Disfigurement

“ Every feature and every inch of him was a trifle out of shape; and so, while one could not put his finger upon any particular part and say, “This is a conspicuous deformity,” the spectator perceived that this little person was a deformity as a whole—a vague, general, evenly blended, nicely adjusted deformity. There was a fox-like cunning in the face and the sharp little eyes, and also alertness and malice. And yet, this vile bit of human rubbish seemed to bear a sort of remote and ill-defined resemblance to me! ”

“ Certainly, everybody will answer, in cases where there is a palpable organic change brought about, as when a blow on the head produces insanity. Fools! How long will it be before we shall learn that for every wound which betrays itself to the sight by a scar, there are a thousand unseen mutilations that cripple, each of them, some one or more of our highest faculties? ”

“ On each man's emaciated face, a look of agony, and on the canvas-clad back of one man, a great stain of wet blood from a raw wound caused by the cutting and rubbing of the stone-laden knapsack. Each man wore a fatigue-uniform, filthy beyond description. ”

“ A ghastly deathlike skeleton, all the hue of life perished from a face on which grief and despair had traced deep furrows—his beard and nails, from long neglect, grown to a frightful length-his clothes rotten and hanging about him in tatters ”

“ When the dislocation is forwards, he directs us to make strong extension with the hands or with thongs, and then placing some round body upon the anterior part of the arm, to push the fore-arm over it suddenly to the shoulder. ”

“ Every second paralysis can strike him down, so that the right side of the face, the right arm, the right leg die—it isn’t a human being that’s living, but some sort of a little half. Half-man-half-corpse. The majority of them go out of their minds. ”

“ A poor creature with dishevelled hair, with a horrible wound in her throat, clasping a baby in her arms, and her bosom dabbled with the child’s blood. She swayed herself, the agony of despair in her eyes ”

“ When the displacement of a body takes place with deformation, we can no longer by appropriate movements place the organs of our body in the same relative situation with respect to this body; we can no longer, therefore, reconstruct the primitive aggregate of impressions. ”

“ Shall a defect in the body make a monster ; a defect in the mind (the far more noble, and, in the common phrase, the far more essential part) not ? Shall the want of a nose, or a neck, make a monster, and put such issue out of the rank of men ”

“ Most of the instances on record, and particularly those from lay journals, are vivid exaggerations, drawn from possibly such a trivial sign as a corpse found with the fist tightly clenched or the face distorted, which are the inspiration of the horrible details of the dying struggles of the person in the coffin. ”

“ The difficulties, too, about the corruption and dissolution of dead bodies,—that one is turned into dust, while another evaporates into the air; that some are devoured by beasts, some by fire, while some perish by shipwreck or by drowning in one shape or other, so that their bodies decay into liquid, these difficulties give them immoderate alarm, and they believe that all those dissolved elements cannot be gathered again and reconstructed into a body. ”

“ We are deadened by the strain—a deadly tension that scrapes along one's spine like a gapped knife. Our legs refuse to move, our hands tremble, our bodies are a thin skin stretched painfully over repressed madness, over an almost irresistible, bursting roar. ”

“ Men without legs or arms, and some with frightful body wounds or bayonet thrusts, lay huddled in helpless confusion. Desolation and death grimly met us at each step. Then the effluvia arising from the bodies was horrible beyond description. ”

“ When the dissolution has taken place under circumstances such as those described, it is not a few minutes’ look after the last duties are performed and the body is composed in death and left in repose, that is given to this class of survivors, but the spectacle is protracted hour after hour through the day and night, and day after day, and night after night, thus aggravating the mental pains under varied circumstances, and increasing the dangers of permanent bodily injury. ”

“ Then, with a heavy sigh, he moves to his work, and stands looking at it, with his head down; he does a stitch or two, having the air of a man so lost in sadness that each stitch is, as it were, a coming to life. Then, turning abruptly, he begins pacing his cell, moving his head, like an animal pacing its cage. ”

