Hektoen International

A Journal of Medical Humanities

Tag: Surgeon

  • Richard Selzer on writing

    Someone asked me why a surgeon would write. Why, when the shelves are already too full? They sag under the deadweight of books. To add a single adverb is to risk exceeding the strength of the boards. A surgeon should abstain. A surgeon, whose fingers are more at home in the steamy gullies of the body…

  • Learning compassion – learning forgiveness

    Larry ZaroffCalifornia, United States I once made a technical error that injured a patient. An error of commission. Distressed, I wrote to several cardiac surgeons with whom I was acquainted through training or practice. I asked if they had made similar mistakes and how they were dealing with their mistakes. Were they embarrassed, ashamed? Did…

  • Medieval medical diagrams: Meanings, audiences, and functions

    Sara StrådalUnited Kingdom Diagrams are prevalent in many different types of medieval manuscripts; they are used to illustrate theological and moral concerns as well as scientific and medical theories. In religious manuscripts they have often been investigated and understood in terms of their mnemonic functions. For example, Lucy Freeman Sandler describes how diagrams in the…

  • JB Murphy: Chicago’s great but controversial surgeon

    Patrick GuinanGeorge DuneaChicago, Illinois, United States The grand surgical auditorium of the American College of Surgeons in Chicago still bears the name of JB Murphy, the tall, slim, blue-eyed boy from Appleton, Wisconsin, born in 1857 on a farm into an Irish family that escaped the horrors of the potato famine to make a new…