Every 10 minutes, a new person is added to the organ transplant list (organdonor.gov). That’s 144 people each and every day. With the help of human cadavers, those 144 people can be helped and be given the opportunity to a more prolonged life. Mary Roach uses her book to inform people of this and uses different rhetorical devices to convince people to join in on the donation. Mary Roach has always had an interest in science related topics, whether she is experiencing it first hand or is writing about it. She’s had jobs that span from working in a zoo to being a journalist, but now she is an author who specializes in science and humor, which is very evident in her popular 2003 Stiff. Her motivation for said book, was to show her audience that …show more content…
The first section uses imagery and metaphors to paint the picture of what is going on in the operation room and what the surgeon thinks about performing on a cadaver. She describes the operation process, “The harvesting of H is winding down. The last organs to be taken, the kidneys, are being brought up and separated from the depths of her open torso.” The way the surgery is being described makes it easy for the reader to feel like they are right there witnessing the event with Mary Roach. Although it is a heavy subject, Mary Roach lightens the mood by including a metaphor in the passage. She compares the red, bloody ice to a “Cherry Sno-Kone”, which provides some comedy for the reader so they aren’t too engrossed in the gory thought of the situation. She adds in even more humor when she describes the veins and arteries, “like spare sweater buttons”, because they can be sewn back together, like a button can be on clothing. Mary Roach’s use of imagery and humor helps the reader picture the organ donation process while still keeping the passage not too …show more content…
The last two paragraphs of the passage focus on the use of pathos. Roach says “To be able, as a dead person, to make a gift of this magnitude is phenomenal. Most people don’t manage this sort of thing while they’re alive”. When people read this, it makes them want to be able to take part in something so spectacular. She then goes on to appeal to logic, “It is astounding to me, and achingly sad, that with eighty thousand people on the waiting list for donated hearts and livers and kidneys, with sixteen a day dying there on that list, that more than half of the people in the position H’s family was in will say no, will choose to burn those organs or let them rot”. The statistics really make people think. What’s the point in wasting organs that could help another human being stay alive? “We abide the surgeon’s scalpel to save our own live, our loved ones’ lives, but not to save a stranger’s life”. If we want to be able to help our own loved ones, we should also want to help someone else’s loved
In the Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot, the author demonstrates the harsh realities that many African Americans faced in the medical and scientific field during the mid 20th century. The author shows the unjust practices of this time period through interviews with the Lacks family and medical professionals. These harsh realities are proven when Skloot talks to Henrietta’s family. Henrietta’s husband, Day, explains how they took samples from Henrietta’s body without consent when Skloot writes, “Day clenched his remaining three teeth. "I didn't sign no papers," he said.
While the list includes several unique possibilities, it isn’t necessary to understand the story. The use of footnotes allows Roach to impart what she thinks is thought-provoking, even if it isn’t part of the experience she is currently relating. The archer in the image represents the reader. The reader can continue to read the main story and skip the footnotes. Like an archer is expected to aim for the bullseye, a reader is supposed to finish the book.
Yet when looking over the entirety of it, it seems that Roach uses sequential structure to manipulate the readers into possibly donating their bodies to science by giving a clear-cut explanation of how the organ extraction procedure works. This is effective because when trying to persuade a person into doing something that requires a large amount of commitment, people usually want to know exactly what they're getting into-- no ambiguity, no bias, and nothing misleading. The beginning of the excerpt contains graphic imagery, some of which is shown through similes, depicting the removal of cadaver H’s internal organs in order to donate them to living humans who need them. In the section she uses descriptive phrases such as “‘Cherry Sno-Kone’” and the simile “cutting off veins and arteries to be included, like spare sweater buttons” to implant a vivid illustration of the scene in the reader’s mind. By using this imagery, Roach places the reader into the situation she’s recreating in order to make it easier to manipulate or convince them to donate their organs after death.
This rhetorical strategy has a great effect on the book as a whole in a way that Roach often uses allows the reader to imagine things as they would like while still getting her purpose across- to donate your body to
In this work of nonfiction, Rebecca Skloot writes about the life of a woman that unknowingly supplied her cells to scientific research. Additionally, Skloot expresses issues such as race, scientific methods, class, and ethics, that were raised by the HeLa cells. The novel commences with a quote by Elie Wiesel from The Nazi Doctors and the Nuremberg code. The quote follows “ We must not see any person as an abstraction. Instead, we must see in every person a universe with its own secrets, with its own treasures, with its own sources of anguish and with some measure of triumph”.