“ For that which is non-existent does not exist. But when bodies are disintegrated, and experience a change, a dissolution of them takes place; so that a part of them goes to earth, a part to air, and a part to something else. ”

“ Here their confusion was at the highest—some threw down their arms and were saved, others precipitated themselves down the abyss, where their bodies were afterwards found, crushed and mangled in a manner to render them scarcely recognizable even as human beings. ”

“ What one misfortune or disaster in the book of embryotic evils, that could unmechanize thy frame, or entangle thy filaments! which has not fallen upon thy head, or ever thou camest into the world—what evils in thy passage into it!—What evils since!—produced into being, in the decline of thy father's days—when the powers of his imagination and of his body were waxing feeble—when radical heat and radical moisture, the elements which should have temper'd thine, were drying up ”

“ The unfortunate victim of physical deformity, increased by a fall which prevented the possibility of her ever being able to walk, nature had with unusual malignity stamped her with a feebleness of intellect that at times bordered almost on imbecility. ”

“ But countless forces and conditions are assailing it. Wood burns, or rots. Iron rusts. The human body—a conglomeration of cells loosely clinging into a semblance of an independent entity—grows old, dies, disintegrates. ”

“ And thus our finding that the dissolution of matter, in which living beings were most nearly interested, is not their dissolution; and that the destruction of several of the organs and instruments of perception and of motion belonging to them, is not their destruction; shows demonstratively, that there is no ground to think that the dissolution of any other matter, or destruction of any other organs and instruments, will be the dissolution or destruction of living agents, from the like kind of relation. ”

“ It will be noted, in passing, that in this falling dream which is so familiar to you and me and all of us, we never strike bottom. To strike bottom would be destruction. Those of our arboreal ancestors who struck bottom died forthwith. True, the shock of their fall was communicated to the cerebral cells, but they died immediately, before they could have progeny. ”

“ Whereas, if the human form were changed into some shape belonging to another kind, or at any rate, if the number of its limbs were increased or diminished, the result would be that the whole body would become either a wreck or a monster, or, at the least, would be impaired and enfeebled. ”

“ Whatever may be the mode or seat of the displacement, there always exists, as Hippocrates has observed, a manifest depression under the acromion, which exhibits a prominence more perceptible than in its natural state. ”

“ The process, it will be seen, is thus really rather analogous to that which on the physical plane takes place in a person whose jaw or arm is dislocated, whether by some inordinate effort or some sudden shock with the external world. The miserable man with a dislocated jaw is out of harmony with himself and with the universe. ”

“ The first impression, I think, made upon a visitor is the almost invariable physical deformity that attends imbecility—ill-proportioned, distorted bodies, dwarfed, misshapen gelatinoids, with bones that have no stiffness. ”

“ That this was beyond all question the case was clear from five shallow depressions in the stone of the table, all shaped like a human form, with a separate place for the head to lie in, and a little bridge to support the neck, each depression being of a different size, so as to fit bodies varying in stature from a full-grown man's to a small child's, and with little holes bored at intervals to carry off fluid. ”

“ That a bone of a corpse of the size of a barley-corn, when brought in contact with a man, defiles him, is a tradition, and thou wouldst draw therefrom the a fortiori conclusion that a quarter of a lug of blood would so much the more be a means of defilement. ”

“ All is there disorder and accident, or seems so; sudden starts of its shattered beds hither and thither; ugly struggles of unexpected strength from under the ground; fallen fragments, toppling one over another into more helpless fall. ”

“ Left to themselves, they would hasten to dissolution, and the man, as an entity, would be annihilated. This catastrophe, however, could be averted through the piety of the survivors. The decomposition of the body could be prevented, or at least suspended, by the process of embalming ”

“ The victim, whether man, woman, or tender virgin, is stripped naked, and stretched upon a wooden bench. Water, weights, fires, pulleys, screws, all the apparatus by which the sinews can be strained without cracking, the bones bruised without breaking, and the body racked without giving up the ghost, is now put into operation. ”

