Hektoen International

A Journal of Medical Humanities

Tag: Review of Health Humanities in Postgraduate Medical Education: A Handbook to the Heart of Medicine

  • The Polish Medical School at Edinburgh University, 1941–1949

    Howard FischerUppsala, Sweden “…an affirmation that science can be international…”– Surgeon Antoni Jurasz (1882–1961), dean of the Polish Medical School After the Nazi army invaded Poland, the remnants of the Polish military evacuated to France. When France was invaded in the summer of 1940, the… Read more

  • Robert Pope’s painting, Mountain

    P. Ravi ShankarKuala Lumpur, Malaysia Robert Pope, a Canadian artist, left behind an important collection of work dealing with illness and healing. Born in Halifax, Nova Scotia, in 1956, he died of Hodgkin’s disease in 1992. He has created a series of paintings and sketches… Read more

  • The truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth: But to what end?

    Hugh Tunstall-PedoeDundee, Scotland Different variants of the doctors’ Hippocratic Oath swear to a virtuous life, honoring their patients and respecting their confidences, but not specifically promising to tell them the truth! Until recent decades it was not uncommon for doctors to avoid telling their patients… Read more

  • Wordsworth’s “The Idiot Boy”: Disability and maternal love

    Elizabeth Lovett ColledgeJacksonville, Florida, United States In William Wordsworth’s Lyrical Ballads (1798), the poem “The Idiot Boy” reveals a compassionate insight into the mental disabilities of young Johnny Foy, presenting him not as a horror to be confined to Bedlam or a similar institution, but… Read more

  • “Satturday” by Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, who helped introduce smallpox inoculation to England

    Cristóbal Berry-CabánFort Liberty, North Carolina, United States Lady Mary Wortley Montagu1 was born in 1689 to an aristocratic family. She was highly intelligent and self-educated by having access to her father’s library, studying the classics, and even learning Latin. In 1712 she rejected her father’s… Read more

  • Fugu—Japanese delicacy or death?

    In Japan, fugu has been a “captain of these men of death” for generations, causing an exitus that is “rapid and violent.” There is at first numbness around the mouth, then paralysis, and, as with curare, consciousness persists until the very end. The poison interferes… Read more

  • Thalassemia

    David GreenGeorge HonigGeorge DuneaChicago, Illinois, United States The thalassemias comprise a large and diverse group of genetic disorders which share as a common feature a deficiency, or in the most severe forms a total absence, of one or more of the globin chains of hemoglobin.… Read more

  • Quaerens and the Dreamy States

    JMS PearceHull, England We are such stuffAs dreams are made on, and our little lifeIs rounded with a sleep.—Shakespeare, The Tempest IV.1 Dreamy states are well known as brief aberrations of awareness and of altered thought that are a commonplace, normal experience. As a manifestation… Read more

  • The self-destructive urge

    JMS PearceHull, England Preservation of life is often an unwritten axiom of medical practice. Sections on therapeutics in medical books and papers usually assume the obvious: aim to preserve or extend life. They rarely discuss the alternative harm or good that results from allowing nature… Read more

  • Lydia Sherman, serial poisoner

    Howard FischerUppsala, Sweden Poisons were easily obtainable in the nineteenth century, sold for use as household cleaners, vermin control, and in agriculture. By the 1820s, Americans feared being secretly poisoned, “and considered the incidence of murder by poison to be quite high.”1 This “poison panic”… Read more

  • Book review: Why We Die: The New Science of Ageing and the Quest for Immortality

    Arpan K. BanerjeeSolihull, England The subjects of ageing, death, and immortality have long preoccupied human thoughts and culture. The ancient Egyptians practiced mummification out of a belief in an afterlife. Buddhists and Hindus believe in reincarnation with the immortal soul living on in another body.… Read more

  • Willebrand disease discovered in a girl from the Aland archipelago

    In 1924 the Finnish physician Erik von Willebrand was consulted about the case of a five-year- old girl from the self-governing autonomous Swedish-speaking region of the Aland archipelago in the Baltic Sea. Born on February 1, 1870, in Vasa, Finland, von Willebrand had graduated in… Read more