Doctors are infamous for their unreadable writing; Richard Selzer is not one of those doctors. A talented surgeon, Selzer has garnered critical acclaim for his captivating operating room tales, and rightfully so. A perfect exhibition of this is The Knife, a detailed illustration of a surgery. What may seem like an uninteresting event is made mesmerizing by Selzer’s magnificent account of the human body and the meticulousness that goes into repairing it. The rhetorical appeals, tone, and figurative language that Selzer uses throughout The Knife provide the reader with a vivid description of the sacred process of surgery.
During the previous decades, society’s behavior with regard to organ donation remains reluctant. A survey showed that although people plainly accept to offer their organs for transplantation, when a person dies, his or her relatives often refuse donation. To be able
Unit 1: Organ Donation Name: Kayden Mataafa Class: HED121A Introduction Organ donation within Australia is something society neglects, many barriers prevent Australians from knowing about donation, and how to go about donating. Organ donation is a life-saving and life-transforming medical process. Organ and tissue donation involves removing organs and tissues from someone who has died (a donor) and transplanting them into someone who, in many cases, is very ill or dying (a recipient) (Donatelife.gov.au, 2018). A donor within Australia cannot decide individually on whether they can or want to donate, in the end the family are always the final deciders in matters regarding organ donation. The purpose of this task is to incorporate the Ottawa
If I was introducing this topic to an audience who knew nothing about it, I would start with explaining what organ donors do. When someone registers as
The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks tells the story of Henrietta, an African-American woman whose cells were used to create the first immortal human cell line. Told through the eyes of her daughter, Deborah Lacks, aided by journalist Rebecca Skloot. Deborah wanted to learn about her mother, and to understand how the unauthorized harvesting of Lacks cancerous cells in 1951 led to unprecedented medical breakthroughs, changing countless lives and the face of medicine forever. It is a story of medical arrogance and triumph, race, poverty and deep friendship between the unlikeliest people. There had been many books published about Henrietta’s cells, but nothing about Henrietta’s personality, experiences, feeling, life style etc.
Henrietta Lacks The purpose of Rebecca Skloot’s book, “The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks,” is to tell the story of Henrietta Lacks, her illness, and how she completely changed science without even knowing it. Henrietta Lacks, a name that had been known to the world only as HeLa up until recent years; the first two letters of a name that belonged to a poor African American tobacco farmer. Henrietta Lacks was a woman who died of cervical cancer in 1951 and HeLa, the line of cells taken from Henrietta that were the first line of cells to reproduce and survive in the lab indefinitely.
The short story “The Knife” utilizes various forms of diction to strengthen the quality of the text. He uses imagery in order to draw the audience into the story. Vivid phrases, such as “the tight click of clamps” and “the tough fibrous sheet” create a description that resonates with the audience. Selzer uses diction to create the tone and mood of the story. In the opening paragraph, his word choice suggests that the speaker is a murderer; in later paragraphs, it is implied that the speaker is a surgeon trying to save a patient.
Racism in The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks Imagine your mother, sister, wife, or cousin was diagnosed with cervical cancer and you believed the doctors were doing everything in their power to help her. Only later you discovered her cells were used for research without consent and she was not properly informed of the risks of her treatment due to her race. This story happened and is told by Rebecca Skloot in The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks. Skloot use of narrative and her writing style enhances the understanding of the story. Henrietta Lacks was a young black woman who was diagnosed with cervical cancer at John Hopkins Hospital.
An essential part of modern society relied on trust, especially the trust of doctors and scientists. People had the right to make an informed decision about their bodies and body parts. People had a right to their body parts, both attached and cell samples collected by doctors. The actions that the medical professions made will continue to affect future generations in both positive and negative ways. In the contemporary biographical novel, the Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, Rebecca Skloot used logical opinions to argue about the importance of consent to reveal the lack of morality from those in the medical field which continues to persist today.
Who is anyone to take the right of life from someone, just because you are being selfish and have no beneficial use for your organs, when someone is dying because they need an organ of yours? I have to agree, that if organ donations did become legal, it would change the underlying meaning of organ donations, it wouldn’t be because you truly want to help people. But even if you don’t have a choice, you would still be saving someone’s life, which is heroic. We should have compassion for people, because we never know if that could be us one