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Critical Analysis #2
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"It's Alive!" (Again)- revised, reposted
| Critical Analysis #2 |
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"It's Alive!" (Again)- revised, reposted |
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hush Senior Member
since 2001-05-27
Posts 1653Ohio, USA |
Okay, so it's not poetry, but nobody in the Prose forum seemed interested, so I figured I'd field this here. It's only part of it, and still rough... but I'm supposed to be presenting this in a couple weeks at Oxford University in front of people with PhD's. (not intimidating at all, right?) and what I need is a critical eye. So, pretty please, Brad, Pete, will you let it stay? I know it's long, but any thoughts or suggestions would be appreciated. 43 And when he thus had spoken, he cried with a loud voice, Lazarus, come forth. 44 And he that was dead came forth, bound hand and foot with graveclothes: and his face was bound about with a napkin. Jesus saith unto them, Loose him, and let him go. -The Gospel According to John, from the King James Bible The New Testament may seem like an unlikely source of horror stories, but when Jesus Christ resurrected Lazarus, he became a pioneer in the art of reanimation. Reanimation myths that began with the Bible have persevered as cultural legends, classic and modern literature, and in the reality of medical practice. Science and medicine provide many avenues for the reanimation of inanimate flesh, whether that flesh is an entire human body or a select set of tissues or organs. While electrocuting the best parts of several rotting corpses is unlikely to produce any reaction more stimulating than a foul odor, Victor Frankenstein’s medical vision is, at least in part, a medical reality. While tales of reanimation have fascinated the human race for millennia, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein has been one of the most enduring. With over 90 onstage and film dramatizations (Karbeiner, 2003) and such a presence in the public imagination that the mad doctor’s name has become synonymous with the monster, “Shelley could not have chosen a subject with more relevance to twentieth- and twenty-first-century readers” (Karbeiner, P. xviii). In addition to continued cultural significance and moral implications, the reanimation in Frankenstein was both influenced by and influential upon science and medical practice- past, present, and future. But a discussion of reanimation necessitates, first, a discussion of death. Death was once simply (or not-so-simply, considering the prevalent and justified terror of premature burial in the eighteenth- and nineteenth centuries [Roach, M., 2003]) considered the cessation of the vital function of the body; breathing, heartbeat, and circulation. However, with the advent of newer medical technology and organ transplantation in recent decades, a new definition was needed, and it emerged as brain death (Lock, M., 2002; DearDeath.com, 1998-2007). Brain death is defined as the permanent and irreversible cessation of brain function, while a person who has suffered a cardiac arrest is considered clinically dead. What normally comes to mind when a person is described as “dead” is someone who is both brain dead and clinically dead, but a clinically dead person can sometimes be revived, and a brain dead patient may be clinically alive, maintained on a ventilator and life support. The latter are sometimes referred to as “beating-heart cadavers” and, if family consents, harvested of their vital organs for use in transplants (Roach, M., Pp. 167-170). The difference between clinical death and brain death becomes very important in regard to the reality of human reanimation. Scientist Louis Pasteur’s experiments in the 1860’s showed that the spontaneous generation of life from non-living material does not occur. (Klyce, N.D.) The potential for the clinically dead patient’s revival, or reanimation, suggests that the patient’s tissues, while inert, are not actually dead yet- several minutes of hypoxia (or lack of oxygen) are needed to cause tissue death, including brain death (Smeltzer, S. & Bare, B., 2004, P. 90). So while the clinically dead patient is not initially brain dead, he/she quickly becomes so if no attempt is made to resuscitate. And while the brain dead patient may be clinically alive, once removed from life support, he/she will clinically die, because respiration will not continue without brain function. Brain death is irreversible, and after a matter of minutes so too is clinical death. According to Brunner and Suddarth’s Textbook of Medical Surgical Nursing, in cases where cardiac rhythms known as ventricular tachycardia or ventricular fibrillation indicate a need for defibrillation, the survival rate drops 10% for each minute defibrillation is delayed, with a near zero percentage of survival after ten minutes (Smeltzer, S. & Bare, B., P. 811). The amount of time passing between cardiac arrest and irreversible death will differ based on individual variances; hypothermia, for example, is noted to extend this time considerably by lowering the body’s metabolic demands (DearDeath.com, Para. 10). The reason it is so important to make this distinction between brain death and clinical death is that, in light of Pasteur’s experiments, when the human body is truly dead, it should be irreversible. A person who is revived with medical interventions was never actually dead, their body’s vital functions simply were not continuing on their own accord. According to these