Hektoen International

A Journal of Medical Humanities

Tag: William Blake

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

    Zoya Gurm Detroit, Michigan, United States   Virgin and Child. Artwork by William Blake, 1825. Yale Center for British Art Paul Mellon Collection. Public domain.  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…

  • 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. Lichtman Rochester, New York, United States   A fruit fly displaying its large red eye. Among Thomas Hunt Morgan’s many contribution to the burgeoning science of genetics, he observed some male fruit flies had a mutant white eye. By cross-breeding males with mutant white eyes with females with the dominant trait and, subsequently,…

  • Sir Geoffrey Langdon Keynes

    JMS Pearce East Yorks, UK   Fig 1.  Sir Geoffrey Langdon Keynes. Reproduction after a pencil drawing by G. Shaw, 1957. Credit: Wellcome Collection.  (CC BY 4.0) 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…

  • Taking the bat out of Hell

    Tajri Salek Birmingham, UK   Fig. 1 The Destruction of Job’s Sons, from Illustrations of the Book of Job, 1825–26. Engraving by William Blake. Collection in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Copyright: Public Domain, Universal (CC0 1.0). “Listen to them, the children of the night. What music they make!” ― Bram Stoker, Dracula   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…