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…
minds find an irreducible mystery, a motiveless evil in nature, and the scientist’s vision of evil comes to match the vision of a God-fearing country woman with a ten-foot pole” (52). This tells us the lesson of Grice’s essay, which is that humans tend to be afraid of things they don’t understand and this leads to missed opportunities. By overcoming that lack of knowledge humans can see things in a new perspective and encounter greater things. This explains how the fear that the surgeons experienced due to the tension during the war and the lack of knowledge at the time contributed to the wide use of amputation. So, the kit can also conjure an image of a scared surgeon, contemplating his decision to amputate, as he is about to perform surgery on an injured soldier. I later learned that, according to a NY Times article, there were two processes that civil war surgeons could’ve taken when faced with a severe injury- amputation or resection.
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
war.
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.
During the Civil War, 620,000 soldiers died from combat, starvation, disease, and many more suffered a variety of life threatening injuries. Walt Whitman, an author, poet, and Civil War nurse wrote two literary pieces titled “The Artilleryman’s Vision” and “The Letter to His Mother.” These literary works of art have a similar theme stating, war can be physically and mentally traumatizing to the soldiers, but it is also a necessity for a country to obtain and maintain its freedom. Walt Whitman's contradictory pieces ¨The Artilleryman's vision” and ¨The letter to his mother¨ shows his Civil War experiences through his use of certain characters, speakers from different points of views, and the gruesome events that occurred during the war.
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.
In the early years of the Civil War, it became clear that disease would be the greatest killer. Twice as many Civil War soldiers died of disease than those killed in combat. This was due to unsanitary and filthy conditions, untrained medical personnel and poor medical examination of new soldier’s. One fact from the Civil War was 315,000 soldiers died from illnesses that included: 44,558 from diarrhea/dysentery, 10,063 from malaria, 34,833 from typhoid, 958 from typhus and 436 from yellow fever. The sanitary conditions that a cured during the civil war were shocking.
“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
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
The theme fear of the unknown can be similar to being afraid of the dark. Darkness is a symbol of fear, mystery or evil. The darkness creates fear because one is visually impaired. The dark itself it not terrifying, it’s the fear of whatever might be lurking around. Hearing a little creak makes one afraid and anxious that will eventually lead them to come up with their own theories and solutions. The mind 's imagination takes over and makes one think of their worse fears. Many people can say that they are not afraid, but what if something comes up from behind you? What if something is underneath your bed, just waiting for the right time to hurt you? The truth is that everyone is afraid of the dark, and because the vision is impaired, it is essentially the fear of the unknown. Fears creates itself and prevents an individual from making the correct decisions for their survival. Fear is not only unknown, there are many kinds of fears many individuals have for example some fear their body weight, relationships, jobs and public appearance. Fear comes in many different types of forms; and every form has a different effect on someone. One can overcome fear by understand their fear and having hope that good will come. In every bad situation, the only way you can bring light in the darkness is by having
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
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.