19th Century Literature and Medicine - Essay Example

Now and Then: A case study of 19th century literature and medicine In Hawthorne’s The Birthmark, Georgianas death by her philosophic husband’s effortto cure her off her birth mark is treated in a manner which echoes with the Renaissance idea of the essential conflict between man and nature. Hawthorne presents the invincibility of the birth mark and gives it a tone of finality which was synonymous to fatalism of pre-modern medical sciences. Interestingly, Aylmer is portrayed as some sort of a sorcerer who tries to know and do things which are not only beyond him, but also which are against the law of nature. The text echoes with Marlovian traits of Dr Faustus and beneath the futile efforts of Aylmer, Hawthorne tries to imply the Faustian realization that: Yet thou art Faustas and a man! (Marlowe 21) This inability of man to transcend his immediate physical condition was partly due to ignorance and partly due to the stringent social norms. The world which Hawthorne portrays, the likes of scientific minded men were either looked upon in awe or given an evil nomenclature. The reason was simply because of the lack of scientific awareness of the ages. Even if in today’s world scientists remain ambiguous regarding the grouping together of blood vessels in pre-natal babies, something which is generally held as the reason for the occurrence of birthmarks in children, we can guess what the situation was in older times when the birthmark was seen more of a divine action inexplicable to mere mortal beings. The idea is reiterated in the story in the episode where Georgina feels that she is dying due to the diminishing of her good luck charm. The birthmark is thus given a moral implication, a sort of a divine barrier which man should best leave alone. The scenario is definitely different in today’s world. The advent of laser surgery has not only made it possible to remove birthmarks, but also do it at a reasonably safer mode. Prior to the development of laser treatment, red birthmarks could not be treated and were a major cosmetic defect for people born with these obvious birthmarks. However, in today’s medical world, greatly improved laser technology has revolutionized the treatment of these birthmarks. Photo-derm is one of the most successful treatments for birthmarks, with a post operative healing time of five to seven days. Compared to the older laser technologies, fewer treatments are now needed. The number of treatments depends on the darkness of the birthmark with darker lesions requiring more treatments. Whereas, the first two to three treatments will produce the most dramatic improvements, most people require at least five treatments for optimal results. Treatments followed by four to eight weeks of rest in between allow the patient to remove the maximum amount of pigment cells. Patients can notice a lightening of the lesion after each treatment as the body disposes of the pigment cells. Interestingly, most birthmarks lighten by at least seventy five percent; where as some may lighten by even up to ninety five percent. Georgina’s death, as a result of her husband’s ‘will for perfection’ could not only have been avoided today, but she could have been cured of her birthmark. The matter in The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins is much complicated. Barbara A. Suess sees the symbols as an agent to overcome the lack of Lacanian “Imaginary” language beyond the “Symbolic Order” or what cannot be symbolized. Thus every fragment of her unique sense of the self is a mosaic of reactions to the “Wallpaper” and within the “dead paper” of her journal where she uses masculine utterances to give vent to her silenced self. Hence she can only grapple at visual details that correspond to the vague images of her mind that has only found a corresponding “objective correlative” in the wallpaper. Suess calls this her attempt to “create a new order” (Suess, 84). The wallpaper is the canvas where she objectifies herself. The “patterns” of her condition when projected subjectively with expressionistic detail over the wallpaper only appear “gruesome” to her. Slowly one can observe a change in her as she tires herself out and goes out of her way to “think” out a pattern and etch out a space of her own. Suddenly she sees a crack within the interminable and exhaustive “patterns” as they appear as “bars”. And beyond that she finds herself buried underneath that charade of “self-control” and “will”. Another startling effect is produced by the symbol of daylight and moonlight. It can have indefinite meanings to a post-Freudian reader, but if taken in the context of the narrative pattern itself, the light and darkness seem to directly refer to her new sense of alienation. She sees herself as a social misfit (like all the other creeping women she sees) only because she understands the futility of this silence and restive calm. It is only a decorated surface that mocks her with “bulbous eyes” and lolling heads. She can tolerate or understand John’s laughter but not the laughter of those eyes, because she cannot face her own sham. Her sense of self is almost like that ‘paper’, which under the ownership of the master and like a palimpsest has lost it’s own sense of identity and is of a cowardly shade of yellow that follows her everywhere, the smell of which make her constantly aware of her own imprisonment. She tries to free the wallpaper of all its designs and loose all the tiring “daylight” calm and rest off her. The narrator expresses her desire to be seized by the ‘moonlight’ madness that starts to attack her sporadically. She escapes the humiliating treatment offered to her mind by humiliating her body. She raises herself to the level of physically “creeping” humiliation and “gnawing” beyond all fixed “duties” and free her mind of any further humiliation. Her body by its symbolic detachment from the mentored and monitored habits becomes