Hektoen International

A Journal of Medical Humanities

Tag: Shakespeare

  • Bad blood: The drama of bloodshed

    Emily BoyleDublin, Ireland In some professions, bloodstained clothing is a normal part of the job. The two jobs that come to mind principally are a butcher and a vascular surgeon, although the latter would probably prefer not to be associated with the former! In vascular surgery not every operation results in bloodstained scrubs, although for…

  • Did Macbeth have syphilis?

    Eleanor J. Molloy Dublin, Ireland Introduction Syphilis was endemic in Elizabethan England and it was estimated that nearly 20% of the population of London were infected.1 The signs and symptoms were commonly known to the average person and would be potentially recognizable to the audience in Shakespeare’s plays. Shakespeare mentions syphilis more times than any…

  • More than “toil and trouble”: Macbeth and medicine

    Mariel TishmaChicago, Illinois, United States The image of a woman – a witch — working over a bubbling cauldron filled with stomach-turning substances is a staple of both horror and more family friendly media. One such example is Shakespeare’s Macbeth, specifically the “Double, double toil and trouble” speech given by the three witches in Act…

  • Madness and gender in Gregory Doran’s Hamlet

    Sarah BahrIndianapolis, Indiana, United States In director Gregory Doran’s 2009 film adaptation of Shakespeare’s Hamlet, David Tennant’s Hamlet becomes a bawdy lunatic who consciously or unconsciously uncouples himself from reality. The intentionality of Hamlet’s madness is more muddled than in Shakespeare’s text because of the confrontational quality Tennant lends to the prince’s mental angst. Tennant…

  • Manifestations of madness in King Lear

    Anoushka SinhaNew York, United States In his satirical masterpiece The Praise of Folly, the influential Dutch humanist Erasmus of Rotterdam attributes a Janus-like quality to madness, which he describes as two divergent manifestations: “one that which the Furies bring from hell” and “another…that proceeds from Folly.”1 Given the essay’s encomiastic title, it should come as…

  • If Cleopatra were alive today, she would be diagnosed as a borderline personality

    Jonathan LewisChicago, Illinois, United States For anyone with the temerity to write about Shakespeare, Virginia Woolf has this amusing warning: “Shakespeare is flyblown; a paternal government might well forbid writing about him…one may hazard one’s conjectures privately, make one’s notes in the margin; but, knowing that someone has said it before, or said it better,…

  • Anatomical ghosts in The Merchant of Venice

    Mauro Spicci Antonio and the dangers of self-diagnosis In the last few years the steadily growing number of attempts to read Shakespeare’s plays from a medical perspective has been justified by the idea that they are not simply the immortal fruits of a genius, but also documents reflecting the historical, cultural, and social background of…