Preston's Hot Zone
Imagine walking into a tiny village in Africa, suffering and dying from some unknown virus. As you approach the huts you hear the wails of pure agony from the afflicted tribe members. Coming closer, you smell the stench of vomit mixed with the bitter smell of warm blood. People inside lay dying in pools of their own vital fluids, coughing and vomiting up their own liquefied internal organs; their faces emotionless masks loosely hanging from their skulls, the connective tissue and collagen in their bodies turned to mush. Their skin bubbled up into a sea of tiny white blisters and spontaneous rips occurring at the slightest touch, pouring blood that refuses to coagulate. Hemmorging and massive clotting underneath the skin causing black and blue bruises all over the body. Their mouths bleeding around their teeth from hemorrhaging saliva glands and the sloughing off of their own tongues, throat lining, and wind pipe, crying tears of pure blood from hemorrhaging tear ducts and the disintegration of the eyeball lining and bleeding from every opening on the body. You see the blood spattered room and pools of black vomit, expelled during the epileptic convulsions that accompany the last stages of death. Their hearts have bled into themselves, heart muscles softened and hemorrhaging , the brain clogged with dead blood cells (sludging of the brain), the liver bulging and yellow with deep cracks and the spleen a single hard blood clot. Babies with bloody noses born with red eyes lay dead from spontaneous abortions of affected mothers. It is the human slate-wiper, the invisible ultimate death, the filovirus named Ebola.
The theme of Richard Preston's Hot Zone seems deal with man's one predator, the invisible one, the one thing that man cannot seek out and conquer, the one that lurks unseen and undetected in the shadows waiting for a warm body to make its new breeding ground in, with total disregard for person, social class, or status. We are "meat", as the biologists at the USAMRIID Institute stated, no names, no faces, no "individuality", the virus rips through our bodies with no thought, mechanical reproducers who sabotage our cells and used them as incubators until their "offspring" replicate to the point the cell wall bursts, releasing hundreds of new virus particles. Literally thousands of these "killers", as humans see them can be held on the point of an ink pen.
The novel, “The Hot Zone”, by Richard Preston, is an extraordinary tale about a virus called the Ebola virus. The author interviews a number of different people that all had encounters with the virus and records their stories. He is very interested by what they tell him and throughout the novel he is always seeking to find more information about it. There were many different encounters in this book but in my summary I am going to explain the ones that interested me the most.
The Beechworth Lunatic Asylum, also known as the Mayday Hills Lunatic Asylum, is located in Beechworth, a town in Victoria, Australia. Located just a few hours away from Melbourne, Beechworth is the second oldest institution in Victoria. It is also one of the most haunted buildings in all of Australia. Mayday hills was founded in 1867 and closed in 1995 after 128 years of operation. Since it’s closing, it has now been transformed into a hotel and conference center for La Trobe University. It was the fourth psychiatric hospital to be built in Victoria, making one of the three largest. The Beechworth Lunatic Asylum was home to patients, as well as prisoners. Over 9,000 people died on the property. With all those tragic passings, no wonder it’s
Pollard is depicted as something “grotesque”, which is an adjective that is used to describe something ugly and twisted. As he is dehumanizing Pollard by describing him as something grotesque, Hamilton is inviting horror in reader’s imagination of Pollard. These description of Pollard gives readers a sense of disgust and terror, as he is turned into a creature that has less semblance with his original forms. Furthermore, Hamilton uses specific wording to create an ominous tone, creating a feeling of risk in scientific research. He utilizes words including “destroy”, “own”, “rule”, grotesque”, and “perish” to infuse fear in his readers, as the words suggest the idea of destruction, enslavement, and ugliness, elements that people try to avoid in this
In deed on June 6, 1944, the little town of Bedford, VA, suffered a tragedy that would never be forgotten. But through the pain and hardship some of officers who leaded the Bedford boys displayed remarkable leadership’s principles. One of the basic functions of leadership is to unite people: bring people together to achieve common objectives. There is truth in the statement, where there is unity there is strength. This essay will offer a working definition of effective leadership principles and discuss the function of leadership as it relates to followers, motivation and power.
AUTHOR: Richard Preston PUBLISHER: Random House DATE OF PUBLICATION: 1994 Setting: The setting g takes place in two major places. Reston Maryland which is a suburb of Washington DC. and the second major area is in Kenya Africa.
“Peoria State Hospital? What’s that? Oh is that the Bartonville Insane Asylum haunted house? That place is scary!” This is what pops into many people’s mind when they think of Peoria State Hospital. Peoria State Hospital, PSH, is not just a scary haunted house; it is a very important part of history. PSH was one of the first mental health facilities of its kind. Peoria State Hospital is considered a pioneer in the treatment of mentally ill patients due to the innovative treatment methods it used. PHS influenced mental healthcare not only in Illinois but across the entire United States as well. This facility became terribly downtrodden in its later years due to the launch of new local facilities and programs and the degradation of the buildings. Toward the end PSH was eerily similar to the hospitals they sought to replace. Peoria State Hospital marked a major turning point towards the improving of mental healthcare by helping people with and curing, their mental illness not only in Illinois, but in the entire country (Bittersweet).
