This fear of the unknown is similar to the one shown in Gordon Grice’s essay, “The Black Widow.” In his essay, Grice explains how his fear of black widow made him curious about them. He once feared black widows because most people associated black widows as deadly animals that kill people. However, once Grice said, “I fell, hands first, into a mass of young widows … In about ten minutes my arms carried nothing but old web and the husks of spiderlings eaten by their sibs. I have never been bitten” (47). This revelation for Grice shows that black widows aren’t what he had thought them to be, but in fact mostly harmless to humans. “We want the world to be an ordered room, but in a corner of that room there hangs an untidy web. Here the analytical …show more content…
Resection was a process that “involved cutting open the limb, sawing out the damaged bone, and then closing the incision” (Jones, 1). Resection allows the patient to keep his limbs but it requires a great ordeal of time and skill. This also contributed to the common practice of amputation during the war. But there were cases where surgeons did use this method. Terry J. Jones said in his NY Times article, “resections were used more frequently after surgeons learned that amputations had a much higher mortality rate” (Jones, 1). In another article by Corydon Ireland, it describes Mitchell Adam’s, a Harvard lecturer, grandfather who served as a volunteer surgeon during the Civil War. In the article, “Adams was not a champion of hasty amputations, but argued for excision and other limb-saving measures. And he describes the everyday pressures of a country practice in Framingham, Mass” (Ireland, 1). This meant that not all surgeons at the time only wanted to amputate but strived for alternate methods. This new knowledge shows that some surgeons were more dedicated to thinking about the well-being of their patients than others and this opens up to other possibilities that may have occurred during the war. This allows an image to come to mind of a surgeon diligently operating on a soldier with care and compassion. However, even though there may be many possibilities, we can’t truly know every event that occurs during a
Popular television paint a glorified image of doctors removing the seriousness of medical procedures. In the non-fiction short story, “The First Appendectomy,” William Nolen primarily aims to persuade the reader that real surgery is full of stress and high stakes decisions rather than this unrealistic view portrayed by movies.
The surgeons “sawed bones and stitched arteries, cut back damaged flesh, repaired abdomens and faces, all at breakneck speed”. A variation of the French guillotine was used to amputate limbs as those “severed limbs stacked up like logs for disposal”. With the surgical instruments being used so much, they had to have cutlers nearby to sharpen them often. Nurses working the frontline, hospitals, CCS as well as the hospital ships and railways, were often seen as angels of compassion by the soldiers they cared for. One nurse shared that one of their more serious wards was called “the nursery” as the wounded were so helpless due to debilitating
The knowledge we have of surgery in the Civil war is filled with gruesome and haunting experiences soldiers had to face. The surgeons were the onsite hospital staff that carried a wooden case to perform their duties anywhere at any time. This specific case in the __ museum belonged to a gentleman named Dr. W.P. Gunnell who “was educated in the best school of Virginia and graduated in medicine from the University of Pennsylvania. When the war began he was on a visit in the North, and while trying to get back to his home in Virginia he was arrested, and, through discretion, was forced to become a surgeon in a Union army hospital. He served to the best of his ability until he had an opportunity to escape through the lines to the South, and then he enlisted as a surgeon in the Confederate army” (). He experienced both sides of serving in the hospital departments during the Civil War.
As a kid, I was afraid of the hideous monsters that lay hiding under my bed. Although as I grew I realised that the monsters weren't under beds or hiding in dark closets, they were the strangers I walked past daily, the shooters, the bombers, the molesters. We live in a society today where kids can no longer ride their bikes too far and women can't walk around late at night without the fear of something terrible happening to them. We're taught from a young age to be afraid, to have fears and live our lives based on those fears.
Lt. John Dunbar was an American proud man. All was well with Dunbar until a terrible accident occurred. The year was 1863 and the American Civil War had just sparked nations. John was out fighting for what he loved, and that's when he was injured by his rivals. His leg was going to have to be amputated and well John didn’t want that. He put on his boot and headed out to do what was planned for him. He decided
President Franklin Roosevelt famously said, “The only thing we have to fear, is fear itself.”(Psychology Today) In literature, many authors use the five primal fears of extinction, mutilation, loss of autonomy, separation, and ego-death in their works. The primal fears of ego-death, separation, and loss of autonomy are used because they have an affect on one’s mental state that in some cases cause people to think unclearly and irrationally.
