Doctors are infamous for their unreadable writing; Richard Selzer is not one of those doctors. A talented surgeon, Selzer has garnered critical acclaim for his captivating operating room tales, and rightfully so. A perfect exhibition of this is The Knife, a detailed illustration of a surgery. What may seem like an uninteresting event is made mesmerizing by Selzer’s magnificent account of the human body and the meticulousness that goes into repairing it. The rhetorical appeals, tone, and figurative language that Selzer uses throughout The Knife provide the reader with a vivid description of the sacred process of surgery.
Many bodies are donated to science but they are not all treated well. David Wagoner Professor of anatomy at Indiana University wanted the bodies to be treated fairly. The meaning of the David Wagoner poem Their Bodies is that the students of Indiana University should be gentle with the bodies. In the first stanza of the poem it describes how his parents were good people and then the second stanza says that the students should treat them just how they would have treated them. The second stanza says, “You should treat them One last time as they would have treated you” (Wagoner 2.2-3).
She is trying to express that this method is a startling process and is now believed to be secretive such that only the experts should be involved. She refers in the text that people don’t have the abdominal strength to observe the whole process since it is terrifying. The author defines the embalmed body as peaceful after enduring the entire procedure. The tone in the story is informative in the fact that an individual can know how a body is preserved. The author discusses the benefits that the process has on the corpse.
Andrew Davidson uses several rhetorical strategies throughout “Following my accident...,” an excerpt from The Gargoyle. These add great amounts of emotional depth, AND SOMETHING ELSE. In the opening paragraph, Davidson describes the doctor’s incisions to release a “secret inner being”(line 4), a “thing of engorged flesh”(6). This introduces a divide between the narrator, and his body; establishing it as it’s own entity.
Saba Mirfatahi Professor Bourget English 1130 October 6th 2015 Mitford: Analysis of “Behind the Formaldehyde Curtain” Jessica Mitford’s, “Behind the Formaldehyde Curtain,” is an assertive account of the true realisms involving embalming. Jessica Mitford takes a bold stand against the funeral industry and states that people are “blissfully ignorant” (Mitford 310) on preserving people. Ultimately, Jessica Mitford’s argumentative essay is successful due to her very somber but informative and organized tone, her style using dark vivid imagery and quotations make her claims credible. One of the way’s in which Mitford’s argument is effective is through the use of her sarcastic tone. There are many words to describe Mitford’s tone; cocky, blunt,
Thomas Henry Huxley, an English biologist who was known for his Darwin’s Bulldog theory based on Charles Darwin’s evolution theory, once said, “ It is because the body is a machine that education is possible. Education is the formation of habits, a super-inducing of an artificial organization upon the natural organization of the body.” Huxley explains that because of our body, and how it works, humans have been able to find new studies. Huxley’s ideas are similarly seen in the book Stiff, by Mary Roach, which shows the readers that donating one's body involves more than just surgeons removing organs and throwing away a body. Roach shows that donating a body helps enhance further education, newer technology, and greater discoveries.
Intro: Nathaniel Hawthorne’s fictional short story “The Birthmark” and The Twilight Zone’s darkly romantic episode “Eye of the Beholder” both use gothic elements and delve into the realm of science to explore concepts of beauty and perfection. Through their contrasting characterizations of the scientist and employments of irony and allusions, each work comes to its own conclusions about how to define and treat beauty. Body #1: The Birthmark From the very first paragraph, Hawthorne’s story revolves around Aylmer, a scientist who supposedly gives up his career to marry the beautiful woman of his dreams, Georgiana.
The author, Alice Dreger, wants to know why we let our anatomy decide how our future is going to be. In the future, as science continues to become better, are we still going to continue to look at anatomy? Would we ever confess that a democracy that was built on anatomy might be collapsing? Alice Dreger argues that individuals who have bodies that challenge norms such as conjoined twins and those who have atypical sex threaten the social categories we have developed in our society. We have two categories: male and female.
In “The Funeral,” author Henry James evinces the narrator’s inflated sense of self through a lampoon of the lower class—primarily via tones of irreverent degradation and supercilious condescension. Amidst the impoverished masses, the speaker finds himself intrigued by their dejected existence and paltry attempt to mourn the death of Mr. George Odger, a humble shoemaker. [add another sentence] Riddled with insouciance, haughtiness, and patronization, the author’s diction divulges the pompous outlook of the narrator. For instance, the onlooker continually mocks the “spectacle” of the funeral that he describes as one he “[would] have been sorry to miss.”
In her 1967 essay Behind The Formaldehyde Curtain, Jessica Mitford utilizes the rhetorical devices of diction and verbal irony to illustrate the unthinkable, little-known truth behind the North American funeral industry and its manipulation of death. Through her choice of diction used when describing the process of an embalmment, Mitford shows us the horrifying and questionable truth behind it, prompting us to question the American funeral industry's ethicality. In the 9th paragraph, Mitford states during an embalmment, the blood of the deceased person "is drained out through the veins”. The word “drained” could’ve easily been replaced with “removed” or “extracted”, both of them being more suitable and correct terms, but the author chose it because it has a negative
This paper will focus on the monstrous and monstrous bodies in the Testaments. To properly discuss the monstrous in the Testaments we will shortly look at some themes from so-called monster theory. The term “monster” has, in contemporary times, come to mean anything unnatural or excessively large. Original monsters, however, were of a different sort. Monsters were ill-constructed of mismatching parts, grotesque in their overabundance of certain organs or qualities.
One of his most controversial paintings, the Gross Clinic (1875) aroused dispute and critique because of its explicit depiction of surgery. The painting shows Dr. Samuel Gross performing surgery, as the patient's mother covered her eyes in horror. Eakins captures the dark and sinister aspects of the clinic, using light effects to stress terrifying details and blood. The way the painting was crafted, it can almost be said that Eakins was “painting with light”. We can clearly see the influence of Rembrandt and his work Anatomy lesson of Dr.Nicolaes Tulp.
5.) Taboo and Rites of Initiation in The Body The Body provides a great variety of taboos of different degrees, most of which have been addressed before: bodily functions, violence, sexuality, mental illness, death. Some of them only play a minor role in the story, such as the portrayal of obesity or vomition in Gordie 's story The Revenge of Lard Ass Hogan. Others, such as violence and death, are recurrent themes throughout the whole story.
The major social values in Anglo-Saxon civilization such as glory, formidable social status, wealth, fame, and physical strength/beauty, appear in Beowulf as a driving reason to journey and explore. These social values remain present and valued in the modern world today. It is important to note that the human body has long been admired for its appearance, valued for its strength, and used as a tool to form an initial opinion of the person in question. For example, in Thomas Foster’s How to Read Literature Like a Professor: A Lively and Entertaining Guide to Reading in Between the Lines, he talks about, in chapter twenty one, the significance of physical traits. More specifically deformities.
These people are Mercer who applies the concept of the “grotesque body”, Bick the “abject body” and Peffer the “tortured body”. Therefore, this essay explains how these concepts differ and how these difference impacts on the
