Thursday, December 28, 2006

Military doctors: then and now

Today on C-SPAN an army doctor was describing his experience at army hospitals in Iraq. His descriptions of the pain and suffering and the severity of wounds of the American troops and Iraqi civilians were gruesome indeed; his describing how soldiers cope with life after losing two or three limbs from their battle wounds was extremely touching. His commentary brought two things to my mind:

My antipathy toward George Bush for having brought on this ill-conceived, ill-managed war, thus causing these horrible stories.

Mt great grandfather’s experiences as a military doctor during the Mexican War and the Civil War. (I included these experiences in a posting entitled Surfing American history through Great Grandpa on 2/23/06.)

During the Mexican War he was a physician in the U.S. Navy. In a letter to his fiancée (later my great grandmother), dated October 1, 1846, written on board the Navy frigate Potomac en route to Vera Cruz, and posted at Pensacola, he wrote:

Our sick list has greatly diminished. We are getting rid of the scurvy very fast. A few weeks more will free us entirely of it...In addition to an extraordinary heavy sick list on board ship, we have 40 odd cases of (yellow) fever to attend to in the Navy Yard.

He added in that letter that he, too, had been sick with a fever.

Later, after North Carolina seceded from the Union, he joined the Confederate army as a physician. He wrote several letters to his family back home from the field of battle near Richmond. In one, dated June 6, 1864, he wrote:

I have been worked down and there is no end of it–I have never seen so many wounded men together as I have seen in the Yankee Hospital–800 or more all desperately wounded. My hands have been in dreadful condition from wounds received in operating on them.

I can only guess what he meant by the “Yankee Hospital”—possibly he was treating captured Union troops who had been wounded in battle.

In another letter, dated August 17, 1864, he wrote:

The Yanks are very near here, have been fighting for two days–shot and shell flying all in sight of my hospital. It is possible I shall have to move out of the building tomorrow.

After hearing the military doctor describe the terrible ordeal of treating badly wounded soldiers in Iraq--terrible even with all the techniques of modern medicine—I think how much worse it must have been for my great grandfather, 142 years ago, who had only the techniques of that day to work with.

Saturday, December 23, 2006

The randomness of life

Being on a current existentialism reading jag, I am reminded of the randomness of life.

When I came to Baltimore to live in 1955 I knew absolutely no one here; however, I began attending services at its historic First Unitarian Church (at which William Ellery Channing delivered his famous sermon defining Unitarianism in 1819), where I made some acquaintances. One of these invited me to attend a Great Books summer reading group—this group followed the national Great Books reading program during most of the year but went for more light stuff during the summer.

Being a young bachelor at the time, at the first meeting of this group that I attended I naturally took note of some of the young women who were present. Before the next meeting, I thought of two of these that I would like to get to know. For whatever reason that I can’t now recall, I decided that, of the two, Anne would be the one that I would approach—my pitch would be (please pardon the pun) an invitation to go to a Baltimore Orioles baseball game for which I already had two tickets.

So, at an informal get-together at the home of one of the members of the reading group following the next meeting, I planned to ask Anne for a date to go to the ball game; however, after we all had picked up some snack food and sodas and taken seats in the living room, there were others sitting on either side of Anne. But there was a seat available on one side of Sally, the other young woman of the two whom I had taken note of. The conversation with her went thus:

I: Do you like baseball?

Sally: I hate it.

I: I have two tickets to an Orioles game on (whatever date). Would you like to go?

Sally: I’d love to.

A few days later—a week or so before the game—thinking that it would be a good idea for Sally and me to get together to better know each other, I phoned her at the law office where she worked as a legal assistant and made a date. The next day we went for drinks to Marty’s Park Plaza, a popular spot at Baltimore’s lovely Mount Vernon Place. (Marty's is one of the few such places in Baltimore that still exists.)

Following that first date at Marty’s and the baseball game, one thing led to another and, two years later, we were married at the First Unitarian Church. (Some years later, our two children were dedicated there.)

And, as such stories end, “They lived happily ever after”—well, sort of. Fast-forward 49 years: in another ten months (in October 2007) we will celebrate our 50th wedding anniversary, and we have five grandchildren.

Suppose, as the random event could have had it, the available seat would have been next to Anne—what would have been the further course of her life, of Sally’s, of mine? Of course, we’ll never know. The thought reminds me of the song from Naughty Marietta “Ah, sweet mystery of life.”

Monday, December 18, 2006

Great minds thinking alike

In reading An Introduction to Existentialism by Robert G. Olson, I came across the following commentary by the author of the question that the French existentialist Gabriel Marcel posed of his own existence.

Why, he (Marcel) asks in extreme wonder, does he exist as an author at a particular point in the space-time of the modern world writing a book on philosophy? Why is he not rather a leper at a point of space-time in the medieval world ringing his warning bell as he approaches a walled city. (p. 41)

It reminded me that I posed the same question in my very first posting to this blog (on 1/16/06).

The biggest "Why"? The largest question for anyone is “Why was I born when I was, where I was, who I was?" For me, that is: Why was I born in 19__, in a small tobacco town in North Carolina, a white male?

Why not a black female in Senegal in the 1600's? Or a male in China in the fifth century BC?

It seems likely to me that I was born in the past as someone else, somewhere else–perhaps many times. And that it will happen again when I leave this life. Why? It’s difficult to explain a feeling, but I’ll try by saying that it doesn’t seem that the “I” that I know existed only one time in the infinite sweep of history.

Mr. Olson adds another voice to the question—that of Blaise Pascal.

When I consider the short duration of my life, swallowed up in the eternity before and after, the little space which I fill, and even can see, engulfed in the infinite immensity of space of which I am ignorant, and which knows me not, I am frightened. I am astonished at being here rather than there. Why now rather than then!

The tragedy of the George Bush presidency

The following commentary from the December 2006 issue of Current History (p. 403) is the most succinct description that I have seen of the terrible damage that the presidency of George Bush has done to our country and to the world. The tragedy is that actions taken in a short period of time—the almost six years of his tenure—will take decades, with striving and good fortune, to repair.

Voters delivered a ringing repudiation of the president in the November congressional elections. But his policies had already diminished America’s constitutional strength and moral authority. Instead of building on the spirit of national unity that followed the attacks of September 11, 2001, the White House divided and weakened the country by converting the war on terror into an instrument for instilling fear, bashing opponents, smothering checks and balances, and seizing more power for the executive.

The cost to American values has been high…The damage extends not merely to the nation and its reputation but across the world, in part because the administration has also squandered America’s traditional role of global leadership. The United States has lost prestige and power at a time when the world needs US help to strengthen the capacity of international institutions to address complex and daunting problems…

Declining US legitimacy and swelling anti-Americanism compound the difficulty, too, of democratic reform within countries…And now America, hobbled and distracted, its moral beacon dimmed, has less ability to help or inspire.
Name:
Location: United States

Mycroft Watson is the nom de plume of a man who has seen many winters. He is moderate to an extreme. When he comes to a fork in the road, he always takes it. His favorite philosopher is Yogi Berra. He has come out of the closet and identified himself. Anyone interested can get his real name, biography, and e-mail address by going to "Google Search" and keying in "User:Marshall H. Pinnix" (case sensitive).

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