Reanimation

“ And when the poor crazed paralytic sank to the ground exhausted and helpless, frothing at the lips and every muscle tense and spasmodically twitching and quivering, not a hand was lifted for his resuscitation; after a few moments' gazing, audience and performers dispersed, while the friends of the unfortunate merely lifted and carried him to his lodge, and there left him alone, to recover or die as the case might be. ”

“ And now, in the midnight, the veil is torn aside, and I see a human heart in extremis, writhing with agony, groaning as the wounded never groan, stricken, bleeding, prostrate, overwhelmed with the enormity of its sorrow. ”

“ Wounded men everywhere. Crawling about, delirious with pain and agony; lying prone and almost motionless, staring up into the blue sky, dying slowly and making no sign; shrieking, groaning, cursing, praying, imploring help, begging for a bandage, for water, lying quietly, laughing even,—wounded men everywhere. In hospitals, under trees, in tents, in houses, in stables, with surgeons probing and cutting and carving and sawing and clumsily bandaging; in ambulances jolting off towards Springfield; limping along to hide and escape another hurt—wounded men everywhere. ”

“ Burnings and scaldings, domestic and from manufactories; falls, including sprains, bruises, dislocations, and simple and compound fractures; cuts, so fearful that one turns away shuddering, and wondering that life has not escaped through the awful gash; limbs crushed, torn or shattered by machinery; wounds from blows, enough to fill any hospital with horrors, without stopping to consider that cruel, insidious enemy disease, mining and burrowing its way through the human system, and battling step by step with the science brought to bear upon it. ”

“ Just then the beating of hoofs and jangling of bells in the distance announced the coming of the belated firemen; not so long belated actually, for all the emotions, heart-beats, terrors, and despairs that go to make up tragedy can be lived through in a few brief moments. ”

“ It is fifteen years ago, and yet I can still distinctly see the eyes of one soldier looking at me from his berth in the waggon. The glow of intense pain—the glow of long-continued agony—lit them up as coals that smouldering are suddenly fanned. Pain brightens the eyes as much as joy, there is a fire in the brain behind it; it is the flame in the mind you see, and not the eyeball. ”

“ People seldom died with the first attack; but the subtle disease hung about them, and returned again and again, and wore, and tugged, and exhausted their energies—kept nibbling, in fact, at body and soul, till, in too many cases, the disease-besieged man surrendered, and his soul marched out. ”

“ In these surroundings, those who had been long inured to scenes of human suffering—surgeons with a world-wide knowledge of agonies, soldiers familiar with fields of carnage, missionaries with remembrances of famine and of plague—yet found a depth of horror which they had never known before. ”

“ Wretched beings at the point of death, thrown by the wayside, continued to call with feeble voice, 'I have not the plague, I am but wounded;' and, to convince those that passed, they might be seen tearing open their real wounds, or inflicting new ones. ”

“ The dreadful nature of the injuries inflicted by high explosive, the irrepressible cries and moans of pain; the impossibility of bringing relief to the sufferers form a combination of sight, sound and sensation which if protracted for many hours absolutely unnerves the unwounded survivors and forms the nightmare of their sleep for years. ”

“ When, as yesterday, every sixteen minutes a tremendous jarring crash tells you that a shell has fallen somewhere in the city,—and the concussion is so great that it always sounds as if it had fallen in the next block!—you see people turn their heads as they walk, staring in the direction of the explosion ”

“ Then the organ tones deepened to the rumblings of approaching thunders—heralds of a climax of catastrophies, while above the rumblings a solitary, piercing voice, which ended in a thrilling, agonizing cry: “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me!” Following this came peal upon peal from the organ; louder and louder; discord and confusion; ending in mighty crashings. The rocking earth; the earthquake; the rent veil—all the tragedy of Cavalry—was presented in awful realism to the minds of the kneeling worshipers. ”