principles, once true death has set in, it should be impossible to cause the body to rise and live again as Viktor Frankenstein did. This is where the case of Richard Selzer becomes of interest. Selzer is a surgeon and a writer who recounts his own death and return to life in his autobiographical book Raising the Dead. He was pronounced dead after a cardiac arrest, during which efforts at resuscitation were unsuccessful. A nurse observes Selzer’s body for ten minutes after his death is pronounced, noting “the fixity that is incontrovertible” (Selzer, R., 2001, P. 44). Then, suddenly and unexpectedly, Selzer took a breath, followed by a return of electrical activity on his EKG monitor and regular breathing, a return from death seemingly no less miraculous than that of Lazarus’ resurrection by Christ. While the accuracy of the determination of his death was questioned, nurses who were present insist that his EKG was flat and they could not get a pulse or a blood pressure on him. Evidence, anecdotal and academically recorded, exists to support the idea that the human body can sometimes survive extended periods of time without exhibiting signs of vital functions, such as respiration and heartbeat, and that certain individuals may even exert conscious control over them. Perhaps the best known of these individuals is a 19th century British officer, simply referred to as Colonel Townsend, who willfully suppressed, and eventually ceased, his heartbeat and respiration, entering a state of “suspended animation” (Davis, 1988, P. 91) For thirty minutes, he remained this way, his body becoming so cold and stiff that the physicians who had witnessed the event actually declared him dead, at which point, Townsend slowly began to revive himself, having made a full recovery by the next day. Interestingly, the timing of Townsend’s reanimation implies that he may have been aware of his surroundings, awakening himself as a sort of retort to the physicians’ proclamation. Townsend’s descent into suspended animation was intentional; imagine, however, having such a state induced against one’s will and without the knowledge that this state differs from true death. Anthropologist Wade Davis did extensive research in Haiti in the 1980’s regarding the myth of the Haitian zombie, an unfortunate soul supposedly killed and resurrected via a combination of a folk preparation (or “zombie powder”) containing a powerful neurotoxin known as tetrodotoxin, found in certain species of puffer fish, and the magical powers of the bokor, or Vodoun sorcerer (Davis, Pp 1-11). The bokor then possesses the person’s soul and the zombie is enslaved by him.. The fear, then, in Haiti, is not of the monster, but of becoming the monster. While Davis stops short of verifying zombification as fact, he does cite several cases in western culture in which illness and/or pharmacologic agents rendered individuals unresponsive to the degree that they were declared dead, only to be found at a later time with active respirations and heart rate, often, to the horror of both the victim and the person preparing the body, on a table in a morgue or mortuary. Upon investigation of the ethnobiology of the zombie powder, Davis concludes that it may be possible for the powder to create a state of apparent death and that the victim, once recovered, may, in light of his/her cultural surroundings and myths, believe him/herself to be a genuine zombie. Even more terrifying, Davis also suggests that in this drug-induced sort of suspended-animation, the victims of zombification may actually be aware of the declaration of their deaths, their burials, and their reanimation. This cultural phenomenon is strikingly similar to Juliet’s experience in Romeo and Juliet. When Friar Laurence thus describes the potion that would allow her to escape the fate of an arranged marriage, “And in this borrow'd likeness of shrunk death/ Thou shalt continue two and forty hours,/ And then awake as from a pleasant sleep” (Shakespeare, Act 4, Scene 1), Juliet jumps at the chance. While the idea (a potion or concoction that temporarily renders ones vital signs undetectable or absent) is essentially the same, the cultural context (and expert storytelling) create the difference between living as an enslaved zombie and waking peacefully in order to be with one’s true love. Of course, in Romeo and Juliet, the end result of tampering with life and death is far from the traditional “happily ever after,” and the horror of waking up next to your beloved’s body may rival the horror of a bokor owning and commanding your soul. While some of the previous examples focus on the intentional production (and return from) death or a deathlike state, resuscitation from unintentional death is a much more specific science, with medical protocols based on an understanding of human pathophysiology and the application of modern technology. Most modern hospitals have a set of policies and procedures to be followed when attempting to resuscitate, or “code” a patient. Historically, before the age of the modern hospital, attempts to revive the dead were not limited by an ignorance of anatomy or lack of medical technology. The human race has a long and colorful history of attempts at resuscitation, some of which seem monstrous in their barbarism. In early times, bodies were warmed with various substances (including, most interestingly, burning excrement) as a means to counteract the cooling of the cadaver. Whipping was another technique, commonly attempted in order to stimulate the victim. During the Medieval period, the importance of respiration was