Hektoen International

A Journal of Medical Humanities

Tag: Wilfred Owen

  • Poets at the Craiglockhart War Hospital

    JMS Pearce Hull, England, United Kindom   Wilfred Owen (left) and Siegfried Sassoon (right; source). In the First World War, the writer Siegfried Sassoon (1886–1967) (Figs 1 and 2) received the Military Cross for bringing back wounded soldiers under heavy fire.1 He was admitted to the Craiglockhart War Hospital, Edinburgh in 1917,2,3 where he befriended…

  • William Halse Rivers Rivers

    JMS Pearce Hull, England   Figure 1 WHR Rivers in public domain, from Wikimedia William Rivers MD FRCP FRS (1864-1922) William Rivers (Fig 1) was a most unusual man, a polymath with careers in neuroscience, ethnology, and psychology. But above all—notwithstanding or perhaps because of personal nervous constraints—he was a man of originality and great…

  • “Mental Cases” by Wilfred Owen: The suffering of soldiers in World War I

    Alice MacNeill Oxford, United Kingdom   Wilfred Owen plate from Poems (1920). Internet Archive via Wikimedia. Public domain. Who are these? Why sit they here in twilight? Wherefore rock they, purgatorial shadows, Drooping tongues from jaws that slob their relish, Baring teeth that leer like skulls’ tongues wicked? Stroke on stroke of pain, — but…