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• 5 • Fear, wounding and death The overriding objective of the Allied forces in the Second World War was to fight the enemy: to defend areas under threat from Axis invasion and to liberate conquered territories.1 The resources that the British Army used for this were essentially human. The front-line soldier, whose body had been honed and primed for combat, now took his chances in battle. There all his skills, training and experience would be put to the test, and there he faced the prospect of being wounded or killed. Neil McCallum was deployed with the Eighth
Common approach Traditionally the international law of armed conflict has distinguished between land and sea warfare, dealing with the wounded and sick in these theatres as two separate categories. In 1864 the first Convention on the Amelioration of the Conditions of the Wounded and Sick in Armies in the Field was
Medical care Chapter 4 ‘Stout Skippon hath a wound’: the medical treatment of Parliament’s infantry commander following the battle of Naseby Ismini Pells S tout Skippon hath a wound’ proclaims Macaulay’s poem Naseby. It was once claimed that this line was the only reason that anyone had ever heard of Parliament’s infantry commander.1 Regardless of the truth of this claim, the treatment administered to Sergeant-Major-General Philip Skippon following his wounding at the battle of Naseby on 14 June 1645 is one of the best documented examples of the medical care
133 8 SPECTACULARLY WOUNDED White male vulnerability as heterosexual fantasy Susa nna Paa sonen I n a 2012 interview, E. L. James, the author of the massively popular Fifty Shades novel series, describes its male protagonist Christian Grey as ‘the ultimate fantasy guy. And that’s the point: As long as you accept that fantasy guy –fantasy sex, fantasy lifestyle, a broken man who needs fixing through love –what woman could resist that?’ (in Thomas, 2012.) Grey is a twenty-seven-year-old, white, cis-gendered, Seattle-based multi-billionaire businessman
This book explores the ways in which the unashamedly disturbing conventions of international horror cinema allow audiences to engage with the traumatic legacy of the recent past in a manner that has serious implications for the ways in which we conceive of ourselves both as gendered individuals and as members of a particular nation-state. Exploring a wide range of stylistically distinctive and generically diverse film texts, its analysis ranges from the body horror of the American 1970s to the avant-garde proclivities of German Reunification horror, from the vengeful supernaturalism of recent Japanese chillers and their American remakes to the post-Thatcherite masculinity horror of the UK and the resurgence of hillbilly horror in the period following 9/11 USA. In each case, it is argued that horror cinema forces us to look again at the wounds inflicted on individuals, families, communities and nations by traumatic events such as genocide and war, terrorist outrage and seismic political change, wounds that are all too often concealed beneath ideologically expedient discourses of national cohesion. Thus proffering a radical critique of the nation-state and the ideologies of identity it promulgates, horror cinema is seen to offer us a disturbing, yet perversely life affirming, means of working through the traumatic legacy of recent times.
7 Wounding realities and ‘painful excitements’: real sympathy, the imitation of suffering and the visual arts after Burke’s sublime Aris Sarafianos Edmund Burke’s Philosophical Enquiry (1757/59) is bustling with claims calculated to destabilise established views on taste.1 In particular, the focus of his theory of the sublime on physical pain threw the spotlight on various irregular experiences that changed the polite conformation of the fine arts. After years of scholarly neglect,2 David Bromwich has drawn attention to the shocking aspects of Burke’s book,3
Gerard’s Herball and the treatment of war-wounds Chapter 6 Gerard’s Herball and the treatment of war-wounds and contagion during the English Civil War Richard Jones O n 14 September 1644, Lieutenant-Colonel Thomas Johnson, a royalist field officer at Basing House, sustained a gunshot to his shoulder while coming to the aid of Captain Fletcher’s musketeers. Charged with protecting carts bringing provisions from the town to the besieged garrison, Fletcher’s men had been routed by a parliamentarian force of mounted and foot soldiers. Johnson’s rearguard action
Introduction How can a medical humanitarian organisation deliver emergency assistance in Syria when there is nowhere in the country where civilians, the wounded and their families, medical personnel and aid workers are not targeted? Not in the areas controlled by the government, nor in those held by the Kurdish Democratic Union Party (PYD), Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) or the different rebel groups. So what action could be taken
In Sir Charles Grandison, Richardson anticipates the imaginary Italy of the Gothic novel. The categories of gender and nationality that Richardson constructs in the division of the ‘Names of the Principal Persons’ into ‘Men’, ‘Women’ and ‘Italians’ intersect with categories of health and illness to reinforce the opposition of a sensible, enlightened England, home of liberty and social stability, against a passionate, unstable and irrational Catholic Italy, home of wounded, mad and dangerous ‘Italians’. While the Gothic novel relies on landscape descriptions, banditti and abandoned castles to create a sense of terror, in Sir Charles Grandison, the Gothic is located, not in Italy, imaginary or otherwise, but in the bodies of the Italian characters.
reflected by its title) was ‘the amelioration of the condition of the wounded in armies in the field’. It can be summarised in just two points: first, it specified that which is necessary to care for sick and wounded soldiers – that is, ambulances and hospitals – must be recognised as neutral; and, second, it introduced a ‘distinctive and uniform flag’, an emblem to be shared by all nations, bearing a red cross against a white background, as well as an armband for ‘neutral