Hektoen International

A Journal of Medical Humanities

Tag: Obstetrics

  • Galactagogues in postpartum rituals

    Puja PersaudTrue Blue, Grenada, West Indies Having a baby demands drastic changes in lifestyle, eating habits, and sleeping patterns. Many cultures across the world practice postpartum rituals that “allow the mother to be ‘mothered’,” and help to “facilitate the transition into motherhood.”1 For generations, the Indian descendants residing in Guyana of South America have helped…

  • Winnie Ille Pu and Dr. Alexander Lenard

    Avi OhryTel Aviv, Israel Sandor (Alexander) Lenard1 was born in Budapest, Hungary in 1910 and died in Dona Irma, Santa Catarina, Brazil in 1972. He was a Jewish poet, author, physician, painter, musician, translator, language teacher, philosopher, and polyglot. A short outline of Lenard’s life events could be summarized as follows: Hungary, medical studies in…

  • Obstetrical fistula: A malady hidden by shame

    Layla A. Al-JailaniYemen Nouria strolls across the kitchen, making lunch for her family as she does every day. Her stride is slightly wobbly, but any observer would think this was a healthy young woman. What they do not see, however, is the hidden anguish, pain, and shame that tears at her body and eats through…

  • Medical school final exams: playing the odds

    Howard FischerUppsala, Sweden I had finished eighteen months of clinical rotations at an American hospital and was back at my medical school in Belgium to take final exams. I checked in to a small hotel in the center of town and settled in for two weeks of last-minute cramming. I was going to take five…

  • A brief life

    Andrea Eisenberg Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, United States I felt his legs wiggling in the sac of warm fluid surrounding him. His body was so tiny, his kicks were like a feather passing across my fingers. But his warm, dark world was about to slip away. Did he already sense it? Or did he swim peacefully, oblivious…

  • Traditional obstetrics in Isaan, Thailand

    Khwan PhusrisomDurham, United Kingdom Traditional midwifery and the culture of birth in Isaan, Northeast Thailand, may hold lessons for the prevention of obstetric complications. Since traditional midwifery has been declining for the past two decades,1,2 in 2020 I interviewed elders in my home village in the Yang Talat district in order to preserve their rapidly…

  • Heartbreak in the nursery

    Shruthi RavishankarChennai, India I began the long drive to the pediatric hospital on a route peppered with traffic jams and incessant honking. Some of my medical school classmates simply do not attend the rotation, but I always make it a point to go. It is fun to see the smiling babies and their proud mothers…

  • A birth remembered

    F. Gonzalez-CrussiChicago, Illinois, United States Memory is to old age as presbyopia (far-sightedness) is to eyesight. Presbyopia makes you lose the ability to see clearly at a normal near working distance while maintaining a sharp distant vision. Just so the elderly recollect in painstaking detail what happened to them fifty or sixty years ago, yet…

  • Becoming a doctor in Chicago (c. 1954)—Clerkships at Michael Reese Hospital

    Peter BerczellerEdited by Paul Berczeller An excerpt from Dr. Peter Berczeller’s memoir, The Little White Coat. After Cook County, my group and I moved over to Michael Reese Hospital—a pile of old buildings on the near South Side—for our surgical clerkship. Each of us was assigned to a resident and told to stick to him…

  • James Simpson, who made childbirth painless

    A large, jolly man with broad shoulders, large hands, blue eyes, and a charismatic personality, James Young Simpson was said to have been the most popular man in Edinburgh since the death of Sir Walter Scott.1 Born in 1811 at Bathgate, he was the seventh son of a village baker in a poor family housed in…