addressed with the use of fireplace bellows for artificial ventilation, which was, surprisingly, successful enough to inspire the modern-day bag-mask form of ventilation, in which a mask fits over the victim’s mouth and nose and a rescue worker compresses a large handheld bag. The bellows did have a major flaw: overdistension of the lungs was often fatal in and of itself (UKDivers.net, 2006). (Imagine a balloon filled past capacity. Now imagine that the balloon is a vital organ in the human body.) In the 1700’s the idea of ventilation was evidently given a new spin, and fumigation became prevalent. Fumigation involved exhaling tobacco smoke into the victim’s rectum, and was evidently used with some success by Native Americans and colonists in North America at that time (UKDivers.net, 2006). Based on the lack of attention to vital organs and the unpleasant nature of the treatment, it seems reasonable to guess that the people who were successfully revived by fumigation may have been unconscious rather than clinically dead. The latter eighteenth century saw the origin of organizations in Europe focusing on resuscitation. Dutch guidelines at the time recommended warming the victim, placing the head lower than the feet and applying abdominal compressions (in cases of drowning), stimulation with strong odors or the previously mentioned fumigation technique, using the bellows for ventilation, and bloodletting (UKDivers.net, 2006). A member of the London Humane Society during this time period apparently also applied an electrical shock to the chest of a young child, inducing the return of pulse and respiration (Trauma.org, 2007), a forerunner to the modern technique of defibrillation. This reanimation via electricity may have been based on a scientific discovery that was a vital inspiration for Shelley’s Frankenstein. In 1786, Luigi Galvani discovered, much by accident, the effect of electricity on nerve tissue. Dissecting a frog during a lightning storm, he found that every time his scissors touched a nerve, the frog’s leg twitched (Vardalas, 2004). Thus the theory of Galvanism was born, a theory that Shelley admits discussing as a means to human reanimation with her husband Percy Shelley and their friend Lord Byron prior to penning her masterpiece. While Galvani’s experiments took the scientific community by storm, they seem tame in comparison to research spurred by the mass executions of the French Reign of Terror. Rumors circulated that the heads of guillotine victims retained consciousness and, in fact, writhed and ground their teeth, for a matter of minutes after beheading (Roach, 2003). These rumors inspired a variety of experiments. Several different types of animals, most often dogs, were decapitated and then given a new source of blood flow, whether by manual injection or by connection to a living dog. These dogs’ heads were found to exhibit basic reflexes when stimulated with electricity; this seems inconclusive, however, when considering that Galvani’s dead frogs exhibited reflexive movements during dissection. Later experiments with human heads after death by guillotine had similar results; when invigorated with blood (generally dog blood) the facial muscles contracted reflexively. One French physician named Beaurieux observed a beheading, and upon calling the condemned’s name just after the guillotine blade dropped, the decapitated head twice opened its eyes and met Beaurieux’s gaze: “I was not, then, dealing with the sort of vague dull look without any expression that can be observed any day in dying people to whom one speaks. I was dealing with undeniably living eyes which were looking at me” (Roach, 2003, P. 206). |
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moonbeam
since 2005-12-24
Posts 2356 |
Hush It varies between slightly boring and charmingly macabre. What is it? Scientific paper? Wide ranging quasi medical speculation? What is it intended to do? Who is it aimed at? Who is the presentation to? Is that all of it? No intro? No conclusion? It's grammatically sound. Well, if uninspiringly, written. On a quick skim I can find no serious errors of spelling, punctuation, tense etc etc. I have no idea about the references though, and indeed no idea what some of it is about! Is this for our Oxford Uni? England? Are you going to be a student there? Are you already? M |
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Brad Member Ascendant
since 1999-08-20
Posts 5705Jejudo, South Korea |
An exercise in New Historicism? Interesting and I like the conversational style. two quick points: 1. too many parenthetical remarks. Drop the parentheses and leave the information. 2. I think it gets bogged down at the death paragraph quote: Stuff like that, nine times out of ten, just isn't necessary.  If I can find the time, I'll add some more. Oh yeah, finish the damn thing! |
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Brad Member Ascendant
since 1999-08-20
Posts 5705Jejudo, South Korea |
Hush? |
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moonbeam
since 2005-12-24
Posts 2356 |
She's probably having internet connection problems Brad. They still work on steam power in Oxford  |
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hush Senior Member
since 2001-05-27
Posts 1653Ohio, USA |
Not in Oxford- going to Oxford. And not having internet problems- working too damn much. Thanks you guys, for the input, and I'm going to try to cut filler and add some more interesting bits and links to horror literature/pop culture. Ever read Mary Roach? (Stiff, Spook) I'm trying to channel her a little bit. |
