom Professor Sheila Sherlock took with her from the Royal Postgraduate Medical School at Hammersmith to the Royal Free Hospital to work on liver…

  • Running in my blood

    Niina MajaniemiPirkanmaa, Finland Some people are drawn to dancing, others to traveling or baking cakes. My passion is to torture myself by running for twenty-six miles, usually in very hot weather. Why? I could give you countless reasons. The thrill. The sense of achievement. Pushing boundaries. The blood pumping in my veins so strongly that…

  • The 1918 Pandemic—the collective story versus the personal narrative

    Mariella ScerriMellieha, Malta Stalin’s claim that a “single death is a tragedy; a million deaths is a statistic”1 reverberates at a time when the world is gripped by fear as it tries to come to terms with a pandemic caused by the latest novel coronavirus, SARS-COV-2. Throughout history, humanity has had to contend with new…

  • A surgeon and a gentleman: the life of James Barry

    Mariel Tishma Chicago, Illinois, United States Dr. James Barry with John, a servant, and his dog, Psyche. Unknown Artist. c1850.   “Do not consider whether what I say is a young man speaking, but whether my discussion with you is that of a man of understanding.”1 – Dedication of the thesis of James Barry In November of 1809, a…

  • Embalming Vladimir Lenin

    In 1997, two years after the dissolution of the Soviet Union, Ilya Zbarsky wrote a book about embalming the body of Vladimir Lenin, a process in which both he and his father (Boris Zbarsky) took part during the decades of terror of the Bolshevik reign. It all seems to have begun in 1918, when a…

  • Hiroshima seventy-five years after the bombing

    Cristóbal Berry-CabánFort Bragg, North Carolina, United States “At exactly fifteen minutes past eight in the morning on August 6, 1945, Japanese time, at the moment when the atomic bomb flashed above Hiroshima, Miss Toshiko Sasaki, a clerk in the personnel department of the East Asia Tin Works, had just sat down at her place in…

  • Engage the emotions

    Florence GeloPhiladelphia, Pennsylvania, United States Captivated by the paintings of Caravaggio, I search for them wherever I travel. But no encounter has been as intense and personal as The Taking of Christ in the Beit wing of the National Gallery of Ireland in Dublin. The Taking of Christ depicts the moment of Jesus’s betrayal by…