Hektoen International

A Journal of Medical Humanities

Tag: Old age

  • The loneliness of the long-living doctor

    Peter Arnold Sydney, Australia   Study of the head of an old man. Peter Paul Rubens. between 1610 and 1615. Kunsthistorisches Museum. Via Wikimedia. A noticeable phenomenon of the twenty-first century is the increasing frequency of friendships between older men. The importance of such friendships to both mental and physical health has been well documented.1,2,3…

  • No complaints, only symptoms

    Peter Arnold Sydney, Australia “No complaints, only symptoms,” I told my cardiologist this year. How dare I complain? I am eighty-four. Thirty-two years have passed since my quintuple coronary artery bypass; eighteen years since a diagnosis, in one of eleven biopsy samples, of invasive prostate cancer—left untreated, because so few of us die from it; five…

  • Gulliver at Luggnagg — Learning about the immortal struldbrugs (abridged)

    Image from Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift. (Travels into Several Remote Nations of the World by Lemuel Gulliver). Illustration by Stephen Baghot de la Bere, 1904. Originally published in 1726. Bridgeman Images. Public domain. The Luggnaggians are a polite and generous people . . . they show themselves courteous to strangers. One day . .…

  • Rehearsing lines

    Catalina Florina Florescu Hoboken, New Jersey, United States   Coffee Queen. Iulia Şchiopu. Permission granted by artist. CHARACTERS: Eve Ana TIME AND SETTING: Now, here. Two women are seated on a bench. That’s all you need to know. Plus that their name is a palindrome. Mirrored names. Make what you want out of this.  …

  • A house call

    Martin Duke Mystic, Connecticut, United States   A doctor visiting a sick woman, and taking her pulse. Many years ago, in the mid 1980s, when I was still in clinical practice, I made a house call accompanied by a second year medical student who was coming to my office one day a week as part…

  • Life savings

    Daniel Moran Webster, New Hampshire, United States     Aging is the bank which accepts deposits, and will not ever give them back. But it does have its tiny catalogue of compensations. I recall those ancient days when opening that account might earn you a new toaster or blender, a set of steak knives.This week,…

  • All life is a gift

    “I am tired,” said Mr. Hale. “I’m fifty-five years of age, and that little fact of itself accounts for any loss of strength.”“Nonsense! I’m upward of sixty and feel no strength, either bodily or mental. Don’t let me hear you talking so. Fifty-five! Why, you’re quite a young man.”-Elisabeth Gaskell, North and South, 1855 At…

  • Those golden years

    Richard SobelKibbutz Revivim, Israel “I’ve only ever had one wrinkle, and I’m sitting on it.” Jeanne Clement was one hundred ten years old but cheerful and lucid when she made that remark during an interview. She may still have been smoking: she stopped only when her vision became too poor to see the cigarette well…