War - Hektoen International

Letting go of logic

February 18, 2020

Nimisha Bajaj Columbus, Ohio, United States Last Supper by Leonardo DaVinci. Photo by Paris Orlando. November 2019. Public Domain “He’s here for aspiration pneumonia. He doesn’t want a G-tube even though we tried to explain to him that if he continues to eat and drink by mouth, this will keep happening and he will […]

Bad blood: The drama of bloodshed

February 6, 2020

Emily Boyle Dublin, Ireland Lucia’s mad scene – Rachelle Durkin as Lucia during The Chautauqua Opera’s dress rehearsal for Lucia di Lammermoor. Photo by Michelle Kanaar. In some professions, bloodstained clothing is a normal part of the job. The two jobs that come to mind principally are a butcher and a vascular surgeon, although […]

First principles

January 30, 2020

Charles G. Kels San Antonio, Texas, United States Ambulance Corps. Method of removing wounded from the field depicts the aftermath of battle in the American Civil War. The law of war is enshrined in treaties but steeped in blood. In 1859, a young Swiss businessman was traveling through Italy when a savage battle between […]

Blood at Maidan – Kyiv, Ukraine 2014

January 27, 2020

Olena Kagui Rhode Island, United States Photo by Olena Kagui, taken March 17th, 2014. Source There was no physical blood present when I stepped onto Maidan Square in Kyiv, Ukraine. Yet signs of it were everywhere. Bullet holes pierced the shields and helmets that memorialized the fallen. Flowers, the color of blood, sat inside […]

The bulletproof doctor

May 6, 2019

Ammar Saad Ottawa, Ontario, Canada The Last sleep of Arthur in Avalon is a 1880’s painting that depicts the deaths of Burne-Jones’s close friends which ignited his feelings of solitude and awareness of his own mortality. (By Edward Burne-Jones. Ponce Museum of Art, Ponce, Puerto Rico) I had been admitted to the Damascus University […]

Building a legend

January 22, 2017

Vladimir Simunovic Croati During the war in Bosnia-Herzegovina the number of health care professionals declined precipitously. None of those who stayed were trained or mentally prepared to work under war conditions. Nobody had taught us skills that would be useful in war, and some of us found ourselves in roles we never expected to […]

The American Civil War as a biological phenomenon: Did Salmonella or Sherman win the war for the North?

January 22, 2017

Michael Brown Chicago, Illinois, United States Reexamining Civil War deaths Patients in Ward K of Armory Square Hospital – Washington, DC, 1865 A demographic historian, J. David Hacker, recently discovered an unfortunate truth; using newly digitized data from the 1860, 1870, and 1880 censuses, he constructed new estimates of Northern and Southern Civil […]

Peleliu as a paradigm for PTSD: The two thousand yard stare

January 22, 2017

Gregory Rutecki Cleveland, Ohio, United States “I noticed a tattered marine…staring stiffly at nothing. His mind had crumbled in battle…his eyes were like two black empty holes in his head…Last evening he came down out of the hills. Told to get some sleep, he found a shell crater and slumped into it…First light has […]

Medical and scientific innovations arising from warfare

January 22, 2017

Brian Omondi Nairobi, Kenya Perhaps the only bright side of war is that it impels nations to make medical and scientific innovations. War has long been portrayed as being the best school for surgeons and even for doctors.1 An association between medical services and the military can be traced back to ancient Greece, and the […]