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hush Senior Member
since 2001-05-27
Posts 1653Ohio, USA |
This is basically supposed to be an exploration of myths and stories about reanimation compared with real experiments and science. I thought I had an intro? But no, no conclusion yet. (Crunch time, less than 2 weeks left.) Seems like straight medical definitions bore people (I overlook that, medical stuff fascinates me. If you guys could only have seen the wound I dressed last night ) I'm also a bit addicted to the parentheses. But I am trying to weed out my wordiness and keep pulling the interesting threads in. A few tweaks, plus I got into some of the really freaky stuff after where I ended w/ the previous post. Sorry, no conclusion yet. Thx for taking the time to look at this.Ignore anything that looks out of context- it's likely underlines in Word and something I intend to look further at. Thanks. 43 And when he thus had spoken, he cried with a loud voice, Lazarus, come forth. 44 And he that was dead came forth, bound hand and foot with graveclothes: and his face was bound about with a napkin. Jesus saith unto them, Loose him, and let him go. -The Gospel According to John, from the King James Bible(1) The New Testament may seem like an unlikely source for horror stories, but when Jesus Christ resurrected Lazarus, he, like Victor Frankenstein, became a pioneer in the science of reanimation. Reanimation myths that began with the Bible have persevered as cultural legends, classic and modern literature, and in the reality of medical practice. Science and medicine provide many avenues for the reanimation of inanimate flesh, whether that flesh is an entire human body or a select set of tissues or organs. While electrocuting the best parts of several rotting corpses is unlikely to produce any reaction more stimulating than a foul odor, Frankenstein’s medical vision is, at least in part, a medical reality. Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein has been one of the most enduring stories about reanimation. With over 90 onstage and film dramatizations (Karbeiner, 2003) and such a presence in the public imagination that the doctor’s name has become synonymous with the monster, “Shelley could not have chosen a subject with more relevance to twentieth- and twenty-first-century readers” (Karbeiner, P. xviii). In addition to continued cultural significance and moral implications, the reanimation in Frankenstein was both influenced by and influential upon science and medical practice: past, present, and future. A discussion of reanimation necessitates, first, a discussion of death. Death was once simply (or not-so-simply, considering the prevalent and justified terror of premature burial in the eighteenth- and nineteenth centuries [Roach, M., 2003]) considered the cessation of the vital function of the body; breathing, heartbeat, and circulation. However, with the advent of newer medical technology and organ transplantation in recent decades, a new definition was needed, and the criteria for brain death emerged (Lock, M., 2002; DearDeath.com, 1998-2007). Brain death is defined as the permanent and irreversible cessation of brain function, while a person who has suffered a cardiac arrest is considered clinically dead. What normally comes to mind when a person is described as “dead” is someone who is both brain dead and clinically dead, but a clinically dead person can sometimes be revived, and a brain dead patient may be clinically alive, maintained on a ventilator and life support. The latter are sometimes referred to as “beating-heart cadavers” and, if family consents, they are harvested of their vital organs for use in transplants (Roach, M., Pp. 167-170). The difference between clinical death and brain death becomes very important in regard to the reality of human reanimation. Scientist Louis Pasteur’s experiments in the 1860’s showed that the spontaneous generation of life from non-living material does not occur. (Klyce, N.D.) The potential for the clinically dead patient’s revival, or reanimation, suggests that the patient’s tissues, while inert, are actually not yet dead; several minutes of hypoxia (or lack of oxygen) are needed to cause tissue death, including brain death (Smeltzer, S. & Bare, B., 2004, P. 90). So while the clinically dead patient is not initially brain dead, he/she quickly becomes so if no attempt is made to resuscitate. And while the brain dead patient may be clinically alive, once removed from life support, he/she will clinically die, because respiration will not continue without brain function. Brain death is irreversible, and after a matter of minutes so too is clinical death. The amount of time passing between cardiac arrest and irreversible death will differ based on individual variances; hypothermia, for example, is noted to extend this time considerably by lowering the body’s metabolic demands (DearDeath.com, Para. 10). he reason it is so important to make this distinction between brain death and clinical death is that, in light of Pasteur’s experiments, when the human body is truly dead, it should be irreversible. A person who is revived with medical interventions was never actually dead, their body’s vital functions simply were not continuing on their own accord. According to these principles, once true death has set in, it should be impossible to cause the body to rise and live again as Victor Frankenstein did. This is where the case of Richard Selzer becomes of interest. Selzer is a surgeon and a writer who recounts his own death and return to life in his autobiographical book Raising