The principles and practice of death: The Oslerian conflicted conception of dying

2021 ◽  
pp. 096777202110189
Author(s):  
Kacper Niburski

Sir William Osler espoused a particularly idealized medical life that included the patient in the physician's worldview. Disease is not considered a monolith, only a reflection of one's broader health. Death, too, is configured as a part of one's being, not as a thing apart from life. The wholesomeness that characterized Osler's practice is well known—however, his long discussions and thoughts on death have not been sufficiently analyzed. His clinical views have been hinted at and numerous medical historians have noted that Osler's worldview on death was avant-garde for its time, one in which he described finality not as a time of suffering and anguish, but as “singularly free from mental distress.” This essay contends with this simple view. This straightforward understanding becomes complicated when delving into such primary resources as Osler's Study on Dying cards, his writings on other medical conditions, and personal reflections following the personal losses of his sons Edward Revere Osler and Paul Revere Osler. This essay contends that the loss and the death he imagines is not one of peace, but rather, of horror and terror. Furthermore, the primary sources show Osler not as the paragon of flawless clinical acumen and reasoning, but a man of personal beliefs that were in conflict with views he espoused more publicly. The essay therefore reconceptualizes the common understanding of a stoic Osler, determines how death prefigures into Oslerian thought, and challenges the idea of an Oslerian simple death.

Author(s):  
Oren Izenberg

This book offers a new way to understand the divisions that organize twentieth-century poetry. It argues that the most important conflict is not between styles or aesthetic politics, but between poets who seek to preserve or produce the incommensurable particularity of experience by making powerful objects, and poets whose radical commitment to abstract personhood seems altogether incompatible with experience—and with poems. Reading across the apparent gulf that separates traditional and avant-garde poets, the book reveals the common philosophical urgency that lies behind diverse forms of poetic difficulty—from William Butler Yeats's esoteric symbolism and George Oppen's minimalism and silence to Frank O'Hara's joyful slightness and the Language poets' rejection of traditional aesthetic satisfactions. For these poets, what begins as a practical question about the conduct of literary life—what distinguishes a poet or group of poets?—ends up as an ontological inquiry about social life: What is a person and how is a community possible? In the face of the violence and dislocation of the twentieth century, these poets resist their will to mastery, shy away from the sensual richness of their strongest work, and undermine the particularity of their imaginative and moral visions—all in an effort to allow personhood itself to emerge as an undeniable fact making an unrefusable claim.


2017 ◽  
Vol 30 (1) ◽  
pp. 4-27 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stephen Clucas

The Animadversiones in Elementorum Philosophiae by a little known Flemish scholar G. Moranus, published in Brussels in 1655 was an early European response to Hobbes’s De Corpore. Although it is has been referred to by various Hobbes scholars, such as Noel Malcolm, Doug Jesseph, and Alexander Bird it has been little studied. Previous scholarship has tended to focus on the mathematical criticisms of André Tacquet which Moranus included in the form of a letter in his volume. Moranus’s philosophical objections to Hobbes’s natural philosophy offer a fascinating picture of the critical reception of Hobbes’s work by a religious writer trained in the late Scholastic tradition. Moranus’s opening criticism clearly shows that he is unhappy with Hobbes’s exclusion of the divine and the immaterial from natural philosophy. He asks what authority Hobbes has for breaking with the common understanding of philosophy, as defined by Cicero ‘the knowledge of things human and divine’. He also offers natural philosophical and theological criticisms of Hobbes for overlooking the generation of things involved in the Creation. He also attacks the natural philosophical underpinning of Hobbes’s civil philosophy. In this paper I look at a number of philosophical topics which Moranus criticised in Hobbes’s work, including his mechanical psychology, his theory of imaginary space, his use of the concept of accidents, his blurring of the distinction between the human being and the animal, and his theories of motion. Moranus’s criticisms, which are a mixture of philosophical and theological objections, gives us some clear indications of what made Hobbes’ natural philosophy controversial amongst his contemporaries, and sheds new light on the early continental reception of Hobbes’s work.


