Hektoen International

A Journal of Medical Humanities

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

  • Santa Margherita da Cortona

    Susan Brunn PuettJ. David PuettChapel Hill, North Carolina, United States From humble beginnings to years as a mistress, Margherita altered her path to become a tertiary Franciscan penitent, attending the ill and poor, founding a hospital, and devoting herself to Christ. She was in the… Read more

  • An uneasy relationship

    P. Ravi ShankarKuala Lumpur, Malaysia My paternal grandmother lived for nearly ninety-three years. She was a strong woman who faced life with courage and dignity. She developed some medical conditions later in life but was active, could carry out her activities of daily living, and… Read more

  • Dr. Lucy Hobbs Taylor, DDS

    Natalie HorakovaHradec Kralove, Czech Republic “I am a New Yorker by birth, but I love my adopted country—the West. To it belongs the credit of making it possible for women to be recognized in the dental profession on equal terms with men.”—Dr. Lucy Hobbs Taylor1… Read more

  • Remembering your COVID birth

    Laura KahnChicago, IL The thing about having your first baby at the beginning of a pandemic is that everything seems equally strange, because you don’t have a prior kid for comparison. I wait anxiously for my son to poop, I wear a mask when I… Read more

  • Book review: Pandemic Obsession: How They Feature in our Popular Culture

    Arpan K. BanerjeeSolihull, UK Following the worldwide COVID pandemic, there has been a plethora of books published on the theme of epidemics and pandemics. Readers may be forgiven if they feel they are now suffering from literary pandemic fatigue. However, this interesting new book sets… Read more

  • Keeping corpses company

    Nater AkpenMakurdi, Benue State, Nigeria Inspired by an error where he had misjudged the time since death—not by hours or days—by 112 years,1 William Bass set up the Anthropological Research Facility in Tennessee. His request to his dean was simple: Give me some land to… Read more

  • Anna Morandi, famous anatomist of Bologna

    Anna Morandi Manzolini (1714–1774) was an Italian anatomist and sculptor who created some of the most beautiful and accurate anatomical models of her time. She came from a Bologna family of artists and scientists, her father being a painter and her mother a midwife. While… Read more

  • Unconventional wisdom: A risky business

    Jayant RadhakrishnanDarien, Illinois, United States It pays to keep an open mind, but not so open that your brains fall out.– Carl Sagan Surgical advances typically occur in small, incremental steps. Major changes are resisted vigorously, particularly when children are affected. Occasionally, a seemingly outlandish… Read more

  • Ondine’s curse: You sleep, you die

    Trisha KesavanTamil Nadu, India In the 16th century, philosopher Paracelsus wrote about undines as nymphs that gained souls by marrying humans.1 According to German mythology, Ondine or Undine was a water nymph (de la Motte Fouque’s version) who married a knight, Huldbrand, and gained a… Read more

  • Raynaud’s phenomenon

    JMS PearceHull, England In 1862, Maurice Raynaud (1834–81) of Paris provided one of the finest descriptive accounts in clinical medicine in his doctoral dissertation on episodic digital ischemia. Yet lasting recognition came only after his death. He described twenty-five patients, twenty of whom were female, and… Read more

  • Book review: A History of Insanity and the Asylum

    Arpan K. BanerjeeSolihull, UK Mental health topics have long been a source of fascination. In this new book, author Juliana Cummings explores the history of insanity and asylums from the Middle Ages to the modern era, revealing the sometimes-shocking treatment of people with mental illness… Read more

  • Saved by the spoonful: Oral rehydration therapy (ORT)

    Mariam AbdulghaniMichigan, United States In the early 1970s, the Bangladesh Liberation War caused a mass exodus of refugees from East Pakistan (now Bangladesh) into West Bengal, India. Some ten million people found sanctuary in camps along the Indian-Pakistan border, where the conditions of war during… Read more