Hektoen International

A Journal of Medical Humanities

Tag: Religion

  • Mixing medicine – Religion and science

    Aneesa BodiatSouth Africa The ameer chewed on the dry date my husband had presented to him, saying a prayer and then placing the chewed fruit back into the container, sealing it for use in a few days when my baby boy would be born. This particular ameer or religious leader was from Medina, the holy…

  • Is it ethical to bring religion into medicine?

    Patrick Guinan Chicago, Illinois, USA   Over 200 years ago Voltaire wrote that one half of metaphysics was known to everybody and that the other half will never be known. It is by no means certain that ethics has yet reached the same high degree of development. At the beginnings of recorded history, the priests…

  • Prayers from Africa

    Marcia Whitney-SchenckChicago, Illinois, United States Rev. David Ambola from Mbingo, Cameroon, has remarked that Africans are incurably religious. Indeed, for many in Africa, religion permeates every aspect of their lives, from Christian messages on the rear windows of taxis to hand-crafted signs in hospital waiting rooms. Hand surgeon Dr. Robert Schenck and his wife, photographer…

  • The Gross Clinic as religious painting: Eakins, affect, and anatomy

    Adam R. ShapiroCambridge, Massachusetts, United States Thomas Eakins’s 1875 painting The Gross Clinic has long been considered one of the great works of nineteenth-century American art. Yet its depiction of a surgical demonstration by Dr. Samuel D. Gross and his colleagues at Jefferson Medical College was controversial from the moment of its completion. It was…