Hektoen International

A Journal of Medical Humanities

Tag: Winter 2018

  • “…One must imagine Sisyphus happy”

    Katerina DimaPreveza, Greece   “Sysphus, carrying the weight of his agony, forever.” Sisyphus, 1548, TitanMuseo del Prado, Madrid, Spain. Ancient Greek mythology teems with stories of morality, despair, and the philosophy of the absurd. No story, however, had a greater impact on this young, impressionable medical student than the story of Sisyphus. Sisyphus was a…

  • Collections complete: experiential centres of learning

    Lynsey Grosfield Rude, Denmark   The period between roughly 1520 and 1590 was a time of growing efforts to understand the world of science through hands-on exercises in collecting and cataloging natural objects, observation, dissection, and experimentation in the fields of anatomy, botany, and museum science. This was also the time of the High Renaissance…

  • Path of compassion

    Raisa Zubareva Warsaw, Poland   Kate Marsden, photographed in 1892 before she set off for Sakha in Siberia to search for a herb said to cure leprosy. Photo by Otto Renard, Moscow. In humble circumstances in one of London’s asylums for the insane, Kate Marsden, a nurse and philanthropist who devoted her life to saving others, died…

  • The unsexed woman: Depictions of women in 19th century fictional literature

    Katherina Baranova London, Canada   A vicar asking a woman if she likes her new female doctor, the woman retorts that she prefers male doctors and finds them more gentle. Wood engraving after G. Du Maurier (1834–1896). The nineteenth century saw unprecedented changes in medicine, both technical and professional, as two parallel tales dealing with clubfoot…

  • Beyond eating yogurt

    Margad Zorigt Mongolia   When I was studying in Australia, an American teacher asked us what we usually did in the evening in our countries. I said Mongolians drink yogurt before sleep. The teacher was surprised at my answer: “Your country’s people drink yogurt? In my country we eat yogurt.” In the Mongolian language we…

  • Ghosts from the Ether Dome

    Isabel Legarda Belmont, Massachusetts, United States   The ether dome today. Author photo. On October 16, 1846, dentist William Morton successfully demonstrated the use of ether as an anesthetic inside Massachusetts General Hospital’s Bulfinch Pavilion. That day, now passed down to us as “Ether Day,” is often seen as a turning point for surgery both…

  • Disease mapping: tracing the urban epidemic

    Astrid Primadhani Jakarta, Indonesia   Snow’s map analysis to Thessian polygons (Cliff & Haggert) (1988): Atlas of Disease Distributions In August 1854 a deadly cholera outbreak struck the Soho neighborhood of London.1 Within thirty-six hours, rapid death ensued as the dense and unsanitary condition of the working-class neighborhood became a haven for the spread of…

  • Red right hand: Ectrodactyly as a metaphor

    Erin CrouchKatelyn McDonaldTacoma, Washington Hands make us human. We lend a hand, we put all hands on deck, we know things like the back of our hands. Hands show emotion, beauty, and grace. But as Tolstoy wrote, “What a strange illusion it is to suppose that beauty is goodness.”1 Perfect hands do not make a…

  • Shackleton’s angel

    Paul G. Firth Boston, Massachusetts, United States   Shackleton’s angel. Photo by Paul Firth. South Georgia Island is a tortured upheaval of mountain and glacier that falls in chaos to the jagged coastline of the South Atlantic Ocean.1 From thirty miles of this wind-blasted sub-Antarctic wilderness came walking on the afternoon of the 20 May 1916…

  • Joseph Roth, a visionary poet and victim of European history

    Frank Wollheim Sweden   Joseph and Friedl in Berlin, 1927. From Wilhelm von Sternberg. Joseph Roth, Kiepenheuer & Wirtsch, 2009. Joseph Roth was born on 2 September 1894 in Brody, then a Galician town in the Austrian-Hungarian Monarchy, bordering Russia. His parents married in 1892 and like two thirds of the 20,000 inhabitants were Hassidic…