Hektoen International

A Journal of Medical Humanities

Tag: Winter 2019

  • What could have been

    Gordon SunDowney, California, United States Every year, there are 400 stories like these. The second-year medical student. The social butterfly of her 106 classmates, yet her bubbly personality masks the loneliness of living on one coast after spending the first twenty-five years of her life on the other coast. The isolation is amplified by the…

  • That hospital smell

    Mariel TishmaChicago, Illinois, United States What smells good to you? Do you know why? To many people smell seems of little significance, yet it is a powerful sense, having evolved earlier than the more complex senses of sight and hearing.1, 2 Smell is unique in how it is processed, being first detected by neurons which…

  • Gioachino Rossini of The Barber of Seville (1792–1868)

    In The Barber of Seville, Doctor Bartolo is a pompous, grumpy old man who wants to marry his young niece many years his junior and whom he basically keeps locked up. As he appears on stage, he makes sure that all the doors are firmly secured so that nobody can enter the house while he…

  • John Tyndall, FRS: The beauty of science

    JMS PearceHull, England, United Kingdom Over many centuries non-medical people have carried out research into disease and its causes, often making important advances. The 1841 Census estimates suggest a third of all medical practitioners in England were unqualified.a The great scientist John Tyndall (1820–1893) (Fig 1) was not a medical practitioner, but an Irish physicist,…