“ For in the first place, they die suddenly who, being in the vigor of health, are assassinated, or drowned, or meet with a fatal accident, or are struck by lightning or by a fit of apoplexy, or who die in the delirium of a violent fever, or in a lethargy. ”

“ A battle royal between a glandular-level panic and a violent and useless effort of the will to control the situation. Muscles tear, working against one another. Lungs rupture and air is forced into the blood-stream, causing embolism and death. ”

“ This is civilization. Even today thousands look askance at the uncompromising brick and stone walls, shuddering as the ambulance gong warns them of its approach, bearing the victim, perchance, of some terrible disaster. ”

“ Convalescent states as well as exhaustion from pain and disease, such as fever or a shock from some accident, war-shock, shell-shock, surgical shock predispose to the manifestation of the fear instinct. ”

“ In spite of the great disaster which they believed had befallen the National cause, their lungs expanded in the rare mountain air, and the good red blood danced in their veins, and with youth and health of body it was impossible to take an altogether gloomy view of life. ”

“ These measures, called of relief, and carried to an incredible excess, were of such a character, that, during any normal state of the human system, they would have destroyed, not one, but a hundred lives, if the patient, or victim, had been endowed with so many. ”

“ Relief in Severe Injuries.—Even extremely severe injuries, which inflict serious organic lesions that ordinarily would produce shock and collapse, quite apart from the pain induced, may at moments of excitement pass unnoticed. A soldier often does not know that he is wounded until the flow of blood calls his attention to it, or perhaps a friend points it out to him, or loss of blood causes him to faint. ”

“ Add to this conflagrations, falling houses, shipwrecks, the agonizing operations of surgeons, who cut pieces of bone out of men's living bodies, plunge their whole hands into their entrails, and inflict more than one kind of pain to effect the cure of shameful diseases. ”

“ Her vivid imagination went beyond the little work-room with its white-veiled women to those hospitals back of the battle line where mutilated men lay waiting for the compresses and the wipes and the bandages, men in awful agony—. ”

“ Impelled by a resistless force I still rose, although now against a crushing pressure and an active resistance which seemed to beat me back, and I fought my upward way in an agony which resembled nothing so much as the terrible moment when, from strangling or suffocation, all the forces of life struggle against death, and wrestle madly for another breath. ”

“ Those perhaps who to appearance are killed by lightning, or by any violent agitation of the passions, as fear, joy, surprise, and such like, might also be frequently recovered by the use of proper means, as blowing strongly into their lungs, &c.
632The means to be used for the recovery of persons suddenly deprived of life are nearly the same in all cases; they are practicable by every one who happens to be present at the accident, and require no great expence, and less skill. ”

“ In the lives of firemen and the police, in the experiences of escaping prisoners, of shipwrecked sailors, in the struggles between pioneers and their savage enemies, in accounts of forced marches or retreats, search would reveal many examples of such bodily disturbances as have been described in earlier chapters as augmenting the effectiveness of muscular efforts, and such exhibitions of power or endurance as are evidently far beyond the ordinary. ”

“ Whether I resolve to fire, earth, water, air,
Or all the elements by scruples, I know not,
Nor greatly care.—Shoot! shoot!
Of all deaths, the violent death is best;
For from ourselves it steals ourselves so fast,
The pain, once apprehended, is quite past. ”

“ The state of constitution, the difficulties and distresses of military warfare, exposure to the inclemency of the weather, the season of the year, or the imprudence of individuals, will sometimes bring on a train of serious symptoms, in wounds apparently of the same nature as others in which no such evils occur. ”

“ The blood will follow where the knife is driven, The flesh will quiver where the pincers tear, And sighs and cries by nature grow on pain. ”

“ I have just this moment heard from the front—there is nothing yet of a movement, but each side is continually on the alert, expecting something to happen. O mother, to think that we are to have here soon what I have seen so many times, the awful loads and trains and boat loads of poor bloody and pale and wounded young men again—for that is what we certainly will, and before very long. I see all the little signs, geting ready in the hospitals, etc.; it is dreadful when one thinks about it. ”

