Hektoen International

A Journal of Medical Humanities

Tag: Spring 2023

  • Art, anhedonia, and family psychodynamics in the creativity of Nathaniel Hawthorne

    Stephen MartinThailand There are interesting questions about how the mental phenomenology of the great writer Nathaniel Hawthorne1 drove his work. His supreme narrative gift and engaging observation were shadowed by anhedonia, which is a complete or partial lack of the ability to experience pleasure and a hallmark of clinical depression. In modern criteria,2 major depressive…

  • Fear of being buried alive

    Howard FischerUppsala, Sweden “Cremation eliminates all danger of being buried alive.”– “Short reasons for cremation,” an Australian pamphlet, c. 1900 It has been said that one of our most common fears is being buried alive.1 Someone is mistakenly thought dead, placed in a coffin, and buried. We will not discuss other forms of alive burials,…

  • Marie François Xavier Bichat (1771–1802)

    In the universal Pantheon of the medical greats, Xavier Bichat is remembered as “the father of modern histology.” Yet he never used a microscope. He studied the human organs with his naked eye and evaluated them for their physical features (such as elasticity, transparency, and hardness). He postulated that each organ was not a homogenous…

  • Forensic medicine and Sir Bernard Spilsbury

    JMS PearceHull, England A forensic autopsy performed to establish the cause of death is an ancient practice.1 In Europe it was preceded by conventional pathology, as started by Herophilus of Chalcedon (335–280 BC). Medicolegal autopsies to solve legal problems were first performed in Bologna in 1302. During the Middle Ages, physicians’ opinions were sought to…

  • The paradoxical life and art of Robert Colescott

    Mildred WilsonMichigan, United States In 1975, satirist Robert Colescott turned the art community on its head with Eat Dem Taters, a parody of van Gogh’s The Potato Eaters.1,2 He and other postmodernist painters of the period would appropriate images from other artists’ paintings, questioning the concept of originality,2 and his George Washington Carver Crossing the…

  • Dipinto di blu: Turning blue in a Florence hospital

    Giulio Nicita Florence, Italy   A view of Villa Monna Tessa. From the author’s archive. We were in the middle of the 1970s in Florence, Italy. We had concluded the long, tedious years of university study. Real work awaited us in Villa Monna Tessa, a large early 1900s four-story building. It housed several departments of…

  • Drs. Joseph Bell, Arthur Conan Doyle, William Osler, and the method of Zadig

    Howard Fischer Uppsala, Sweden “The whole of medicine is observation.” – William Osler, M.D.   Paw prints. Photo by Peter Castleton on Flickr. CC BY 2.0.  M. de Voltaire, the pen name of François-Marie Arouet (1694–1778), was an Enlightenment historian, philosopher, and writer. He opposed France’s absolute monarchy and the power of the church. He…

  • Pavel Ivanovich Jacobi (1841–1913)

    Avi Ohry Tel Aviv, Israel   Pavel Jacobi. Via Wikimedia. Pavel Ivanovich Jacobi (1841–1913), largely forgotten and rarely featured in the psychiatric literature, was a Russian socialist who made as great an impact on the treatment of the mentally ill as Jonathan Swift in Dublin, Phillipp Pinel in Revolutionary France, Father William Tuke and his…

  • Mental health issues in medical students: The prejudice and the injury

    Amairani Gómez RodríguezPuebla, Mexico   The Scream by Edvard Munch, 1893. National Museum of Art, Architecture and Design, Oslo, Norway. I had my first panic attack at seventeen. Biochemistry was a total headache; no matter how hard I studied, it was never enough to pass. As a school overachiever, I had never experienced failure. I…

  • Archibald Edward Garrod: Inborn errors of metabolism

    JMS Pearce Hull, England   Fig 1. Archibald Edward Garrod. Crop of image in Obituary Notices of Fellows of the Royal Society, 1932–1954. Wellcome Collection. CC BY 4.0. It is given to very few to invent a new class of diseases and to even fewer one that has survived subsequent scrutiny. Archibald Garrod, KCMG DM…