Hektoen International

A Journal of Medical Humanities

Tag: Population

  • The bomb that fizzled

    Simon WeinPetach Tikvah, Israel The recent death of Paul R. Ehrlich (1932–2026) reminds us of the risks of hubris when prognosticating, ignoring human inventiveness, and promoting authoritarian control of society. Paul Ehrlich won the Swedish Crafoord Prize in 1990 (which is awarded in fields not covered by the Nobel Prize) for his post-graduate ethological research.…

  • Giovanni Boccaccio on pandemics past and present

    Constance MarkeyChicago, IL Giovanni Boccaccio (1313-1375) is universally celebrated for his masterpiece The Decameron, an appealing assemblage of one hundred loosely connected novellas, all designed, in part, to distract the fourteenth-century Italian audience from the Black Death plaguing the country. Some of the tales are slapstick misadventures to make the reader laugh, others are more…