Hektoen International

A Journal of Medical Humanities

Tag: Psychiatry Phsycology

  • Delusions of being and nothingness

    Jesús Ramírez-BermúdezMexico City, Mexico In the late nineteenth century, the French physician Jules Cotard described patients with a delusional denial of bodily organs, self-existence, and the world. The woman originally described “believed that she had no brain, nerves, chest, or bowels, and that she was only skin and bone. God and the devil did not…

  • In search of Cassandra

    Charles KelsSan Antonio, Texas, United States “Psychiatrists are [not] always wrong with respect to future dangerousness, only most of the time.”– Barefoot v Estelle, 463 US 880 (1983) My wife is the smartest person I know, but she is not, to the best of my knowledge, omniscient. This qualification would be unnecessary had she not…

  • “Something monomanical”: obsession and the unity of effect

    Jack RosserHerefordshire, England, United Kingdom The concept of monomania first gathered popularity in France at the beginning of the nineteenth century; the term “referred to a type of mental disorder in which a person would have fixed, and often grandiose, ideas that did not correspond to reality.”1 These ideas would be “confined to a single…