Hektoen International

A Journal of Medical Humanities

Tag: Winter 2017

  • Music and the brain

    Rayda JoomunMauritius Music  brings a smile to our faces. Yet this abstract entity has no conventional defining criteria. Proust acknowledged this: “Music helped me to descend into myself, to discover new things; the variety that I had sought in vain in life, in travel, but for a longing which was nonetheless renewed in me by…

  • Was the Mozart Effect evident before the birth of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart?

    Harishnath RamachandranEngland, United Kingdom “Rhythm and harmony find their way into the inward places of the soul.” – Plato The word music is derived from the Greek word “mousike”, meaning art of the muses. It is considered a form of entertainment combining a collection of sounds to form pleasurable tunes.  A large chunk of the music…

  • Physician: study thyself

    Susan HurleyVictoria, Australia In 2016 one man died and five others suffered brain damage during a drug trial in Rennes, France.1 A similar disaster occurred during the 2006 London trial of a novel monoclonal antibody: six men experienced an immediate systemic inflammatory response and became critically ill with multi-organ failure.2 These tragedies are a poignant…

  • Bari in the seventh cholera pandemic

    Salvatore BarbutiMoro, Italy Domenico MartinelliRosa PratoFoggia, Italy It all began on a quiet warm afternoon in August 1973 when an infectious diseases specialist called his friend in public health and hesitantly asked for a test on stool sample for a patient whom he believed could be infected with cholera. The public health man laughed and…

  • Public health measures derived from the Jewish tradition: II. Washing and cleaning

    Tova Chein,Mark Epelbaum,Robert SternNew York, New York, United States Introduction Historically, Jewish contributions to public health measures have not been given adequate attribution. The previous article in this series (Hektoen International, Winter 2016) documented the ancient Jewish recognition of the importance of: The ritual washing of hands There are many forms of washing identified in the…

  • Huetation

    Sooo-z Mastropietro Westport, CT     Inspiration can appear unexpectedly just like progress born from sickness. Huetation, inspired by Rebecca Skloot’s book The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks and film documentary The Way of All Flesh took awe from an 8 second visual of mutating cancer cells, displayed with a sequence of 3 images in…

  • Queer and unked: Disability, monstrosity, and George Eliot’s “Sympathy”

    Christina LeeKent, United Kingdom In The Mill on the Floss, the intellectual and sensitive Philip Wakem, who has a curved spine from a fall in infancy, is called “a queer fellow, a humpback, and the son of a rogue.”1(II.vi) In the manuscript Philip Wakem is branded “queer and unked.”1(V.v) “Queer” used here means “a state of strangeness and…

  • Portraits of vision: Sir Joshua Reynolds

    Sally MetzlerChicago, Illinois, United States The subject of this portrait wears wiry, diminutive round spectacles, lending a distinctly pedantic flair. Yet gazing out is none other than Sir Joshua Reynolds (1723–1792), one of the greatest English painters in history (fig. 1). Sir Joshua headed the Royal Academy of Painters for twenty-four years, and wielded enormous…

  • Suicide in medical school

    Trevor KleeCambridge, MA, United States Depression and suicide are difficult subjects to write about because they are unpleasant and have at least a faint tinge of moral failure. Moreover, the enormity of the feelings involved dwarfs the attempts to portray them in writing. Perhaps the best written description of suicidal ideation comes from David Foster…

  • Etienne-Jules Marey (1830–1904). The study of movement in the functions of life: eclecticism and inventiveness

    Philippe CampilloLille, France “[…] I think, together with Claude Bernard, that movement is the most important act, in that all the functions come into play in order to achieve it.”1 Marey had a long and distinguished scientific career covering more than 50 years, focusing principally on the study of movement. In all its forms, he…