the Dead. He was pronounced dead after a cardiac arrest, during which efforts at resuscitation were unsuccessful. A nurse observes Selzer’s body for ten minutes after his death is pronounced, noting “the fixity that is incontrovertible” (Selzer, R., 2001, P. 44). Then, suddenly and unexpectedly, Selzer took a breath, followed by a return of electrical activity on his EKG monitor and regular breathing, a return from death seemingly no less miraculous than that of Lazarus’ resurrection by Christ. “It is true!” Selzer writes (P. 46). “After ten minutes of certified death, this man has… risen. Risen! Such a word does not belong in an intensive care unit.” While the accuracy of the determination of his death was questioned, nurses who were present insist that his EKG was flat and they could detect neither a pulse nor a blood pressure on him. Evidence, anecdotal and academically recorded, exists to support the idea that the human body can sometimes survive extended periods of time without exhibiting signs of vital functions, such as respiration and heartbeat, and that certain individuals may even exert conscious control over them. Perhaps the best known of these individuals is a 19th century British officer, simply referred to as Colonel Townsend, who willfully suppressed, and eventually ceased, his heartbeat and respiration, entering a state of “suspended animation” (Davis, 1988, P. 91) For thirty minutes, he remained this way, his body becoming so cold and stiff that the physicians who had witnessed the event actually declared him dead, at which point, Townsend slowly began to revive himself, having made a full recovery by the next day. Interestingly, the timing of Townsend’s reanimation implies that he may have been aware of his surroundings, awakening himself as a sort of retort to the physicians’ proclamation of his death. Townsend’s descent into suspended animation was intentional; imagine, however, having such a state induced against one’s will and without the knowledge that this state differs from true death. Anthropologist Wade Davis did extensive research in Haiti in the 1980’s regarding the myth of the Haitian zombie, an unfortunate soul supposedly killed and resurrected via a combination of a folk preparation (or “zombie powder”) containing a powerful neurotoxin known as tetrodotoxin, found in certain species of puffer fish, and the magical powers of the bokor, or Vodoun sorcerer (Davis, Pp 1-11).Zombification is usually performed as retribution to some crime or misdeed. An individual pays the bokor in much the same way a person might contract a hitman, and once the victim is transformed into a zombie, the bokor possesses the person’s soul and the zombie is enslaved by him. The fear, then, in Haiti, is not of the monster, but of becoming the monster. While Davis stops short of verifying zombification as fact, he does cite several cases in western culture in which illness and/or pharmacologic agents rendered individuals unresponsive to the degree that they were declared dead, only to be found at a later time with active respirations and heart rate, often, to the horror of both the victim and the person preparing the body, on a table in a morgue or mortuary. Upon investigation of the ethnobiology of the zombie powder, Davis concludes that it may be possible for the powder to create a state of apparent death and that the victim, once recovered, may, in light of his/her cultural surroundings and myths, believe him/herself to be a genuine zombie. Even more terrifying, Davis also suggests that in this drug-induced sort of suspended-animation, the victims of zombification may actually be aware of the declaration of their deaths, their burials, and their reanimation. This physiologic phenomenon is strikingly similar to Juliet’s experience in Romeo and Juliet. When Friar Laurence thus describes the potion that would allow her to escape the fate of an arranged marriage, “And in this borrow'd likeness of shrunk death/ Thou shalt continue two and forty hours,/ And then awake as from a pleasant sleep” (Shakespeare, Act 4, Scene 1), Juliet jumps at the chance. While the idea (a potion or concoction that temporarily renders ones vital signs undetectable or absent) is essentially the same, the cultural context (and expert storytelling) create the difference between living as an enslaved zombie and waking peacefully in order to be with one’s true love. Of course, in Romeo and Juliet, the end result of tampering with life and death is far from the traditional “happily ever after,” and the horror of waking up next to your beloved’s lifeless corpse may rival the horror of a bokor owning and commanding your soul. The science of reanimation has roots that begin much earlier than the establishment of Vodoun culture in colonial Haiti, earlier even than Shakespeare’s Renaissance works. While scientific knowledge of the working of the human body was limited, attempts to revive the dead were not constrained by an ignorance or lack of technology. The human race has a long and colorful history of attempts at resuscitation, some of which seem monstrous in their barbarism. In early times, bodies were warmed with various substances (including, most interestingly, burning excrement) as a means to counteract the cooling of the cadaver. Whipping was another technique, commonly attempted in order to stimulate the victim, though loved ones must have been horrified with the results. In the case of both warming and whipping the victim, success was only achieved if the person was simply in a deep sleep or unconscious (DWORKIN), and neither were particularly