Hektoen International

A Journal of Medical Humanities

Tag: Titian

  • Melville’s Bartleby: An absurd casualty

    Simon WeinPetach Tikvah, Israel Albert Camus (1913-1960) was a French writer and philosopher. He did not want to be pinned down as an existentialist or an absurdist, or indeed a nihilist. Nevertheless, he is well known for coining the expression ‘the absurd hero’. Camus used the Greek myth of Sisyphus to illustrate this idea. Sisyphus’s…

  • Fracastorius, the man who named syphilis

    Titian (1528), National Gallery, London One of the great names in medical history, Girolamo Fracastoro appears in the National Gallery painting by Titian in full regalia. We owe him the name syphilis, derived from his poem (1530) Syphilis sive morbus gallicus (“Syphilis or The French Disease”) in which a shepherd boy named Syphilus was punished…