Hektoen International

A Journal of Medical Humanities

Tag: Psychiatry Phsycology

  • Delusions of being and nothingness

    Jesús Ramírez-Bermúdez Mexico City, Mexico   Emil Cioran and his long-lost friends. Augustin Ramirez Bermudez. Jesus Ramirez Bermudez Private Collection 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,…

  • In search of Cassandra

    Charles Kels San Antonio, Texas, United States   Cassandra by Evelyn De Morgan, 1898, depicts Troy burning in the background as the mythological figure prophesied. The De Morgan Foundation, Surrey, England. Public domain. “Psychiatrists are [not] always wrong with respect to future dangerousness, only most of the time.” – Barefoot v Estelle, 463 US 880…

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

    Jack Rosser Herefordshire, England, United Kingdom   A portrait of Poe in 1848, not long prior to his passing in 1849. 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…