Four of them walk in dressed in their crisp, white gowns and matching caps. An older male opens a drawer and pulls on a pair of latex gloves. The three observers stand back and the gloved man looms over me, face shadowed in the bright light shining down on my naked body. He gestures to a younger man from the observation group. The youthful man approaches me, already putting on gloves, ready to face the challenge. From the steel tray beside me, he picks up a scalpel, hands shaking with anxiety. Inside my head, I’m screaming. I want away from this man. No sound escapes me, however, because I cannot speak. He glimpses my body for a moment and then decides to place the scalpel back on the tray. If it was ever possible to pick up something softly, this man quietly and carefully picks up a syringe and takes a step back towards me, his footsteps clicking on the tile floor, reverberating off the drab, white walls enclosing five very important people in a room vaporous with the grisly smells of dead flesh. He looks deep into my glassy eyes as he sinks the needle deep into my eye tissue, drawing vitreous fluid as he slowly lifts the plug back on the syringe. The man withdraws the needle and places it in an icebox next to the tray of surgical instruments, practically dropping the needle. He wants this particular procedure over with. The older man presses a button on the intercom. “Send this to the lab to be analyzed.” He then sweeps his hand in front of his stomach, as if giving directions to the young man. The young man leans towards me, closes his fingers around the knife and presses the blade to my chilled, pale skin. Trying not to quiver, he makes a quick but accurate Y-incision, straight along the middle of my abdomen... ... middle of paper ... ...ng me onto my side, and then finally onto the steel platform. Cold fog envelopes my broken body. He gives me one last gaze full of emotion. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” he sputters over me, as a bead of moisture escapes the inner corner of his eye. It falls into the poor sewing job, the supposedly sealed opening of my chest cavity. Even if I still possessed my heart, I would have felt nothing. “Goodbye, my love,” he whispers as he kisses me one final time on the forehead. He then pushes my lolling remnants back into the tomb of eternal winter. Works Cited "Autopsy Pathology." LuMriX XML Solutions for Enterprises. Web. 05 Oct. 2009. . Gerritsen, Tess. Body Double (Jane Rizzoli, Book 4). New York: Ballantine Books, 2005. Print. AutopsyTV - Autopsies, Autopsy. Web. 05 Oct. 2009. .
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.
"Apology" and "Phaedo" Knowledge of Death versus Belief in a Soul In Plato’s "Apology," Socrates says that he knows nothing of death while in "Phaedo" he discusses many of his beliefs on death and its philosophical ramifications. From this simple perspective it may seem as though he is contradicting himself although he, after further investigation, is not. Philosophically, the idea of death and an afterlife can be looked at from multiple non-contradictory viewpoints. Socrates talks of his lack of knowledge of death in order to define, more so, his philosophy on life. While in "Phaedo," he talks explicitly about his philosophy on death. The two discussions of death are equally important in determining Socrates’ overall philosophical outlook on life and death although the have different emphasis. They both do help to define philosophy’s proper relationship to death. In Plato’s "Apology " Socrates announces that he is not afraid of death because he knows nothing of it. His lack of knowledge of death is relative to his knowledge of living and, in that manner, helps to define his knowledge of life. Socrates, at his trial, is faced with the death penalty unless he pleads with the judges for a different sentence. The sentences that he may be able to obtain instead of death are a fine, banishment from the city, or imprisonment. Socrates refuses and accepts death. His reasoning for this decision is that the other options are most certainly evils; owing money that he does not have to people he does not want to pay, being sent away from his friends, his family, his city and his home to go to a foreign land, or imprisonment. His beliefs, though, and his teachings seem most valuable to him and any inter...
There were three completely stocked human anatomy labs holding a total of six classes every week during the 1992 winter quarter. Spread thoughout each lab room were six different stations displaying six different viewpoints of that day’s featured body system. Also located in these lab rooms, but off limits to us, was “the room behind the closed door.” Every so often, when the door was carelessly left ajar, we did manage to grab a peek of the secret room beyond. Filling every cubic inch (50 ft deep, 20 ft wide & 20 ft high) of the room lying beyond the door were steel gurneys stacked upon one another; upon each layer were sealed plastic bags containing cotton cocoons of corpses wa...
When Everyman was admitted to the hospital as a child for a routine hernia surgery, he didn't believe that anything would go wrong. While he was asleep the night before his surgery, he was woken up by the sound of doctors and nurses at the bed next to him. When he woke up on the morning of his surgery, the little boy was no longer in his bed next to him. “In that moment of terror when they lowered the ether mask over his face as if to smother him, he could have sworn that the surgeon, whoever he was, had whispered, 'Now I'm going to turn you into a girl.'” (Roth 29). His first thoughts were that the doctors had killed the little boy and were going to give him a similarly unpleasant fate. This was the first glimpse of death he had had in his life thus far and it terrified him. Many years later, when he was in his fifties and needed to have s...