pleasant ways to be woken up. During the Medieval period, the importance of respiration was addressed with the use of fireplace bellows for artificial ventilation, which was, surprisingly, successful enough to inspire the modern-day bag-mask form of ventilation, in which a mask fits over the victim’s mouth and nose and a rescue worker compresses a large handheld bag. The bellows did have a major flaw: overdistension of the lungs was often fatal in and of itself (DWORKIN). Imagine what happens when a balloon is filled past capacity. Now imagine that the balloon is a vital organ in the human body. In the 1700’s the idea of ventilation was evidently given a new spin, and fumigation became prevalent. Fumigation involved exhaling tobacco smoke into the victim’s rectum, and was evidently used with some success by Native Americans and colonists in North America at that time (Dworkin). Based on the lack of attention to vital organs and the unpleasant nature of the treatment, it seems reasonable to guess that the people who were successfully revived by fumigation may have been unconscious rather than dead. The latter eighteenth century saw the origin of organizations in Europe focusing on resuscitation. Dutch guidelines at the time recommended warming the victim, placing the head lower than the feet and applying abdominal compressions (in cases of drowning), stimulation with strong odors or the previously mentioned fumigation technique, using the bellows for ventilation, and bloodletting (Dworkin). A member of the London Humane Society during this time period apparently also applied an electrical shock to the chest of a young child, inducing the return of pulse and respiration (Trauma.org, 2007), a forerunner to the modern technique of defibrillation. This reanimation via electricity may have been based on a scientific discovery that was a vital inspiration for Shelley’s Frankenstein. In 1786, Luigi Galvani discovered, much by accident, the effect of electricity on nerve tissue. Dissecting a frog during a lightning storm, he found that every time his scissors touched a nerve, the frog’s leg twitched (Vardalas, 2004). This inspired him to conduct a series of experiments on the effect of electricity on nerve tissue. Thus the theory of Galvanism was born, a theory that Shelley admits discussing as a means to human reanimation with her husband Percy Shelley and their friend Lord Byron prior to penning her masterpiece. While Galvani’s experiments took the scientific community by storm, they seem tame in comparison to research spurred by the mass executions of the French Reign of Terror. Rumors circulated that the heads of guillotine victims retained consciousness and, in fact, writhed and ground their teeth, for a matter of minutes after beheading (Roach, 2003). These rumors inspired a variety of experiments. Several different types of animals, most often dogs, were decapitated and then given a new source of blood flow, whether by manual injection or by connection to a living dog. These dogs’ heads were found to exhibit basic reflexes when stimulated with electricity; this seems inconclusive, however, when considering that Galvani’s dead frogs exhibited reflexive movements during dissection. Later experiments with human heads after death by guillotine had similar results; when invigorated with blood (generally dog blood) the facial muscles contracted reflexively. FREAKS One French physician named Beaurieux observed a beheading, and upon calling the condemned’s name just after the guillotine blade dropped, the decapitated head twice opened its eyes and met Beaurieux’s gaze: “I was not, then, dealing with the sort of vague dull look without any expression that can be observed any day in dying people to whom one speaks. I was dealing with undeniably living eyes which were looking at me” (Roach, 2003, P. 206). While the consciousness of the decapitated heads of the guillotine victims was debated, no scientist of the era succeeded in fully reanimating the human head, which is probably fortunate for the heads. Moving into the nineteenth century, attempts to reanimate the dead (and intact) human body included techniques to promote ventilation, and also early precursors to the modern chest compression, such as rolling the victim back and forth on a barrel or on the ground and laying the victim (chest down) over a horse’s back and trotting the horse. In the late 1800’s, French authorities recommended pulling the victims tongue rhythmically (Dworkin). What is interesting about this approach is that modern techniques to open the airway involve manipulations that keep the tongue clear from the oral airway opening (i.e., the throat). Around the turn of the century, chest compressions were first performed, and during the 1950s the American Navy officially adopted mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. In the 1960’s the American Heart Association endorsed CPR as we know it today (American Heart Association, 2007, History of CPR). While eighteenth- and nineteenth-century doctors and scientists were limited by current medical technology, in the early 1900s Charles Guthrie (who, with colleague Alexis Carrel, had perfected the art of anastomosis, or connecting two blood vessels together) managed to transplant a dog head onto the base of another dog’s neck, creating a living two-headed dog. The transplanted head exhibited, once again, only reflexes, and the two-headed dog was euthanized several hours after the surgery (Roach, 2003). Soviet scientist Vladimir Demikhov took the dog head transplant a step further in the 1950s, and actually