“ In some instances the destruction is frightful, the heart is torn apart and the bones crushed; in others the organs are observed entirely uninjured. In certain cases flaccidity of the limbs occurs, softening of the bones, collapse of the lungs; in others, contractions and rigidity are remarked. Sometimes the body of the person struck decomposes rapidly, but at times it resists decay. ”

“ When the depression is of such a nature that the elevation of the fragments can be carried out without preliminary trephining, the fragments are raised with the periosteal separator, and the membranes and brain examined as described above. ”

“ On the other hand, how much injustice and mortification are often borne on account of deformity, and how many are the wounds inflicted by thoughtless persons on those thus afflicted by their undisguised contempt or more cruel pity. ”

“ The skilful tricksters among the brethren draw a little blood perhaps but generally confine themselves to causing deep depressions in their skin with point or blade, apparently using great force, and so giving the impression that their skin is impenetrable. ”

“ And yet I have some misgivings whether that human being were so morally culpable as his life of shuffle, and deceit, and meanness, would lead one to think; for I remember how often I noticed the large indentation across his bald head, caused by some accident, in which the bone of the skull had been bent or broken, and, consequently, the brain injured. ”

“ We must not have recourse to cupping at the commencement of complaints, nor when the body is in a plethoric state, but when the general system has been evacuated, and when there is no defluxion any longer to the part, and especially when there is a necessity of removing, dislodging, and determining something outwardly. ”

“ It has been found that under some unusual stimulus—such as an injury, an illness, or the strain of an intense emotion—there may result a disintegration, or, as it is technically termed, a dissociation, of personality, giving rise it may be to hysteria, it may be to hallucinations, it may even be to a complete disappearance of the original personality and its [Pg 75] replacement by a new personality, sometimes of radically different characteristics. ”

“ Ossification, or any unusual condition of the body, is as directly the action of mortal error as insanity. Bones Formation and malformation. have only the substantiality of thought which formed them. They are only an appearance, a subjective state of mortal mind. The so-called substance of bone is formed first by the parent's mind, through self-division. Soon the child becomes a separate, individualized mortal mind, that takes possession of itself and its own bones.
Accidents are unknown to God, or immortal Mind, and we must leave the mortal basis of belief, and unite Accidents. ”

“ For each adaptation of the vocal organs must be in some form or other, and form is a bodily limitation. Further, we know very well that all bodies are composite, but where you see composition you see also dissolution, and dissolution, as the notion implies, is the same thing as destruction. ”

“ On the other hand, others of us who do not and cannot conform (who are left-over phases of ancient streams, perhaps, or portentous striæ of new forces coming into play) are looked upon as horrific, and to be stabilized, or standardized, and brought into the normal systole-diastole of things. Those of us endowed with these things in mind and blood are truly terrible to the mass—pariahs, failures, shams, disgraces. ”

“ The human body is constantly undergoing a process of decay and of reconstruction. First builded into the etheric form in the womb of the mother, it is built up continually by the insetting of fresh materials. ”

“ When bodies are considered another set of relations are generated. With every collision the body may be modified, and a succession of these collisions may ultimately produce a great change. The change which bodies undergo in this manner is called causation. Thus, a body may be deformed or broken up, it may grow or decay when cause and effect are involved. ”

“ Does not this remnant of tenacious vitality in itself show that the organs of primary importance are the last to be attacked? Does it not prove that there is a progressive dismemberment passing from the less essential to the indispensable? ”

“ And perhaps this is the most suitable mode of reduction in such a case of dislocation. The parts may be reduced by extension in a straight line, but less readily than thus.
42. If the arm be dislocated forward- this rarely happens, indeed, but what would a sudden shock not displace? for many other things are removed from their proper place, notwithstanding a great obstacle,- in such a violent displacement the part (olecranon?) which passes above the prominent part of the bones is large, and the stretching of the nerves (ligaments?) is intense ”