Hektoen International

A Journal of Medical Humanities

Tag: Medical Journal

  • Sleep

    Sophia WilsonNew Zealand The fabric of sleepdescends like a tired paw,turns off our lights,offers mouth-to-mouth oblivion. For a while we can pretend we’re like stars andthat we don’t reside here anymore,between impossible grindstonesand the birth-death quandary; We drift weightless as falling leaves,over silver-scaled lakes;sprout fins and tresses andtransform to moon-mirrors until consciousnessdrops its arsenal, hauls us…

  • Gordon Morgan Holmes MD., FRS.

    JMS PearceHull, England “Beneath the exterior of a martinetthere 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 century. In a golden era of…

  • “Moonlight” and silence

    Anne JacobsonOak Park, Illinois, United States 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 teenager under the guise of general angst and anxiety, or alternatively are tamped…

  • Bari in the seventh cholera pandemic

    Salvatore BarbutiMoro, Italy Domenico MartinelliRosa PratoFoggia, Italy 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 on stool sample for a patient whom he believed could be infected with cholera. The public health man laughed and…

  • Lament to measles

    Nazan BilgelBursa, Turkey I am the sorrowful, dull winter sunResting silently on the naked branches of the treesWarming and soothingVillages, roads, and mountain stones.I saw a village far awayBehind the mountains, you couldn’t know So described the poet Ceyhun Atuf Kansu himself when he saw so many dying children because of measles.1 Although a simple preventable…

  • High drama in the scullery

    George DuneaChicago, IL 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…