Hektoen International

A Journal of Medical Humanities

Tag: William Blake

  • Blake’s autonomous newborn: Neonatal mortality in “Infant Joy” and “Infant Sorrow”

    Zoya GurmDetroit, Michigan, United States William Blake (1757–1827) was an artist, poet, and progenitor of the Romantic era. Romanticism represents the artistic and intellectual movement responding to the Enlightenment, industrialization, and political revolutions of the late 18th and early 19th centuries.1 A prominent theme in the work of Blake and other Romantic poets is an…

  • William Blake

    JMS PearceHull, England William Blake (1757–1827) (Fig 1) was and still is an enigma. He was born on November 28, 1757, one of seven children to James, a hosier, and Catherine Wright Blake at 28 Broad Street in London.1 He once remarked: “Thank God I never was sent to school / To be Flogd into…

  • “Am not I a fly like thee?” Drosophila melanogaster and the human genome

    Marshall A. LichtmanRochester, New York, United States Animal models have been essential to medical research for millennia. Ethical concerns about their use has led to a decrease in use of large animals (e.g., dogs, cats). Perhaps the smallest of research animals is Drosophila melanogaster, a fruit fly, one tenth inch in length, which has contributed…

  • Sir Geoffrey Langdon Keynes

    JMS PearceEast Yorks, UK Mention the name Keynes in Britain and most people think of the Buckinghamshire town Milton Keynes or the celebrated twentieth-century economist John Maynard Keynes. In the thirteenth century Milton Keynes village was Mideltone Kaynes, named after its feudal masters, the de Cahainges originally from Normandy,1 who held many manors after the…

  • Taking the bat out of Hell

    Tajri SalekBirmingham, UK “Listen to them, the children of the night. What music they make!”― Bram Stoker, Dracula   If you ever trek through the dense undergrowth of the Borneo rainforests, you will eventually get to a clearing where monkey song and colorful epiphytes give way to the gigantic rocky face of Deer Cave. If you…

  • A proliferation of monsters: Art of the weird as expressions of anxiety in Britain and Japan

    Steve WheelerGreenwich, London, England The human fascination with fear of the unknown has been documented in art and literature across civilization for centuries. In every culture, this has manifested itself in the form of creatures as bizarre as they are terrifying. Since the evolution of language, humans have invented and told stories about monsters to…

  • The beauty of nature and the nature of beauty

    Michael BaumLondon, England Do not all charms fly / At the mere touch of cold philosophy? / There was an awful rainbow once in heaven: / We know her woof, her texture; she is given / In the dull catalogue of common things. / Philosophy will clip an Angel’s wings / Conquer all mysteries by rule…