Hektoen International

A Journal of Medical Humanities

Tag: Medical Journal

  • Sleep

    Sophia Wilson New Zealand   Photo by Snapwire on Pexels The fabric of sleep descends like a tired paw, turns off our lights, offers mouth-to-mouth oblivion. For a while we can pretend we’re like stars and that we don’t reside here anymore, between impossible grindstones and the birth-death quandary; We drift weightless as falling leaves,…

  • Gordon Morgan Holmes MD., FRS.

    JMS Pearce Hull, England Figure 1: Gordon Holmes “Beneath the exterior of a martinet there was an Irish heart of gold” Wilder Penfield Gordon Holmes (1876-1965) was born in Castlebellingham, Ireland. He was named after his father, a landowner, descended from a Yorkshire family that had settled in King’s County (County Offaly) in the mid-seventeenth…

  • Whose blood is it anyway?

    Felicity SelfPacific North West I am ashamed. I am ashamed because I have only given blood once in my entire adult life. I am forty-eight years old and eligible to donate blood since I was seventeen, which means I have had thirty-one years in which I could have given blood. And I know the importance:…

  • “Moonlight” and silence

    Anne Jacobson Oak Park, Illinois, United States   Woman at the Piano. Pierre-Auguste Renoir, 1875/76. Art Institute of Chicago. At seventeen, I knew little about the limitations or losses that might cause a person to second-guess a vocation, deeply held belief, or identity. Perhaps those questions about the unknowable future inhabit the soul of a…

  • Bari in the seventh cholera pandemic

    Salvatore Barbuti Moro, Italy Domenico Martinelli Rosa Prato Foggia, Italy   Gazzetta del Mezzoggiorno, Bari, Italy, 31st August 1973. Photo Courtesy of Prof. Salvatore Barbuti’s private collection. It all began on a quiet warm afternoon in August 1973 when an infectious diseases specialist called his friend in public health and hesitantly asked for a test…

  • Lament to measles

    Nazan Bilgel Bursa, Turkey   I am the sorrowful, dull winter sun Resting silently on the naked branches of the trees Warming and soothing Villages, roads, and mountain stones. I saw a village far away Behind the mountains, you couldn’t know So described the poet Ceyhun Atuf Kansu himself when he saw so many dying…

  • High drama in the scullery

    George Dunea This dramatic incident must have taken place around 1930, at a time when great controversy raged about the level at which a life-saving tracheotomy should be done. It is an extract from “High Tracheotomy Low Tracheostomy,” a lecture as given by Sir Clive Fitts at the Royal College of Physicians of London in…