“ There are few states, I suppose, which exact so severe a toll from one's nervous system as the ANTICIPATION of calamity. ”

“ “This was then the reward of my benevolence! I had saved a human being from destruction, and as a recompense I now writhed under the miserable pain of a wound which shattered the flesh and bone. The feelings of kindness and gentleness which I had entertained but a few moments before gave place to hellish rage and gnashing of teeth. Inflamed by pain, I vowed eternal hatred and vengeance to all mankind. But the agony of my wound overcame me; my pulses paused, and I fainted. ”

“ Death, if thou wilt, fain would I plead with thee:
Canst thou not spare, of all our hopes have built,
One shelter where our spirits fain would be,
Death, if thou wilt? ”

“ Disastrous would have been the result if a fire or a death had suddenly demanded something heroic of human nature, but tragedies come in the hungry hours. ”

“ I remember I felt an extraordinary persuasion that I was being played with, that presently, when I was upon the very verge of safety, this mysterious death—as swift as the passage of light—would leap after me from the pit about the cylinder, and strike me down. ”

“ He who sleeps here, when dying, mistaking the approach of death for the return of health, whispered with his latest breath, "I am better now." Let us believe, in spite of doubts and dogmas and tears and fears that these dear words are true of all the countless dead. ”

“ The man raised himself, fell down, and rose again. The wound that he had under his armor of filth was staining the ground, and when he had spoken, his wide-open eyes looked down at all the blood he had given for the healing of the world. ”

“ To men who had seen it bent forward under the eagles of the old republic, gray in the stifling powder-clouds, falling and rising in the storm of battle, a pale ghost of a flag, fluttering colorless on the plain or climbing the stubborn mountain, human lives falling like leaves for its upholding—this was the burning question. ”

“ Another Plague Year would reconcile all these Differences, a close conversing with Death, or with Diseases that threaten Death, would scum off the Gall from our Tempers, remove the Animosities among us, and bring us to see with differing Eyes, than those which we look’d on Things with before; ”

“ WHEN I stand before thee at the day's end thou shalt see my scars and know that I had my wounds and also my healing. ”

“ I saw a great many men die afterwards, some suffering horribly, but I do not recall any death that affected me quite so much as that of this first victim in my platoon. ”

“ We endure the strokes like anvils or hard steel, Till pain itself make us no pain to feel. ”

“ HOW TO DIE Dark clouds are smouldering into red
While down the craters morning burns.
The dying soldier shifts his head
To watch the glory that returns:
He lifts his fingers toward the skies
Where holy brightness breaks in flame;
Radiance reflected in his eyes,
And on his lips a whispered name. ”

“ And with tears of blood he cleansed the hand, The hand that held the steel: For only blood can wipe out blood, And only tears can heal: And the crimson stain that was of Cain Became Christ's snow-white seal. ”

“ But by and by the cause of my disease
Gives me a pang that inwardly doth sting,
When that I think what grief it is, again,
To live, and lack the thing should rid my pain. ”

“ With grand and lofty natures, the revolts of the flesh and the senses when subjected to physical suffering cause the soul to spring forth, and make it appear on the brow, just as rebellions among the soldiery force the captain to show himself. ”

“ They talk of short-lived pleasure—be it so—
Pain dies as quickly: stern, hard-featured pain
Expires, and lets her weary prisoner go.
The fiercest agonies have shortest reign;
And after dreams of horror, comes again
The welcome morning with its rays of peace; ”

“ Let thy chief terror be of thine own soul: There, 'mid the throng of hurrying desires That trample on the dead to seize their spoil, Lurks vengeance, footless, irresistible As exhalations laden with slow death, And o'er the fairest troop of captured joys Breathes pallid pestilence. ”

“ Where pain of unextinguishable fire Must exercise us without hope of end The vassals of his anger, when the scourge Inexorably, and the torturing hour, Calls us to penance? ”