Hektoen International

A Journal of Medical Humanities

Tag: Paris

  • A sporting end to Henry II, King of France

    Julius P. Bonello Adam Awwad Peoria, Illinois, United States   Henry II. Source Since the first wheel rolled out of the mouth of a cave, sports have been a staple in our social fabric. From throwing balls to picking up sticks, from tug-of-war to wrestling, from chess to football, and from horse racing to car…

  • Humanitarian for all: The life of Henry Dunant

    Stephen KosnarLima, Peru In his late thirties and bankrupt, Henry Dunant lived in abject poverty, on occasion being forced to eat bread crusts and sleep outdoors in Paris. It is a bitter slice of one man’s history, particularly given that only a few years earlier he had founded the International Committee of the Red Cross.1…

  • The International Federation of the Red Cross and Red Crescent

    Mawuli Tettey Ghana   The Red Cross Society is a worldwide humanitarian and volunteer-based organization that protects human life and health by rendering assistance to anyone who may need it. In 1862, a Swiss man named Jean-Henri Dunant published a book titled A Memory of Solferino in which he called for the creation of national…

  • Theme

    THE GLORY OF FRANCE Published in September 2019 H E K T O R A M A   .     ARCHITECTURE AND THE FRENCH HOSPITAL       Parisian hospitals, like those in many European capitals, are the results of years of accretion. Hôtel-Dieu, the oldest Parisian hospital, was founded by Saint Landry in…

  • Notre Dame and gratitude

    Elizabeth Cerceo Camden, New Jersey, United States   Notre Dame de Paris, brandend. April 15, 2019. Photograph by Milliped on Wikimedia. On April 15, 2019, Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris burned. This event highlighted the integral nature of art and beauty in our culture. We often take for granted the beauty that surrounds us and…

  • The stethoscope

    Fiona RobertsonScotland, United Kingdom One of the most iconic tools of the medical profession is the stethoscope. Here we see René-Théophile-Hyacinthe Laennec, a French physician, using his prototype monoaural stethoscope. It was a wooden cylinder one inch and a half in diameter, one foot long, and tapered at the end like a funnel. This embryonic…

  • Illuminating addiction: morphinomania in fin-de-siècle visual culture

    Natalia VieyraPhiladelphia, Pennsylvania, United States The etchings of Paul-Albert Besnard constitute a gruesome assemblage of nineteenth-century social ills—graphic depictions of the hard lives of women plagued by sickness, suicides, prostitution, infanticide, and poverty. Amid this collection of unfortunate modern imagery, an unusual etching featuring two fashionable Parisiennes stands out (Fig. 1). Who are these elegant…

  • Journaling – enhancing the arts experience while traveling

    Mary McDermott “The Plight of Nursing” from a collection of poems by Carol Battaglia, a retired nurse practitioner at Loyola Medical Center, concludes: “Sometimes at the end of my shift, I cannot account for all of me. I retrace my steps, in hopes of putting myself back together again.” (Carol Battaglia Murmurs. 1996. p. 33.…