Hektoen International

A Journal of Medical Humanities

Tag: reading

  • Women in the medical profession: The trial of Jacoba Felicie de Almania

    Mariel Tishma Chicago, Illinois, United States A meeting of doctors at the university of Paris. From the “Chants royaux” manuscript, Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris. BNF, Français 1537, fol. 27v. Source In November 1322 a group of folk healers and empirics were put on trial by the Faculty of Medicine from the University of Paris. Their crime…

  • Blood policies and bioart in the 1900s

    Christopher HubbardOhio, United States Policies related to blood that were adopted in the U.S. during the early to mid-1900s produced cultural and legal effects for certain populations. In 1920, for example, the Hawaiian Homes Commission Act was passed by Congress,1 which modified how identity classifications and boundaries would be drawn up. The act classified an…

  • Nurse reading

    A nurse is sitting at the bedside of a wounded man with a bandage over his eyes; she is reading him a letter. Photographic postcard, ca. 1930. Credit: Wellcome Collection. CC BY 4.0   This Turkish postcard shows a nurse reading a letter to a wounded man. The nurse appears to smile, even as her…

  • The anatomy of bibliotherapy: How fiction heals, part III

    Dustin Grinnell  Boston, Massachusetts, United States   Portrait of Friedrich Nietzsche. Photo by Gustav Schultze. 1882. Taken from Nietzsche by Walter Kaufmann, Fourth Edition. Public Domain. A cure for loneliness In the video “What is Literature For?” produced by The School of Life, author Alain de Botton claims that books are a cure for loneliness.…

  • The anatomy of bibliotherapy: How fiction heals, part I

    Dustin Grinnell  Boston, Massachusetts, United States   Man Reading Book showing cityscape, suggesting an Open Doorway. From iStock. Words are, of course, the most powerful drug used by mankind. —Rudyard Kipling   Literature is medicine for the soul In the 1980s, the mother of Northrop Frye, a Canadian literary scholar, was in the hospital, ill…

  • To all the books that saved my life

    Dannie Ong Melbourne, Australia   Ellison H. I Have No Mouth And I Must Scream. New York: Pyramid Publications; 1977. On the way to therapy, I am reading The Four Hour Work Week by Tim Ferris. I try not to think about the irony of it all – no job, no degree, not even a…

  • Reading should be a pleasure, not a burden

    I have always felt that reading should be a pleasure. Of course to get anything out of it you must give it your full attention, but to a healthy understanding there is nothing disagreeable in the activity of the intellect. It is however the business of an author to make your perusal of his work…

  • Bed-side library for medical students

    A liberal education may be had at a very slight cost of time and money. Well filled though the day be with appointed tasks, to make the best possible use of your one or of your ten talents, rest not satisfied with this professional training, but try to get the education, if not of a…

  • Visionary art and the metaphysical

    Evernus Williams Searcy, Arizona, United States   Artist’s note: These works stem from various studies of anatomical structures and their relationship to nature and technology. When I first endeavored to learn about the human form in 2002, I studied anatomical dissections directly at a local college’s lab while also taking life drawing classes. The dissections…