transplanted puppy heads with several organs and front legs still attached to adult dog necks. The puppies’ cognitive functions seem to have been preserved, as they behaved in a normal puppylike fashion: “The donor’s head bit the recipient behind the ear so that the latter yelped and shook its head” (Roach, 2003, P. 208). The transplanted puppies also attempted to free themselves from their moorings on the adult dog necks, but to no avail; the puppies were doomed to short, immobile lives. The most successful of these transplanted puppy-dog creations lived 29 days before tissue rejection set in. Another Soviet, Dr. S.S. Bryukhonenko, also made some landmark discoveries regarding dog reanimation around the same time Demikhov was conducting his experiments. The short film Experiments in the Revival of Organisms (Yashin, 1940) chronicles Bryukhonenko’s canine experiments. The film shows a heart and lung functioning independently outside the dog’s body, both infused with blood from a device called the “autoejector” (an early precursor to the current cardiopulmonary bypass machine, also known as the heart-lung machine). The autoejector also manages to instill life into a decapitated dog head, and the head is noted to make several different types of movements, including licking its nose and lips. Finally, the autoejector serves to reanimate an entire organism. A dog is drained of blood until the heartbeat and respiration stop. The dog’s blood is placed in the autoejector, oxygenated, and pumped back into the dog after ten minutes of death. The dog’s vital functions and spontaneous movement eventually resume, and the film concludes with several happily gamboling dogs, all of which had been killed and reanimated in this way. In the 1960s, Dr. Robert White also made progress in the practice of bizarre transplant surgeries; he would remove the brain of a living animal and, after cooling the organ to prevent hypoxia and cell death, he connected the still-living brain to another animal’s blood supply. The brain was then implanted into the neck or abdominal cavity of its host, which acted as a sensory-deprivation chamber to the mostly normal brain. Essentially, memories and the ability to reason and imagine would remain intact, but without any sensory input, the consciousness would exist in a void, without sight, sound, tough, taste, or smell. (white quote from Stiff) During the next decade, White performed another medical feat: the transplantation of a rhesus monkey’s head onto the body of another decapitated rhesus monkey. The head transplant, or “whole-body transplant,” as White thinks of it (cite), allows the head to continue functioning, although the severed spinal cord renders the person a quadriplegic. White sees this as beneficial to patients who are already quadriplegic with failing bodies. Skeptics, however, claim that it is medically useless and unethical, and that it complicates the issue of identity. “The issue of who someone who had received a head transplant would "be" is extremely complicated.” (bbc cite) Essentially, while your brain would retain your memories and identity, the rest of your body would assume someone else’s medical history, identifying marks, and fingerprints. It would, however, be a step up from the brain-only transplant, allowing the head to communicate with the outside world. These experimental procedures are objectionable to many for obvious reasons. They are examples of humanity playing God, numerous Dr. Frankensteins constructing monstrous amalgams of animals and human bodies. One may wonder, in disgust and disbelief, how a scientist or doctor can even imagine such horrors, let alone execute them. (find Frankenstein quote). However, despite the grotesque creations of these men, their experiments have added valuable contributions to the medical field particularly in terms of resuscitation and organ transplantation. Without Carrel’s and Guthrie’s innovation of anastamosis, a great many surgical procedures (including organ transplants) would be impossible. Demikhov’s research, while profoundly disturbing, demonstrated that multiple-organ transplants were feasible. |
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serenity blaze Member Empyrean
since 2000-02-02
Posts 27738 |
First I want to congratulate you on your restraint for overcoming the temptation to cite the abundant folklore and literal references (I mean, The Monkey's Paw and Stephen King's Pet Cemetary would have gotten me into a long-winded and unnecessary diversion.) The Biblical quote though, is an interesting enough "buzz" to capture the reader--and it's probably just a diversionary thought that would be peculiar to only myself that I always considered the Lazarus story more as proof of ritual of mystery cults than "re-animation." (I'm hooked on folklore, though, and that's not your goal here.) But in case you are interested: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isis scroll down to "Mother of Horus" and you will find a re-animation legend that pre-dates Christianity: "However, it had to be explained how Osiris, who as god of the dead, was dead, could be considered a father to Horus, who was not considered dead. This led to the evolution of the idea that Osiris needed to be resurrected, and so to the Legend of Osiris and Isis, of which Plutarch's De Iside et Osiride contains the most extensive account known today, a myth so significant that it is the most famous of all Egyptian myths." But like Brad, I think you do a pretty good job of keeping the tone conversational. I am hooked on parenthetical expression as well and