Hektoen International

A Journal of Medical Humanities

Tag: Of Human Bondage

  • Somerset Maugham on studying medicine (abstracted and in parts paraphrased from Of Human Bondage)

    In 1897 Somerset Maugham (1874–1965) qualified as a physician but never practiced medicine and became a full-time writer.1 In his 1915 novel Of Human Bondage he drew on his experiences at St. Thomas’s Hospital to describe what it was like to be a medical student at that time. He first has his young protagonist practice…

  • Somerset Maugham

    JMS Pearce  Hull, England   Fig 1. Somerset Maugham by Graham Sutherland, black chalk, pencil and gouache, 1953. NPG 5327 I have two professions, not one. Medicine is my lawful wife and literature is my mistress; when I get tired of one I spend the night with the other. -Anton Chekov, 1888 As a graduate…

  • Two tales of talipes equinovarus

    Christopher Walker Bielsko-Biala, Poland   Operations for club-foot. Wellcome Collection. Public domain. Congenital talipes equinovarus, better known as clubfoot, is a poorly understood but surprisingly common medical condition. According to Ansar et al, it affects about one in one thousand newborns, though this figure varies by country.1 There is a roughly fifty-fifty split between those…