Hektoen International

A Journal of Medical Humanities

Tag: Mikhail Bulgakov

  • Medical and literary coupling

    Stephen Finn South Africa   (To be read aloud, with gusto and with a strong beat) Collage created by Hektoen staff. Images from left to right. Top row: Portrait of Rabelais, circa 1820. By Louis-François Durrans. From the Rabelais Museum, via Wikimedia; Anton Chekhov, via Wikimedia. Center: Photo by National Cancer Institute on Unsplash Bottom…

  • Franz Kafka, A Country Doctor, (and Bob Dylan)

    Howard Fischer Uppsala, Sweden   Elk Viewing Sleigh Ride – Thunder Bay Resort, Hillman MI. Photo by Joe Ross. Via Flickr. CC BY-SA 2.0 “Certainly doctors are stupid, or rather, they’re not more stupid than other people but their pretensions are ridiculous; [but] you have to reckon with the fact that they become more and…

  • Suffering and empathy in the stories of Anton Chekhov and their relevance to healthcare today

    Peter McCann London Anton Chekhov (1860-1904)   Throughout his life, Anton Chekhov was often faced with the reality of suffering in human existence. His family’s bankruptcy and life of poverty in Moscow influenced young Anton’s thoughts about suffering and degradation in society, and his brief period of medical practice in Moscow provided him with enough…

  • The tracheotomy

    Michelle Paff Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, United States The transformation of a medical student into a physician is depicted in the short story, The Steel Windpipe (1925), by the Russian physician and author, Mikhail Bulgakov. A young practitioner is stationed alone at a rural hospital, and one snowy evening he is approached by a woman with her dying…