In conclusion, readers identify with the human form and use it as a vehicle for defamiliarization to show the mechanical functions they serve themselves and others. The characters in “Bloodchild” behave as part of a process and show a lack of respect for their human qualities. As they desensitize their bodies, they allow the Tlic to engage with them in an unbalanced power relationship. Then, the Tlic interact with them in a sheltering way and inhibit their thought process. Through this interaction chain, Butler effectively conveys that the way humans treat themselves will dictate how others treat them. As the afterword said, “Bloodchild” is not about slavery; it’s about the relationships humans take on because they allow themselves to be
Monsters under the bed, drowning, and property damage are topics many people have nightmares about; nightmares about a dystopian future, on the other hand, are less common. Despite this, Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 and George Orwell’s 1984 display a nightmarish vision about a dystopian society in the near future. Fahrenheit 451 tells of Guy Montag’s experience in a society where books have become illegal and the population has become addicted to television. Meanwhile, 1984 deals with Winston Smith’s affairs in Oceania, a state controlled by the totalitarian regime known as the Party. This regime is supposedly headed by a man named Big Brother. By examining the dehumanized settings, as well as the themes of individuality and manipulation, it becomes clear that novels successfully warn of a nightmarish future.
In the 1300’s, England was struck with a plague called the Bubonic Plague, better known as the “Black Death.” Historians believe this disease arrived by ship at a seaport in modern day Ukraine (Byrne 1). Fleas living on the back of rats were the main cause of spreading. Because of the poor living conditions, rats were very common in towns, making it simple for fleas to bite the human, giving them the disease. Symptoms were easily spotted; the victim would have lumps on his or her groin and armpits, which would then turn to black spots on the arms and thighs (Trueman 1). Most who suffered form this epidemic did not live past three days (Trueman 1). Because the vermin spread this disease so rapidly, it would eventually affect most of Europe. The source of the Black Death was unknown at the time; therefore physicians could not stop the spread or treat the infected (Byrne 1). Many people thought that it was God’s punishment, so to appease Him, they publicly whipped themselves (Byrne 1). Before declining, the Black Death killed around forty percent of the European populations, which is about 25 million victims, making it one of the most widely known epidemics. Once the Bubonic Plague died out, it only had two...
The Black Death, also known as the Great Mortality and Bubonic Plague, occurred during the years of 1347-1350. Although it didn’t last very long, it is said that the Plague killed over 1.5 million people in its short amount of time in activity throughout the Mediterranean and Europe. The Black Death was a very gruesome and horrible disease that caused fever, headache, chills weakness, and inflammation of the lymph nodes causing the disturbing site of buboes on the neck, groin and armpits. Petrarch, an Italian Scholar, described his feelings towards the Plague as he wrote, “O happy posterity, who will not experience such abysmal woe and will look upon our testimony as a fable” (qtd. in Nohl 17). Here, P...
Cults have existed throughout history since the beginning of time. A cult is defined in Webster’s dictionary as a “system of religious worship with a devoted attachment to a person, principle, etc.” Over the past thirty years numerous religious cults have caused “ tens of thousands to abandon their families, friends, education’s, and careers to follow the teaching of a leader they will never meet”(Beck 78).
A devastating widespread disease that resulted in about 75 million deaths was known as the Black Death. The disease came from fleas that came off of rats that were commonly found in towns and cities. The fleas would bite the victims, injecting them with the disease. Fleas and rats could be found almost anywhere but they were mainly aboard ships of all kind. This is how the Black Death made its way through European ports. This disease could also be spread through the air from person to person. According to one doctor “instantaneous death occurs when the aerial spirit escaping from the eyes of the sick man strikes the healthy person standing near and looking at the sick” There was no medical knowledge to help the people neither cure nor stop the disease. This sent all of Europe in a panic and changed many of their lives forever.
Graveyards were full, medicine failed, parents abandoned ill children and in just six months, millions had died. It was the beginning of the Black Death. It was a deadly plague that spread through Europe and Asia from the mid 1330’s -50’s. The cause of death for twenty million people, the survivors thought it was God’s anger at something they had done and, therefore, the end of the world. In Venice, ninety thousand died and in Florence, half the population. There were three types of the plague. The Bubonic plague was the most common, the Pneumonic Plague was less common and the Septicaemic Plague was the most deadly and rarest of them all.
Although the Black Death was one of the largest epidemics ever recorded, it did not have many visible symptoms. The actual symptoms varied i...
In her novel Middlemarch, George Eliot’s job is to compare different types of existence and their relevance to one another—where each character is faced with a struggle to resolve his/hers desires with the realities of life. In the novel, both the character of Dorothea Brooke and Dr. Lydgate share a similar form of imagination, where both create an image in their mind of the ideal marriage. Such images can be seen as illusions and it is through these illusions the characters must surrender to reality, as they must make an effort to understand the desires that sparked their imagination from the start, and must attempt to make peace with their existing situations. Eliot, through her narration, attempts to exemplify through these two characters this common inclination of human nature to create what we desire as a tool when dealing with life that is both limiting and disappointing.