the only way of writing her own experiences in her own terms and not become tired of maintaining any monstrous “deceit”. Again the bestial action of the narrator is juxtaposed to the manicured gardens of the ‘colonial’ estate. This “hereditary estate may be read meta-fictionally as the Gothic tradition” (Davison, 49), with adequate settings to fit the ghastly mood of the place.1 Again the symbolisms also help one to understand the unreliability that the reader must exercise in assimilating the narration of the author. The symbols remain the same all through the narrative. First the room is described to be a nursery. Again the narrator surmises that it may have been a playroom and a gymnasium after that, since the “windows are barred for little children, and there are rings and things in the walls”. One may ask what these things might be. It may be Chains or locks that she describes as “things”. Again she says that “It is stripped off--the paper--in great patches all around the head of my bed, about as far as I can reach, and in a great place on the other side of the room low down…” This is uttered at the very beginning of the narrative. But when one reaches the end of the climax where the narrator says that “Then I peeled off all the paper I could reach standing on the floor. It sticks horribly…” one thinks whether she blames all her own actions on the “children”, (she too is called a little girl by John) since small boys would not be able to tear off papers that come “about as far as [she] can reach”. Again she says that “How those children did tear about here! This bedstead is fairly gnawed!” But later as the narrator in an attempt to “astonish” John tries to tear off papers from behind the bed stand and is unable to do so she says “I tried to lift and push it until I was lame, and then I got so angry I bit off a little piece at one corner…” When she says that the Yellow paper “sticks” to her, like the yellow “metaphorical” odor of it, one can go back to the middle section of the narrative where she talks about Jennie complaining that “she had found yellow smooches on all my clothes and Johns…” Interestingly the children she is referring to may be the child that John makes of her by calling her in such dehumanized and symbolic names as “little goose”. He rebukes her and sternly silences her from exchanging her opinions and the suffering that she undergoes. Thus silence becomes the biggest motif in the whole narrative. Wherever she quotes John, almost always there is an awareness of the silencing agent that tries to adjust her aberrations into the male signifying agents but only increase her paranoia. Thus John is the thousand eyes that chain her to the repressive socializing agents by denying her “imagination”, thought and “ideas”, which makes this narrative a kind of an intellectual claim of a woman who has no language to revolt against the claustrophobia of this normalizing intrusion. The term nervous depression refuses to impress the narrator because it relies on the objective aspects of her illness and the subjective “mind” of the woman (and her structure or “work”) becomes a taboo. Her mind and the awareness of it threaten John’s authoritative standing which severely destroys any healthy medium of communication between them. She is left bereft of any unique expression that does not emerge out of those disgusting “patterns” and hence she exercises thought through action. And she has no thoughts of her own and is only able to quote John and his logical reasons. In the space of her paper she writes about her genuine need to “think” which lacks all the guidelines and inspiration from John. Most of the time the narrator talks about her mind in terms of the wallpaper. And her mind is revolting to her since she is best confined and captured there. She uses the term “fungus” with the patterns that seem to be threatening her because it is never static… there are always new ways of getting bound by them. In her desire to be haunted in the house by ghosts, her own self haunts her. She describes the odor of the wallpaper in an almost magical realist metaphor. The trauma of her consciousness reaches her everywhere as she says “I thought seriously of burning the house--to reach the smell.” Here she is facing her fears but in a self-destructive way, because there is no other alternative present to her. There is no transcendence from her “phallogocentric” bars. She contemplates suicide when she understands that no one can climb out of the pattern because it “strangles”, by throwing herself out of the window. But then again she does not want her death to be misconstrued like all her actions and says that if she is alive then she has to “I shall have to get back behind the pattern when it comes night, and that is hard! It is so pleasant to be out in this great room and creep around as I please!” As she grows fonder of her freed self she forgets to identify John and he becomes a “young man” to her. Considering the condition of many third world countries, we cannot say with authority that the condition of sex education is much better today than it was earlier. However, if there is any marked difference which has been observed, it is in the mind sets of the people. Nowadays, sex is no longer thought to be a taboo-ed subject and many organizations, both governmental and non-governmental NGO’s, are trying to educate the masses regarding sex. However, the inertia that a culture shows in holding onto its fads and superstitions makes it difficult for these organizations to work. This is not to say that the sex education and awareness amongst people have remained status quo. The condition has certainly brightened in many first world countries where a complimentary program of creating awareness and demolishing myths about taboo-ed subjects, be it in dealing with mentally challenged people or imparting sex education, is done through the medium of inter active forums. Again, with the aid of modern