Hektoen International

A Journal of Medical Humanities

Tag: William Wordsworth

  • Tales of the psychosomatic in the Lyrical Ballads

    Stewart JustmanMissoula, Montana, United States The year 1800 saw the publication of John Haygarth’s historic pamphlet Of the Imagination as a Cause and as a Cure of Disorders of the Body, an inquiry into what we now know as the nocebo and placebo effects. The same year saw the second edition of Wordsworth and Coleridge’s…

  • Wandering lonely as a cloud

    Dean GianakosLynchburg, Virginia, US I wandered lonely as a cloudThat floats on high o’er vales and hills,When all at once I saw a crowd,A host, of golden daffodils;Beside the lake, beneath the trees,Fluttering and dancing in the breeze. Continuous as the stars that shineAnd twinkle on the milky way,They stretched in never-ending lineAlong the margin…

  • William Wordsworth: “The blind poet”?

    JMS PearceHull, England, United Kingdom William Wordsworth (1770–1850) was born in Cockermouth, Cumberland, on April 7, 1770. He was the totemic father of the Lakeland poets, who extolled the relation between man and the natural world: a wedding between nature and the human mind that to him symbolized the mind of God. A prolific writer…

  • Book review: Albemarle Street: Portraits, personalities and presentations at the Royal Institution

    Arpan K. BanerjeeSolihull, United Kingdom In this fascinating book, the late Professor Meurig Thomas, a distinguished chemist, former Master of Peterhouse, Cambridge University, and an accomplished popularizer of science, tells the story of one of Britain’s greatest scientific institutions, which for over 200 years has been responsible for many of the great scientific advances of…

  • Elizabeth Barrett Browning—Isolation and the artist

    Elizabeth Lovett Colledge Jacksonville, Florida, United States Elizabeth Barrett Browning is perhaps best known for the poem “How do I Love Thee,” addressed to her husband Robert Browning, as well as their courtship, elopement, and subsequent years together in Europe. However, one might revisit her life and prolific work in light of the many years of…

  • “Troubled in my eyes”: the risks of reading and writing

    Katherine HarveyLondon, England, United Kingdom On January 1, 1660, a young Londoner named Samuel Pepys began to keep a diary. Over the next nine and a half years, he recorded both events of national significance—the Restoration of King Charles II, the Great Plague, and the Great Fire—as well as the minutiae of his private life,…

  • Under the lime tree: Medicine, poetry, and the education of the senses

    Alan BleakleySennen, West Cornwall, United Kingdom When in the summer of 1797 Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s wife Sara accidentally spilled hot milk over his foot, causing serious burns such that Coleridge could not walk, he sat in the garden of his friend Thomas Poole’s house under a lime tree, immobilized. A party of friends, meanwhile, had…

  • Coleridge and the albatross syndrome

    Nicolás Roberto Robles Badajoz, Spain Samuel Taylor Coleridge, the tenth and last child of the vicar of Ottery Saint Mary near Devonshire, England, was born on October 21, 1772. In vivid letters recounting his early years he describes himself as “a genuine Sans culotte, my veins uncontaminated with one drop of Gentility.” He had an amazing…

  • The basest of the senses: medical unease with the sense of smell

    Rebecca ShulmanPhiladelphia, Pennsylvania, United States “…the primitive organ of smell, the basest of the senses” – Patrick Suskind, Perfume For the past two centuries, the medical profession has had a deeply-held but wholly unconscious ambivalence about the sense of smell, including the myriad ways in which it can become disordered. The same ambivalence does not…