“Love is the emblem of eternity: it confounds all notion of time: effaces all memory of a beginning, all fear of an end.”
The definitions of death and life have always been controversial topics since the beginning of civilization. When determining the beginning of life and the end of life, there are just too many factors to consider and there are also uncertainties that have yet to be settled. For example, do the factors have to be strictly observable and physical or can they also include the organism’s state of mind and whether it shows any psychological defects as well? And also let us not forget that for humans religion also plays a crucial role in both the definitions of life and death and the maintenance of life. Unfortunately, the people all over the world have not come to ultimate definitions of life and death but we can only keep trying to get closer until we finally discover just when we are forever separated from this world and what keeps us going in this world.
The doctor left the trauma room, leaving us to pick the bits of tissue from the hair that remained on the man's head. The two of us remaining gathered around his head and proceeded to snag the soft gobs of pink flesh from his hair as gently as possible, so as not to disturb our newly finished work. He was taken to another room to recover as we left the scene of the previous mayhem. Staff congratulated me on a job well done, as this was my first trauma. I felt proud and alive, I knew this was what I wanted to do for the rest of my life. I will never forget that moment realization hit home.
There is one thing in this universe that no one can escape, that everyone fears, and makes people who are close to that person miserable, and that is death. Death is the worst thing that can ever happen to a person, and is just as terrible for the people who are close to them. There is an emptiness that comes with the passing of a loved one or someone close. That blankness in the world does something to the people who encompass that person who passed. It changes people, whether it is for better or worse. Death is a part of life and depending on how people are affected can dictate whether it will leave a positive or negative transformation to their life and that conversion happened to me with the passing of my beloved mother, Fran.
Who brought me here? Out of impulse, my hand travels to my face, pressing the throbbing area on my right temple. I felt a scar and flinched at the pain. I tried to get up. Once I stepped on the cold, white tiles, I instantly fell back on to the bed. My body, engulfed in pain as if objecting my decision to stand up. I lay there pathetically, waiting for the pain to wash away. Staring at the ceiling, illuminated with a white fluorescent light. Perhaps waiting for some help by the hospital staff. I still didn't know how I got here, who took me here, how long I've been here.
I stared in horror at the fearsome needle taunting me to challenge its glinting tip. I closed my eyes, prayed with every cell in my body for the pain to be minimal, and grimaced as she expertly twirled the needle between her fingers and then slid it through my flesh in one fluid motion.
With life comes death. With death comes mourning, sorrow, grief, and depression. Everyone goes through it, and it happens multiple times in their life. Death is a thing that nobody likes to talk about. We turn the other cheek when it is mentioned because most of us, like me, do not comprehend well with it. Death happens anytime it wants to whether we expect or not, which most of the time not knowing when it will happen is how death works. Since death is so unexpected it means we have no time to prepare for what lies ahead of us.
The abstract idea of life cannot be explained by such simple ideas as being animated, breathing, or speaking. Ordinary machines in this century can perform all of these basic functions. The quandary with defining death is not as abstract and elusive as that of life. The problem of defining life and death has plagued philosophers and the religious bodies for thousands of years for one reason; each philosophy or religion has tried to define the meaning of life and death from only their certain perspective. The seemingly appropriate approach to this problem would be to understand the ideas presented in various philosophies and religions and through this knowledge create a new definition for each idea of life and death. The movie Blade Runner has taken this exact approach in its attempt to finally define life and death in a logical and un-spiritual manner. By taking the position that death is a concrete idea that can be explained, Blade Runner accomplishes the task of interpreting the idea of life in terms death. Through this approach, the meaning of life is redefined to accommodate for the existence of the replicants. Also, as a result of this novel notion of life, it is apparent that humans and replicants never actually live, even though they are alive.
Socrates, an honorable Greek philosopher once quoted, “The hour of departure has arrived, and we go our separate ways, I to die, and you to live. Which of these two is better only God knows.”
"Oh no," she mutters inspecting my wound. At her touch an agonizing pain flares and I can't help but groan in discomfort. Why should I even trust that she knows what she's
Life is a precious thing, death is the great evil”, said by Heinrich Heine who is a famous poet. So we can know that life is the most important thing for every single life entity. There are a lot of words that can modify life, such as important, precious, formidable and so on. The reason why there are so many good vocabulary can modify life is nobody want to lose their own life. It is clear that not only human, but also animals cherish their own life. According to the utterance which Heine said, we should not kill anyone. However, the life is also cruel. Crime is happens every day and some of them can’t be excused. People may do some wicked things for some reasons. In this case, the death penalty is the way that can punish them and caution other people and it is necessary to have death penalty.