There’s a monster under your bed, and there are ghosts in the attic. The Bogey man is in your closet and ravens await your death so they can pick from your rotting flesh. Flowers are ready to strangle you, as pickles prepare to choke you in the night. It’s almost funny to hear of people who actually fear flowers and pickles. But these people have real legit fears of even the nicest of things. Although these fears are horrible, and should not be feared; I think the more we know about them, the more we can be prepared. There must be a deeper meaning of these weird phobias. Is it nature? Or inherited traits of the human body? Maybe they come from past experiences? Even as these fears are quite interesting, but unwanted, I want to know why people acquire these ridiculous fears and how we could stop them.
Substandard medical practices and incompetent medical staff operating during the Civil War are quite astounding. It is without doubt that over the last 150 years, the medical field has made profound advances compared to that of the third-rate medical practices of the mid-nineteenth century. If one only knew today’s medical practices as standard, they would find it shocking to know that it was once quite acceptable to practice such mediocre and unsanitary principles and procedures.
Fear comes from comes from a lot of places but one fear might sound strange to you.
Fear is the emotional state that someone goes into when they feel threatened or endangered. The fact that we do not know everything makes us think that everything we do not know is feared. There are many stories that include the fear of the unknown. Each poem, story, and drama include some type of fear. In “The Yellow Wallpaper”, “Hills Like White Elephants”, and “Poof” there is an extensive amount of fear for the unknown. Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Ernest Hemingway, and Lynn Nottage all used the fear to their advantage while writing and making an entertainment for the readers.
Human's fears should not be taken lightly. Fear could do anything to one's minds, though without fear, man can be as savage as animals. In the book Lord of the Flies, William Golding presented fear of the unknown to be a powerful force in a man's mind. Fear of the unknown is a powerful force, which can turn to either insight or hysteria. The kids feared of not being rescued off of the island, so they made signal fires on top of the mountain. Then, there and gone, Roger's fear of the old rules he abided to. Also, there were the fears of the beast which confused and isolated the kids from the top of the mountain.
“When you say 'fear of the unknown', that is the definition of fear; fear is the unknown, fear is what you do not know, and it's genetically within us so that we feel safe. We feel scared of the woods because we're not familiar with it, and that keeps you safe.” – M. Night Shyamalan
One of the worst things about war is the severity of carnage that it bestows upon mankind. Men are killed by the millions in the worst ways imaginable. Bodies are blown apart, limbs are cracked and torn and flesh is melted away from the bone. Dying eyes watch as internal organs are spilled of empty cavities, naked torso are hung in trees and men are forced to run on stumps when their feet are blown off. Along with the horrific deaths that accompany war, the injuries often outnumber dead men. As Paul Baumer witnessed in the hospital, the injuries were terrifying and often led to death. His turmoil is expressed in the lines, “Day after day goes by with pain and fear, groans and death gurgles. Even the death room I no use anymore; it is too small.” The men who make it through the war take with them mental and physical scarification from their experiences.
Friedrich Nietzsche’s quote, “Battle not with monsters, lest ye become a monster, and if you gaze into the abyss, the abyss gazes also into you,” describes the void and fear we humans often times feel. That sometimes the human mind cannot fully comprehend with explanation and reason what is happening before it. Thus, causing a transformation of man into an animal at the precipice of a great cliff. That any confidence and reason at the time is stripped away, until the only question that seems reasonable is, “why not jump?” We often times believe we are afraid of the dark, but in reality what we really are afraid of is what’s in it, and the uncertainty of the unknown.
One of the common fears life brings to the table is the unknown. Many people, including myself, fear the unknown. There are two types of unknown fears that scare me the most. This would be death and losing control of a situation. The reason why death scares me is because you never know when your time is coming. It could be anything from