Hektoen International

A Journal of Medical Humanities

Tag: Spring 2019

  • Labor of love

    Mary OakSeattle, Washington, USA Each week my elderly father and I watch babies being born. In the silver-shadowed flickers of a television, we sit as we often did in my childhood. Now in the spectral shade of his decelerated years, I care for him. He spends a lot of time watching TV. I join him…

  • The other kingdom

    Jamie SamsonDublin, Ireland “Everyone who is born,” Susan Sontag wrote in Illness as Metaphor, “holds dual citizenship, in the kingdom of the well and in the kingdom of the sick.”1 While the passport denoting health and vigor might get us through customs most of the time, we eventually reach that unwelcome day when it is…

  • A love-driven model of suicide prevention

    Kate BaggottSt. Catharines, Ontario, Canada The suicide barrier on the Bloor Street Viaduct in Toronto is called the Luminous Veil. The beauty of the title is that it is intentional and intelligent. Construction of the barrier started in 2003 after more than a decade of advocacy. It was installed just a few years after the…

  • A form of pain

    Ifediba NzubePort Harcourt, Nigeria For Yewande, pain is Èsù slapping her head like a bata drum. But no one sees that; they see only a tumor pushing out her left eye, up her palate, and through her nostrils. Most days she smells like meat gone green. The other patients can tolerate the smell but they…

  • To all the books that saved my life

    Dannie OngMelbourne, Australia On the way to therapy, I am reading The Four Hour Work Week by Tim Ferris. I try not to think about the irony of it all – no job, no degree, not even a life, depending on who you asked – and there I am, filling pages with notes on morning…

  • When a medical student becomes a patient

    Andrew GallagherBurlington, Vermont, United States Elliot pointed to the ultrasound monitor. “What is this?” he said slowly, trailing off. His finger was on the large, black sac occupying the entire bottom of the screen. We both said nothing, attempting to recall our anatomy. “Wait, where is your kidney?” I stared at the screen, disoriented. “I…

  • Learning to eat at thirty

    Hannah HarpoleBern, Switzerland My hippie parents indulged me as a picky eater. At two I proclaimed I was a vegetarian. Around the age of four, I survived solely on yogurt, refusing all other nourishment. I do not exactly know when this morphed into a combination eating disorder of occasional bulimia with a full count of…

  • Adriaen Brouwer: surgery in the tavern

    Adriaen Brouwer (1605/6-1638) was a Flemish Baroque painter who specialized in genre scenes, particularly in taverns. He favored humble, unkempt peasants engaged in various activities, from drunken brawls to fireside chats. In these paintings the village barber-surgeons are shown performing operations on the back and the foot of peasants, who wince from a procedure done…

  • The pains and pleasures of spicy food

    Danielle DalechekNorfolk, Virginia Do you enjoy the painful yet delightful sensation of spicy chili peppers making your mouth feel as if it were on fire? Are you a fan of eating dishes that make your eyes tear and your nose run? If so, it is probably because red pepper contains capsaicin, the substance that gives…

  • On your doctor’s orders

    Alexandria SzalanczyWinston-Salem, North Carolina, United States Long before physicians faced a nation crippled by an opioid crisis, their predecessors lived and worked in a nation dominated by cigarettes. By 1953, 47% of Americans smoked cigarettes, including half of all physicians.1 These physician smokers were particularly instrumental to the rise of the cigarette in America. Beginning…