Hektoen International

A Journal of Medical Humanities

Tag: WWII

  • A Cold War vaccine: Albert Sabin, Russia, and the oral polio vaccine

    James L. FranklinChicago, Illinois, United States In the midst of the 2020 Covid–19 pandemic, when international scientific cooperation seems to be the order of the day, it is heartening to recall that during the height of Cold War tensions between the USSR and the United States, collaboration between an American virologist and his Russian counterparts…

  • Hiroshima seventy-five years after the bombing

    Cristóbal Berry-CabánFort Bragg, North Carolina, United States “At exactly fifteen minutes past eight in the morning on August 6, 1945, Japanese time, at the moment when the atomic bomb flashed above Hiroshima, Miss Toshiko Sasaki, a clerk in the personnel department of the East Asia Tin Works, had just sat down at her place in…

  • 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 YafiHouston, Texas, United States 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 staring at her.1 As he was completing the painting, Dali may have…

  • 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 RuteckiCleveland, 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 given his…

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

    Angharad FletcherLondon and Hong Kong “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 Cavells to remember.”1 Sometime…

  • 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 BaldwinBirmingham, UK 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 aerodynamic fighters, such as the Spitfire and Hurricane, and a new type of aircraft entirely: the heavy bombers of RAF Bomber Command. However, the increased…