Hektoen International

A Journal of Medical Humanities

Tag: schizophrenic

  • Dr. Alice Miller on Hitler’s childhood

    Howard FischerUppsala, Sweden “All it took was a Führer’s madness and several million well-raised Germans to extinguish the lives of countless millions of innocent human beings in the space of a few short years.”—Alice Miller, Ph.D. This article is based on the chapter “Adolf Hitler’s childhood: From hidden to manifest horror,” in Alice Miller, For…

  • Richard Dadd: art and madness

    JMS PearceHull, England Is there anything so extravagant as the imaginations of men’s brains? Where is the head that has no chimeras in it? . . . Our knowledge, therefore is real only so far as there is conformity between our ideas and reality of things. . . – (John Locke, An Essay Concerning Humane…

  • Haunted by a living spirit

    Bernardo NgSan Diego, California, United States Witchcraft has been present in the Mexican culture for centuries, both in and out of the context of disease, with witches practicing either white or black magic. The most nationally recognized site for witchcraft is the city of Catemaco, Veracruz, on the Gulf of Mexico. The white magic witches,…

  • The mystical prophet and his Bride of Christ

    Hansjörg RotheAustria and Klinikum Coburg, Germany In 1648, the year when the exhausted European powers at last ended the Thirty Years’ War, the Orthodox Ukrainian peasants rose against their Catholic Polish overlords and the Cossacks staged murderous pogroms and killed a large number of the local Jews, who were often tax collectors and administrators on…

  • Alden Nowlan, the schizotypal poet

    Shane NeilsonHamilton, Ontario, Canada I suspect a psychiatrist would have pronounced me a victim of dementia praecox or some such thing.1—Alden Nowlan Applying a psychiatric diagnosis to the dead is a mug’s game. Alden Albert Nowlan (1933–1983), the critically acclaimed Canadian poet, novelist, and playwright, might agree, if one considered the bitter evidence of his…

  • Dirty laundry

    Mary ShannonPortland, Oregon, United States She was sitting in the dark with one leg hiked up on her bed, staring out the window, the street light angled across her face like a three-quarter moon. I sat cross-legged in the bed next to her trying my best not to yawn—I knew better than to look uninterested…