Author(s):  
William Loader

After a brief overview of the social context and role of marriage and sexuality in Jewish and Greco-Roman cultures, the chapter traces the impact of the Genesis creation narratives, positively and negatively, on how marriage and sexuality were seen both in the present and in depictions of hope for the future. Discussion of pre-marital sex, incest, intermarriage, polygyny, divorce, adultery, and passions follows. It then turns to Jesus’ reported response to divorce, arguing that the prohibition sayings should be read as assuming that sexual intercourse both effects permanent union and severs previous unions, thus making divorce after adultery mandatory, the common understanding and legal requirement in both Jewish and Greco-Roman society of the time. It concludes by noting both the positive appreciation of sex and marriage, grounded in belief that they are God’s creation, and the many dire warnings against sexual wrongdoing, including adulterous attitudes and uncontrolled passions.


2020 ◽  
Vol 25 (2) ◽  
pp. 35-55
Author(s):  
Serhiy Viktorovych Proleiev

The article considers the challenge to the educational system, which arises from the sociocultural context and the conditions of the global world. The emphasis is on the cultural and historical nature of the emergence and development of the institution of education. The specifics of its current state consists in the transition from the state of "universal education" characteristic of the modern time to the localization of education in specialized groups and communities as a characteristic trend of global reality (the phenomenon of "educational archipelago"). In these conditions, school education receives a special purpose. It becomes a prerequisite for an individual’s ability to self-determination in a changing world devoid of objective unity. Accordingly, giftedness as a potential for personality development comes to the fore. The shortcomings of the common understanding of giftedness are analyzed, its relationship with the essence of man is shown. The meaning of giftedness as a negative and positive educational task is revealed. The most important result of the development of giftedness in the school is the discovery by the student of his vocation. In the form of a vocation, a person opens the semantic perspective of his life and determines the scenario of life in an adult state.


2016 ◽  
Vol 3 (4) ◽  
pp. 250 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mohan Bansal

<p class="abstract"><strong>Background:</strong> Dizziness is one of the most common complaints in medicine just second to headache. It frightens not only the patient but also frustrates the physicians. There is a long list of causes of dizziness but the common causes vary from place to place. The aim of this study was to know the common causes of dizziness and vertigo in Gujarat to generate the awareness among the doctors who get the patients with this common ailment so that they can better manage dizzy patients.</p><p class="abstract"><strong>Methods:</strong> This prospective study included thirty-five patients with dizziness and vertigo that came to the Department of ENT for their management.</p><p class="abstract"><strong>Results:</strong> Patients were divided into three categories. The first group of patients was having associated cochlear symptoms. Second group patients had isolated vertigo. Third group patients had associated CNS or medical conditions. The largest was the second group (37.5%) of isolated vertigo patients. The commonest diagnosis (18.75%) in this group was benign paroxysmal positional vertigo, followed by acute vestibular neuritis. Meniere’s disease and migraine and its variant were the most common causes in first and third group respectively.  </p><strong>Conclusions:</strong>The overall scenario of causes of dizziness and vertigo in our study follow the international trend. Benign paroxysmal positional vertigo, acute vestibular neuronitis, Menieres disease and migraine were found the most common causes of vertigo.<div> </div>


2018 ◽  
pp. 218-233
Author(s):  
Mayank Yuvaraj

During the course of planning an institutional repository, digital library collections or digital preservation service it is inevitable to draft file format policies in order to ensure long term digital preservation, its accessibility and compatibility. Sincere efforts have been made to encourage the adoption of standard formats yet the digital preservation policies vary from library to library. The present paper is based against this background to present the digital preservation community with a common understanding of the common file formats used in the digital libraries or institutional repositories. The paper discusses both open and proprietary file formats for several media.


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