Hektoen International

A Journal of Medical Humanities

Tag: Moby Dick

  • What would one prefer to say about Bartleby?

    Howard FischerUppsala, Sweden “Bartleby is the enigmatic personality par excellence.”1 Herman Melville (1819–1891) was a prolific American novelist and poet. He was born in New York City. Both of his grandfathers were officers in the Colonial Army during the American Revolution, one a colonel, the other a general. When his family had financial troubles, he…

  • Melville’s Bartleby: An absurd casualty

    Simon WeinPetach Tikvah, Israel Albert Camus (1913-1960) was a French writer and philosopher. He did not want to be pinned down as an existentialist or an absurdist, or indeed a nihilist. Nevertheless, he is well known for coining the expression ‘the absurd hero’. Camus used the Greek myth of Sisyphus to illustrate this idea. Sisyphus’s…

  • 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…

  • The anatomy of bibliotherapy: How fiction heals, part I

    Dustin Grinnell Boston, Massachusetts, United States Words are, of course, the most powerful drug used by mankind.—Rudyard Kipling Literature is medicine for the soul In the 1980s, the mother of Northrop Frye, a Canadian literary scholar, was in the hospital, ill and delirious. Seeking to ease her suffering, her father gave her the twenty-five books of…