Winter 2015 - Hektoen International

An ancient oath with modern significance

March 7, 2017

Emmanuel Ugokwe SIA Africa and Society for Young Writers, Nigeria Southeast and SouthSouth Hippocrates of Kos Engraving by Peter Paul Rubens, 1638 About 400 BCE Hippocrates, commonly known as the father of medicine, wrote the Hippocratic oath. That noble, ethical creed still guides the medical profession. Is that what you have been taught? If so, you […]

Latin and medicine

March 4, 2017

Noah DeLone Miami, Florida, United States Photography by Celeste RC Language is the cornerstone of our ability to communicate as humans and underlies the prose of our medical discourse. The words we select can be indicative of our background, training, and intentions. It should come as no surprise that a robust knowledge of one’s […]

Beyond negativity

March 4, 2017

Lynn Sadler Pittsboro, North Carolina, United States Photography by leniners My husband Emory and I have traveled to China five times since participating in the (Eisenhower) People to People’s Citizen Ambassador Program from May 21 through June 2, 1995. Then we were members of a “Biofeedback Delegation to the People’s Republic of China” and visited educational […]

Fluorescence

March 4, 2017

Leah Kaminsky Melbourne, Australia The art of medicine cannot be inherited, nor can it be copied from books. – Paracelsus Photography by Michael My youngest daughter has a lizard called Limmy living on her bedside table. Each time I kiss my girl goodnight, stroke her long, blonde curls and turn off the light, […]

Manifestations of madness in King Lear

March 4, 2017

Anoushka Sinha New York, United States King Lear and the Fool in the Storm William Dyce (1806-1864) National Galleries of Scotland In his satirical masterpiece The Praise of Folly, the influential Dutch humanist Erasmus of Rotterdam attributes a Janus-like quality to madness, which he describes as two divergent manifestations: “one that which the Furies […]

Lifeline Express: the magic train hospital of India

February 24, 2017

Satish Saroshe Indore, India, United States Photograph of the Lifeline Express is from the Indian Health Initiative blog. Lifeline Express, colloquially known as the Magic Train Hospital of India, is the world’s first modern technologically advanced hospital-train. Established in 1991 and completing twenty-three years of service, it has travelled the length and breadth of […]

Royal Victoria Military Hospital Netley

February 24, 2017

Samuel Parish Naples, Florida, United States Royal Victoria Military Hospital Netley Hospitals are built to respond to the health needs of a community. In the military, the state of healthcare is often not realized until a crisis stretches the limits of the health system. The crisis most often is war. Such was the case […]

The Sindh Institute of Urology and Transplantation

February 23, 2017

Rubina Naqvi The Sindh Institute as photographed by Zubeida Mustafa This is a true story about a tertiary care hospital located in a country of 230 million people, which has no well-designed health facility program, especially for poor people with chronic ailments. Every year in this unfortunate country some 260 women per 100,000 live births die in […]

Bimarstan al-Mansouri

February 23, 2017

Mona Youssef Cairo, Egypt Bimaristan al-Mansouri Around 1248 AD, when Islam was at its prime and the Nile was wide, and its seven delta branches coursed through the land with a heavy network of connecting channels in place of the two branches left today, there was the Bimaristan al-Mansouri, with water channels from the Nile […]

The Montreal Neurological Hospital

February 23, 2017

Louise Fabiani Montreal, Canada The Montreal Neurological Institute The time was 1928 and the patient was a forty-three year old mother of six. After nearly thirty years of headaches and seizures, she had started to have problems with her right eye. A young neurosurgeon examined her and found evidence of a right frontal-lobe tumor, […]