‘Shattering’ and ‘Violent’ Forces: Gender, Ecology, and Catastrophe in George Eliot's The Mill on the Floss

This article argues that George Eliot's The Mill on the Floss (1860) aligns natural catastrophe with the image of the disastrous female body in order to challenge contemporary geological readings of nature as a balanced, self-regulating domain. Both incorporating and revising the work of Charles Lyell, Oliver Goldsmith, and Georges Cuvier, Eliot emphasises the interconnectedness of human and planetary processes, feminises environmental catastrophe, and blends human and ecological history. She does so in order to write the human presence back into geological histories that tended to evacuate the human, and to invite readers to account for the effects their lifestyles and industries have upon the supposedly balanced and orderly processes of nature.

O. Goldsmith’s Oriental Parable in the Magazine Ni To Ni Sio (Neither This Nor That)

The essay argues that the oriental parable “Ziou-Zioung. A Chinese Anecdote” published in No. 9 of the magazine Ni To ni Sio (“Neither This nor That”) on April 25, 1769, is a fragment of “The Citizen of the World, or Letters from a Chinese Philosopher” by Oliver Goldsmith (1760–1761, book edition 1762), translated with some changes. The translation is presumably attributed to Fyodor Lazinsky. The paper traces the way of Goldsmith’s plot from the English original to the Russian version. The parable is taken from the French translation of Goldsmith’s book by P. Poivre (1763) and reprinted in the magazine Recueil pour l’esprit & pour le cœur under the title “Ziou-Zioung” (1764). The text of the French magazine is translated into German; it appears in Berlinisches Magazin (1765), from where it is borrowed by the Russian translator. The separation from the original context and a chain of transformations in successive translations, although each of these transformations is minor leads to a substantial change of meaning. While Goldsmith aims his satire at those who are proud of unworthy things, German and Russian versions condemn pride as such.

Damage control surgery: a constant evolution

The story of trauma resuscitation is similar to that of many other advances in medicine: described, forgotten, reinvented, ridiculed, and finally accepted. Even after acceptance, the concepts go through periods of neglect and indifference before they are tried and enhanced, till the next advance. Damage control, a strategy for management of critically injured or ill patients, is a prime example of this phenomenon. It reminds us of the famous words of Oliver Goldsmith in 1761: “for he who fights and runs away, will live to fight another day, but he who is in battle slain, will never rise and fight again”. Damage control was based on the recognition of the lethal triad of hypothermia, acidosis, and a coagulopathy resulting from massive blood loss, large-volume resuscitation and ischemia-reperfusion. It was an approach that J. Hogarth Pringle from Glasgow, Scotland, suggested in 1908 with his principles of compression and hepatic packing for control of venous hemorrhage from the injured liver: temporary, expeditious and effective. Packing, however, was rarely utilized during World War II and the Vietnam War because of the presumed risk of rebleeding with removal of the packs. The ever-difficult challenge of “non-surgical bleeding” from a coagulopathy due to massive hepatic injuries did, eventually, lead to a resurrection of the concept of perihepatic packing in the 1980s in civilian centers and became one of the initial steps in damage control for patients with severe and/or multiple intra-abdominal injuries.