Hektoen International

A Journal of Medical Humanities

Tag: WWII

  • Hiroshima seventy-five years after the bombing

    Cristóbal Berry-Cabán Fort Bragg, North Carolina, United States   Figure 1. Little Boy at Tinian Island, August 1945. National Archives. Figure 2. Mushroom cloud over Hiroshima, August 6, 1945. National Archives. Figure 3. This person’s skin was burned in a pattern corresponding to the dark portions of a kimono worn at the time of the…

  • Theme

    HONORING THE WORK OF THE RED CROSS Published on May, 2020 H E K T O R A M A     .   ALL BLOOD RUNS RED Clara Barton The American Red Cross (ARC) is an independent, neutral organization ensuring humanitarian protection and assistance for victims of armed conflict and other disasters. Based on…

  • Blood policies and bioart in the 1900s

    Christopher HubbardOhio, United States Policies related to blood that were adopted in the U.S. during the early to mid-1900s produced cultural and legal effects for certain populations. In 1920, for example, the Hawaiian Homes Commission Act was passed by Congress,1 which modified how identity classifications and boundaries would be drawn up. The act classified an…

  • Bleeding science dry: The history of scientific racism and blood

    Matthew CasasKansas City, United States One might be familiar with the expression “We All Bleed Red.” But what exactly does blood have to say about our “humanity”? Ripe with good intention, the aforementioned mantra represents a campaign to promote peace by winning over the hearts and minds of those assumed to be unaware of a…

  • Did Salvador Dali follow the prolactin discovery in his painting of the fountain of milk?

    Michael Yafi Houston, Texas, United States   Salvador Dalí, Fundació Gala-Salvador Dalí, Artists Rights Society © 2019 The Fountain of Milk Spreading Itself Uselessly on Three Shoes by Salvador Dali remains one of his most enigmatic works. It shows a nude woman on a pedestal, milk flowing from her breasts, while an emaciated man is…

  • Matters of the heart

    Chris ArthurDundee, Scotland Among the most impressive of Leonardo da Vinci’s anatomical studies are his drawings of the human heart. Beside one of them he has written: “How could you describe this heart in words without filling a whole book?” Since then, scores of books have been written about this most crucial of organs. We…

  • Peleliu as a paradigm for PTSD: The two thousand yard stare

    Gregory Rutecki Cleveland, Ohio, United States   “I noticed a tattered marine…staring stiffly at nothing. His mind had crumbled in battle…his eyes were like two black empty holes in his head…Last evening he came down out of the hills. Told to get some sleep, he found a shell crater and slumped into it…First light has…

  • The “Bangka Island Massacre”: Australian military nurses in the Pacific War

    Angharad Fletcher London and Hong Kong   Centaur Poster “Civilian nurses, bound on errands of mercy among the worst underworld dens, are never in danger from the most hardened criminals. But Australia’s nurses were not safe from the Japanese. No British citizen forgets the name of Nurse Edith Cavell. Australia now has her own Edith…

  • Archibald McIndoe’s stance against the clinical hospital archetype and the importance of this for the recovery of burnt airmen in the Second World War

    Alexander Baldwin Birmingham, UK   Archibald McIndoe and the staff of Ward III enjoys a song with a number of Guinea Pigs, also present is actor Edward Chapman. The Second World War marked the beginning of a new generation of aerial warfare. The slow wooden bi-planes of the First World War were replaced by swift…