Tag: Medical Humanities
-
The literary breakdown in Donna Tartt’s The Goldfinch
Carol-Ann Farkas Boston, Massachusetts, United States The Goldfinch By Carel Fabritius. 1654. Mauritshuis. Public Domain. Wikimedia. 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…
-
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…
-
Stanley Shaldon as I knew him
Stanley Shaldon. Photo by the author. 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…
-
Running in my blood
Niina Majaniemi Pirkanmaa, Finland Picture from Marathon Photos.com. Source 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…
-
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…