anesthetics, the process of operation and treating pain has been minimized to a large extent. The severe headaches and nausea which the erstwhile patients used to face on being optimized has been successfully been done away with by the use of modern anesthetics. Apart from the use of anesthesia in the operation room, organizations like the Food and Drug Administration works closely with medical professionals and medical device manufacturers to reduce the risk involved in anesthesia. FDAs Center for Devices and Radiological Health regulates the manufacturers of anesthesia machines, ventilators, breathing systems, and other machines used in anesthesiology. FDAs Center for Drug Evaluation and Research reviews and approves drugs as safe and effective. FDA also has an important role in promoting the safe use of medical devices through education. FDA produces educational documents and audiovisual materials and conducts conferences and workshops, addressing the needs of health professionals, consumers, patients and manufacturers. As part of this process, FDA has been working with health professionals and device manufacturers to solve problems involving unsafe or ineffective use of anesthesia equipment. Thus, we find that the levels of education in dealing with various medical problems have diversified. The problem that we find in the three given texts is an amalgamation of personal ignorance and a lack of scientific approach to solve the issues. The trio of tragedies which we find emanate from the rigidities of the apparatuses of the social structure of the times. In today’s world, with the aid of pro-active medical persons and various journals such as The Canadian Medical Association Journal, The Medical Journal of Australia or the British Medical Journal, the discourse of medical knowledge has disseminated. The problems we find in the texts are not only curable, but preventable. Francis Jammes’ Clar d’Ellébeuse not only recounts the tragedy of a girl whose death is caused by an over dose of laudanum, but also reveals the limited pharmacopoeia of the day as a result of which opium derivatives were among the most efficacious of available treatments, and were widely prescribed for ailments from colds to meningitis to cardiac diseases, in both adults and children. Laudanum, if taken in large dose, causes nervous irritability leading to death. Today the only medically-approved uses for laudanum are for treating diarrhoea and pain. Moreover, the usual adult dosage of laudanum for the treatment of diarrhea is 0.6 mL (equivalent to 6 mg of morphine) four times a day. Thus, we can safely incur that the issues dealt with in the three works, be it the question of normal sanity in Charlotte Perkins The Yellow Wallpaper, or the lack of proper counselling which goads the protagonist of Jammes’s novella to propel towards death, is definitely preventable in today’s age. If the characters are victims of social stigma and alienation, the advent of medical sciences has surely been able to communicate their plight and thereby solve their problems to a large extent. Communication is a continuous process, a medium which always has loops for perfection. Even when we deal with the vista of medicine and its uses on the human bodies, the perfect communication, so to say, is perhaps, yet to be attained. However, the pain killers that we use today are not merely analgesics but also have an element of anti-allergicity to them. The morphines and the opioids that are used cater to the trope of the safety and are clinically tested in laboratories before being used. The use of combitional drugs, such as the paracetamol and codeine preparations found in many non-prescription pain relievers, has also added a new vista to modern treatment. There are also combinations of vasoconstrictor drugs such as pseudoephedrine for sinus-related preparations, or with antihistamine drugs for allergy sufferers. Even if knowledge of medical drug increases, what is to be remembered is the fact that in the medical world, what is true at one moment becomes anathema the next. The trio of tragedies illustrate paradoxically that though their treatment was possible today, especially if done with the beneficial synergistic effects of drugs, nothing could be done in the scope of their actual happening. It is only when mankind is able to symmetrize its developments to the ratio of vulnerabilities it faces, that can we safely say rue that “this could have been done now” or “this was curable”. The fact remains that people still have wrong notions regarding medical problems and a lot of medical issues are still brushed up beneath the carpet in the name of so called social etiquette or societal rules. The battle between social discourse and scientific knowledge has been a primordial one. And it is doubtful whether the hiatus can ever be bridged. Works Cited Davison, Carol Margaret. Haunted House/Haunted Heroine: Female Gothic Closets in "The Yellow Wallpaper". Womens Studies, Jan/Feb2004, Vol. 33 Issue 1, p47-75, 29p; DOI: 10.1080/00197870190267197; (AN 11794606) Delashmit, M., and C. Longcope. “Gilman’s’ The Yellow Wallpaper.’” Explicator 50.1 (1991): 32-34. Academic Search Premier EBSCO.  San Jacinto Coll. Lib., TX. 15 July 2006. . Felton, Sharon. “Reviews.” Studies in Short Fiction 32.2 (1995): 273-275. Academic Search Premier EBSCO.  San Jacinto Coll. Lib., TX. 14 July 2006. . Gilman, Charlotte Perkins. “THE YELLOW WALLPAPER” Literary Cavalcade, 00244511, May2001, Vol. 53, Issue 8, Database: Academic Search Premier Hochman, Barbara. “The Reading Habit and The Yellow Wallpaper’.”  American Literature, Mar2002, Vol. 74 Issue 1, p89, 22p; (AN 6660179) Notes:  This title is held by San Jacinto College Libraries Schumaker, Conrad . "Too Terribly Good to Be Printed": Charlotte Gilmans "The Yellow Wallpaper" By:. American Literature, Dec85, Vol. 57 Issue 4, p588, 12p; (AN 10069622) Notes:  This title is held by San Jacinto College Libraries Read More