oh-I-do-love-the dash--but let's not forget to use the semi-colon in complex sentences--especially those that contain lists. I'm having some internet trouble tonight too, so I saved the page in case I get booted offline again, but trust I'll give it a tighter read--prolly in the morning with my coffee though. It's a great topic, too. When you are done, remind me to ask you what you think about the practice of women freezing umbilical cords--I believe there is one recorded case of a child saving his own life???? (But that's distracting you and not to the point.) But anyhow, in another life, when I did this type of writing, I relied heavily on outline and template. (I'm scattered, obviously, so nod, outlines, topic sentences, etc. are mandatory for me.) But anyhow, if you can make your medical terminology acessible to the layperson, while still maintaining the necessary jargon and references to your profs? I think you've got a home-run here. (and what, no "puffer fish"? *laughing*) I tease. Hugs, you! |
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serenity blaze Member Empyrean
since 2000-02-02
Posts 27738 |
coffee.... I smell kidney stones!  But anyhow, I promised I'd look at this more closely, so here I am. (Don't get ticked at me either, I realize you already have a headache.) But here goes: Okay. I'm looking at it...and I think I'd start with death. It's all uphill from there. (Or one can HOPE) You can actually point that out and I won't mind at all. There's a lot of good quotes on Death, but I think, and now, mind you, I'm treating this as if I were writing it m'self--but I'd actually introduce each juncture with deathbed quotes. (I promise you there is one for every thought there.) But that would be done delicately too. Pick the best, and open with that---and then? Nod, give a congenial, emotionally distanced, medical definition of death, and the conflicting findings of brain death. (That's just flipping some paragraphs around and tweaking, actually.) This ought to be rather short--and THEN--introduce re-animation. There's no need to go giving a backstory if you don't have to, and you don't have to--but it's more interesting if you don't just cite the one example--I wouldn't deliberately be offensive by picking on the Scriptural stuff--there's plenty of stuff to go around. Intersperse the folklore with factual cases--you'll keep your reader interested--I mean, c'mon, from um...Dracula (which introduces re-animation in the immortality theme) to Bride of Re-Animator, and all the other contexts you mentioned and can be mentioned, you can pick and choose. I think what I would do is keep my medical schemata in a natural order according to the outline. (If you were writing of a natural order of conception to death, I'd keep to that--but interestingly enough, you are not, you are reversing that, so I'd follow that as strict as science) You can reference your material in a biblio--they love bibliographies anyhow--and this sentence alone, qualifies: "The difference between clinical death and brain death becomes very important in regard to the reality of human reanimation." That's a summation in the midst of your paper! (My proof is in the following paragraphs---the stuff about Dr. Selzer is great and necessary, but you resort to a comparison/contrast between fiction and fact. (They really hate when ya do that AFTER the summation.) And then you POINT THAT OUT: "Evidence, anecdotal and academically recorded," Just lose the "anecdotal and academically recorded"--you just did report it--no need to point out your own redundancy--no offense, I'm the girl who keeps opening her opinions with "And but," so keep in mind, I am not the "chief" here. but I'd lose that. I think this is good enough : "Evidence exists to support the idea that the human body can sometimes survive for extended periods of time..." Nod--use declarative sentences! Follow this lead and introduce that Townsend story more willfully, especially if you have the facts to back it up. I like how your end sentences per paragraph don't necessarily tie up the paragraph, (kind of juvenile to my taste) but introduce the next idea... "The human race has a long and colorful history of attempts at resuscitation, some of which seem monstrous in their barbarism." Watch your commas. You don't need one for every prepositional sentence. There is nothing wrong with saying: In early times no comma bodies were warmed with various substances--(and I'd use the dash here) "In early times bodies were warmed with various substances--including burning excrement--as a means..." and so forth. (You don't really need to point out what you think is most interesting--that's the point of your paper.) Use your punctuation for clarity. For example, there's no need for a comma at all in the Whipping sentence. (I oughtta know--  ) But little things like that can make a difference in the flow--you don't want clunky sentences in this--so use 'em for clarity only.I'm pretty sure there are better ways to report your sources than two parenthetical expressions in a row: UKDivers.net, 2006). (Imagine a balloon filled past capacity. Now imagine that the balloon is a vital organ in the human body.) And I'm sure you are ready to kill me by now--and I doubt I have hopes of re-animation. But use that last paragraph wisely to re-iterate your hypothesis, sum it up briefly, and make a clear, concise point to back up that up. It's the last thing they will read, so make it count. I hope I wasn't too much of a bore or a snoot. And just know I typed this all with love.  |
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