Hektoen International

A Journal of Medical Humanities

Tag: Utah

  • Bone headdress

    Susan Sample Salt Lake City, Utah, United States After artwork created by a person with cancer   Cow’s Skull with Calico Roses. Painting by Georgia O’Keeffe, 1931. Art Institute of Chicago. No known restrictions on publication. Why tens of bones linked with silver chain into an earthly veil? I gaze at other entries: hand-stitched quilts…

  • Omentum: Much more than “policeman of the abdomen”

    Ashok Singh Chicago, Illinois, United States Histology of activated omentum 3 days after placing a 5 cc slurry of inert polydextran particles of approx. 100 micron diameter (1 million particles) in the abdominal cavity of rats. Note the dramatic change in the size and quality of the omentum. While the native omentum is fatty in…

  • Hidden heroes

    Candace ThomasSalt Lake City, Utah, United States Being a blood banker is an interesting job and one not many understand. “So you draw people’s blood?” No, that’s a phlebotomist. “Oh, but you work in a hospital. Are you a nurse?” No. “If I donate blood, can I request you?” Still no. Everything a blood banker…

  • Thinking of my dying grandmother at the Natural History Museum

    Roxana Cazan Altoona, Pennsylvania, United States   Bosnian landscape. Photo by Melisa Javier-Wetklow.   At the Natural History Museum in Salt Lake City, I am promised “the assemblage of nature’s ultimate machine,” its precise lurking, one foot crossing the Silurian, its simian lurch trapped behind shatterproof glass. I zigzag through the dinosaur world, the tender bend…