George Washington Crile
Personal Information
Description
George Washington Crile was raised on a farm near Chili, Ohio, and educated in a one-room school house near his home. In 1881, he went to Northwestern Ohio Normal School (now Ohio Northern University) in Ada, Ohio. He worked his way through school by teaching in elementary schools, and he became interested in medicine. In 1886 he went to Wooster Medical College (now Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine) in Cleveland, graduating in 1887 with his M.D. After his internship, he entered private surgical practice, and became primarily interested in the study of shock. From 1889-1900, he taught at the University of Wooster, and from 1900 at the Western Reserve University. He went abroad, to Vienna and London in 1892 and 1895, for further study. In 1897 he won the Cartwright Prize from Columbia University for his paper "An Experimental Research into Surgical Shock," which became his first book when it was in 1899. In 1903, he published his studies in shock and blood pressure during operations in the book Blood Pressure in Surgery. He also revealed a "pneumatic rubber suit " he had invented to decrease postural hypotension in neuro surgical patients, and his invention was used in the second world war to prevent pilots from blacking out and during the Vietnam war to stabilise patients with haemorrhagic shock. In 1906, he performed the first successful blood transfusion from one human to another in the United States. In 1910 he was appointed Clinical Professor of Surgery of the newly-amalgamated Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine. He was also Chair of Surgery at that school's teaching hospital, Lakeside Hospital, which he had helped establish. In 1913 he was elected an honorary Fellow of the Royal College of Surgeons of England. During the World War I, he organised U.S. Army Base Hospital 4, largely from Lakeside Hospital, which was the first detachment of the American Expeditionary Forces to arrive in France, in 1917. He wrote a book about the war, A Mechanistic View of War and Peace (1917). After the war, he continued to work in private surgical practice. In 1921, along with other doctors in his practice, he established non-profit Cleveland Clinic Foundation, and he became its director. The foundation burnt down in 1929 when some x-ray films in the basement caught fire. Crile published 24 books and more than 400 papers. In addition to being the first surgeon to have performed a direct blood transfusion, he contributed to many other aspects of medicine, including neck dissection, the design of a haemostatic forceps called the Crile mosquito clamp, and the development of an anaesthetic technique known as balanced anaesthesia.
Books
Oliver Twist
As is so often the case with Charles Dickens's writing, characters and situations from his 1837-39 novel Oliver Twist seem to have found life apart from the text: little Oliver's asking for "more," Bumble's pomposity, Fagin's treachery, and the Artful Dodger's shenanigans have become standard literary and cultural reference points. Generations of readers have found different elements to savor - from the melodramatic alternation between sentimentality and terror to the fairy-tale plot to the cast of remarkable characters. And of course there's the novel's social implications: Dickens pointedly maintained in his preface to the book's 1841 edition that Oliver Twist was important precisely because of its realistic, uncompromising account of the harshness and cruelty of life in early Victorian England. In this engaging study of Dickens's sccond book (it initially appeared as a magazine serial), Richard J.^ Dunn uses the author's admission that he put his "whole heart and soul" into the novel's writing to explore the connections between Dickens's own adversity - having to work under wretched conditions in a blacking factory as a boy - and the dire and often life-threatening situations the bastard child Oliver must endure before, as Dickens put it, "trimumphing at last." Taking a controversial and timely subject - England's poor laws, whose debates in Parliament he covered as a court reporter - and a child as his hero, Dickens, Dunn contends, drew together two worlds: the destitute London slums that served as a breeding ground for criminal activity and the innocent world we associate with childhood. Dunn points out that Oliver's "progress" from dark world to light shows, almost paradoxically, that these worlds are linked and will always coexist, however secure one may feel in the latter.^ The colorful array of characters that either help along or hinder Oliver's progress Dunn analyzes in detail, but to the book's most controversial character, the sinister yet only-all-too-human Fagin, he devotes an entire chapter. Dunn observes that Oliver, though the novel's "hero," in many ways functions as a blank sheet of paper on which the impressions of Dickens's richly drawn personalities, particularly Fagin, are cast. Such characters, Dunn notes, provide us wide the clues to the wholeness of thought to which Oliver aspires. Dunn underscores the importance of the George Cruikshank drawings that accompanied the serialized Oliver Twist, considering these visual renderings (four of which are reprodueed here) as more of a collaborative than a purely illustrative effort. And to round out this lively study, Dunn examines the myriad stage and screen adaptations of Oliver Twist, which found new life in Oliver!, the Academy Award-winning film of the 1960s.
Intelligence, power and personality
"ONE of the mysteries of the human race is the fact that civalized man is subject to certain diseases that rarely attack primitive man and never appear in wild and domestic animals. These are various nervous and mental disorders, exophthalmic goiter, neurocirculatory asthenia, Raynauds disease, diabetes, peptic ulcer, essential hypertension, and coronary disease. Each of these diseases is related to the expenditure of energy. It would appear that this fact alone offers a biological clue to the mechanism of the energy characteristics of man and animals. It is well known that only certain organs and tissues control the expenditure of energy in all animals, including man. These are the brain, the heart and the blood, the thyroid gland, the adrenal glands, the celiac ganglia, and the sympathetic system. I postulated that if we were to analyze, measure, and compare the organs of this energy-controlling system in fish, reptiles, birds and mammals and then compare the influence of the heat of the tropics and the cold of the arctic upon the size of these organs-heat and cold and struggle and survival being the most potent of all environmental influences-we should be able to account for the varying intelligence, power, and personality among the different species of animals and the races of man. We should be able to find for man an energy formula distinct from that for wild and domestic animals and, further, an energy formula for civilized man. This became our quest, While Mrs. Crile and I were hunting in Africa in 1927, two phenomena well known to hunters of big game excited our attention. The first was that an antelope, a lion, or any high powered animal, when shot through the heart in such a way that the circulation of the blood is immediately arrested, may continue to run at top speed for a distance of a hundred or more yards before he falls dead. This fact challenged credulity, for, from my observations in war, I had found that death results instantly from a comparable shot through the heart in man. The second phenomenon was the explosive outburst of speed seen in the long leaps of the impala in escape and the incredibly high and long bound of the lion in attack. In contrast, we observed that if an animal is shot through the brain or high in the brachial plexus near the spinal column, it will never move again if shot through the heart, it may run a hundred yards or more and even complete its attack if shot so that the energy of the bullet suspends momentarily the action of the brain or creases the animal, the animal may fall, then jump up, and bound away or complete its charge. When a comparison was made of the effect of a shot through the brain of a zebra, a lion, or an elephant with the effect of a shot through the brain of a turtle, a crocodile, or a python, a great difference was noted. In the warm- blooded group death was instantaneous. In the cold-blooded group there was more or less muscular activity for varying periods of time, up to several hours. Why one animal behaves like a high-powered motor, set in high gear, exhausting itself by a high expenditure of energy, and another behaves like a low-powered motor, set in low gear, and therefore capable of carrying on indefinitely at a moderate expenditure of energy, has long been an enigma. This became our problem ..."--Amaon.co.uk product desc. (new ed.).
The bipolar theory of living processes
Explores the fundamental form of energy, the vital force and electrical properties, to which the reactions of life can be traced.