Hektoen International

A Journal of Medical Humanities

Tag: The Plague

  • A return to The Plague

    Bonnie Salomon Chicago, Illinois, United States   Cover of 1991 edition of The Plague by Albert Camus. For the past fifteen months, I have been reading and returning to Albert Camus’ 1947 novel, The Plague. Chronicling a fictional plague epidemic in Oran, Algeria, the narrator Dr. Rieux tells the saga of a city’s horrific struggle.…

  • Drawing parallels in pandemic art

    Mariella Scerri Mellieha, Malta Victor Grech Pembroke, Malta   Photo of the crowd at an undetermined 1918 Georgia Tech home football game. Photo by Thomas Carter, Public domain. Via Wikimedia. “Everybody knows that pestilences have a way of recurring in the world; yet somehow we find it hard to believe in ones that crash down…

  • Remembering Dr. Edmund Pellegrino, physician philosopher

    Dean Gianakos Lynchburg, Virginia, United States   “Get Wisdom.” – Proverbs 4:5   Photograph of the author (right) and Dr. Pellegrino (left). Courtesy of the author. One day in the spring of 1985, I remember jogging past the Kennedy Institute of Ethics at Georgetown University, wondering what went on in there. It was a gorgeous…

  • The Plague and physician burnout

    Geoffrey Rubin Mark Abrams D. Edmund Anstey New York, New York, United States   [Bedside scenes: Doctors visit patient]. 1534. The National Library of Medicine. In Albert Camus’ novel The Plague,1 Doctor Rieux is a consummate physician, a hero and a “true healer.” His main charge is to compassionately perform his duty—a matter, in his…

  • Applause: reflections on The Plague and being a doctor in a pandemic

    Roger Ruiz Moral Universidad Francisco de Vitoria. Madrid, Spain   Quote from the English version of The Plague by Albert Camus in the Library Walk (New York City). Accessed via Wikimedia. Sculpture by Gregg LeFevre. Photo by Heike Huslage-Koch/Lesekreis.  “I imagine then what the plague must be for you. Yes, – said Rieux – an endless defeat.”1 The COVID-19 lockdown is today…

  • Starvation as metaphor

    Michael Shulman  Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, United States   “Boy and Girl at Cahera” (1847) Image of the Great Famine for middle-class readers of London Illustrated News.  The mystery of Food Increased till I abjured it And dine without Like God — Emily Dickinson Susan Sontag’s 1978 essay Illness as Metaphor,1 published in serial form in The…

  • Charite hospital

    Annabelle Slingerland Leiden, the Netherlands   On November 14, 1709, King Frederik I of Prussia planted a small seed that over the following three centuries grew, branch by branch, into one of the foremost medical research and treatment centers in the world.   Plague House, 1709 The Plague, later Almshouse, Matthäus Seutter (1678-1757), circa 1740…