Hektoen International

A Journal of Medical Humanities

Tag: Travel

  • Body heat: September 1944

    Winona WendthLancaster, Massachusetts, United States I traveled up to Terezin against my will. My writing instructor had made the assignment. “Just write down what you see,” he said at nine in the morning while we squeezed into the aisle of a public bus headed out from Prague. The vehicle was packed with dozens of laborers…

  • Of starlit huts and Sahelian sand

    Sara BuckChicago, Illinois, United States Landing in Dakar airport, the Air Afrique flight from New York hummed into the humid night air. Having traversed the nocturnal waters of the Atlantic, our plane descended upon the capital city, its sparse lights glittering along the coast and the nearby Île de Gorrée as if lava were streaming…

  • Travels with Genghis

    Robert SchenckChicago, Illinois, United States At age 80 retired Rush University hand surgeon Robert R. Schenck, MD, seized the challenge of his life by driving an ambulance 10,000 miles from London to Mongolia for charity. He wrote a book, Travels with Genghis, to recount his many challenges, successes and cultural experiences in traversing 16 countries…

  • Journaling – enhancing the arts experience while traveling

    Mary McDermott “The Plight of Nursing” from a collection of poems by Carol Battaglia, a retired nurse practitioner at Loyola Medical Center, concludes: “Sometimes at the end of my shift, I cannot account for all of me. I retrace my steps, in hopes of putting myself back together again.” (Carol Battaglia Murmurs. 1996. p. 33.…

  • Art and healing pilgrimage to France: The art of re-imagining

    Lynda Slimmer I am not an especially creative person. I am a doer; I get things done. I help others channel their creativity into realistic outcomes. However, I am that individual that theologian and ethicist Richard Niebuhr describes as “a poet who creates by taking journeys.” My creative self is most stimulated when a trip…

  • A pilgrim’s poems from the heart

    Joan Callahan I am a daughter, sister, wife, mother, school nurse, colleague, friend and neighbor. My vocation is healing in all dimensions of my life. I care for spirit as well as bodies, knowing that spirit guides and informs how we care for ourselves. Spirit is what guides my path, which is why my spirit…

  • The waiting room

    Jessie SeilerIsrael Before beginning my medical education, I spent two years as a health education Peace Corps Volunteer in a small village in the middle of Senegal, in West Africa. When I used to visit Ndiago’s health post, a miracle staffed by able and educated men and women, I usually spent some time in the…

  • Stendhal syndrome, a hazard of tourism

    Travel may well broaden the mind, but it may also affect it in some strange ways; and tourists have developed a variety of symptoms when overwhelmed by the place they had always dreamed to visit. Some merely became dizzy, had palpitations, or broke into a profuse sweat. Others, perhaps not quite normal to begin with,…

  • La Maison: A palliative care center in France

    Eric BreitbartNew York City, New York, United States Gardanne, the last stop on the local train from Marseilles to Aix-en-Provence, was once a thriving mining center. Today, with only one hotel, a few restaurants, and no monuments worth mentioning, the town has little to entice the crowds of tourists who flock to its better-known neighbors…

  • John Moore M.D.: Physician, travel writer, and social commentator

    Einar PermanStockholm, Sweden Many years ago I read a book entitled A View of Society and Manners in France, Switzerland and Germany. It was published anonymously “by a gentleman” and printed in London in 1779. The title promised impressions from major European countries during a turbulent period. I was not disappointed. It was a superb…