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BRENT DEAN ROBBINS
THE MEDICALIZED BODY

AND ANESTHETIC CULTURE
THE CADAVER, THE MEMORIAL BODY,
AND THE RECOVERY OF LIVED EXPERIENCE
The Medicalized Body and Anesthetic Culture
Brent Dean Robbins
The Medicalized
Body and Anesthetic
Culture
The Cadaver, the Memorial Body, and the Recovery
of Lived Experience
Brent Dean Robbins
Department of Psychology
Point Park University
Pittsburgh, PA, USA
ISBN 978-1-349-95355-4 ISBN 978-1-349-95356-1 (eBook)

https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-349-95356-1
Library of Congress Control Number: 2018934665
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For my Father, John R. Robbins
Acknowledgements
This book has been a long journey of over two decades of scholarship,
completed over a career as a graduate student in clinical psychology at
Duquesne University, and two tenure-track professorships at Daemen
College and Point Park University.
I am grateful to my mentors, Michael Sipiora and Eva-Maria Simms,
who introduced me to metabletic phenomenology through the work of
Robert Romanyshyn and J. H. van den Berg. At Daemen College, my
research on medical students would not have been possible without the
help of Ashley Tomaka, Gary Styn, Joel Patterson, and Cara Innus. At
Point Park University, my scholarship has been deeply enriched through
hours of conversation with my friend and colleague, Robert McInerney.
Seminal scholarship by others has been formative for my investiga-
tions, including Carolyn Merchant’s work on Enlightenment views of
women and nature, Martha Nussbaum’s taxonomy of forms of objec-
tification, Michael Allen Gillespie’s examination of the impact of nomi-
nalism on modern and postmodern thought, Nick Haslam’s theoretical
model of dehumanization, Katherine Park’s historical scholarship on the
history of cadaver dissection, Mary Watkins and Helene Shulman’s schol-
arship on liberation psychology, Ernest Becker’s existential theory,
and the many psychologists who have contributed to the empirical
investigation of terror management theory, including among them Jeff
Greenberg, Sheldon Solomon, Tom Pyszczynski, Jamie Goldenberg, and
my former student from Allegheny College, Matt Motyl. Continental
philosophers have also been deeply formative for my thinking,
vii
viii Acknowledgements
especially Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger, Maurice Merleau-Ponty,

Emmanuel Levinas, Max Scheler, Paul Ricoeur, Erich Fromm, and Rene
Girard.
For shaping my critical faculties regarding critical psychiatry, I am
indebted to Daniel Burston, R. D. Laing, Robert Whitaker, Sharna
Olfman, Peter Kinderman, Lisa Cosgrove, Allen Frances, Sarah Kamens,
and many others.
I am also grateful to the many colleagues who have supported and
challenged me through my involvement in Society from Humanistic
Psychology, including Richard Bargdill, Harris Friedman, Frank Farley,
Jonathan Raskin, Gina Belton, Louis Hoffman, Shawn Rubin, Todd
Dubose, Justin Karter, Kevin Keenan, Chloe Detrick, David Cain,
Donna Rockwell, Scott Churchill, Fred Wertz, Rodger Broome, Candice
Hershman, Kevin Keenan, Connie Kellogg, Brent Potter, Amanda Lowe,
Kirk Schneider, Tom Greening, Robert Stolorow, Daniel Helminiak,
Krishna Kumar, Sarah Kass, Nathaniel Granger, Jr., Lisa Vallejos, Ilene
Serlin, Trisha Nash, Drake Spaeth, Theopia Jackson, Brian Hanna, Paul
Wong, David St. John, Heidi Levitt, and many others, who have been
like a second family over the years.
For spiritual formation, I must thank my pastor, Fr. Richard Infante,
Mike Aquilina, Don Fontana, Sam Arnone, David Mills, Andrew Purcell,
Jack Nelson, and Michael Liccione, to name a few guiding lights.
Most importantly, I owe an enormous debt of gratitude to my family,
who have sacrificed many hours of time with me so that I could com-
plete this work and who are the centre of my life. My wife, April, is the
one person without whom I cannot imagine where I would be. She’s my
compass, my heart. My son Dean is also a joy who always makes him-
self available for conversations about my work, and not only does he pay
attention and express interest, his own research has contributed substan-
tially to my thinking—a feat that is more than impressive considering he
is merely 14 years of age. My youngest, Dominic, deserves praise for his
patience, over the many times I had to delay a game or outing to finish
one last edit which turned into yet another and another. My mother has
been the most supportive and encouraging parent one could ask for and
always ready to lend an ear, emotional support, and even financial sup-
port whenever we needed it. This book is dedicated to my father, who
I cared for in his final days, often typing as I sat by his bedside. After
he lost his speaking voice to a mysterious neurological disease, I told
him this book would be dedicated to him. The memory of his smile will
Acknowledgements ix
warm my heart always. Thanks to Kelli (and many family members) for
taking good care of him (and me) in the twilight of his days.
Above all, I thank God, who like a patient father, puts up with my
protests in the face of human suffering and mortality, and gives me the
courage and faith, in the midst of it all, to hope and to love.
Contents
1 The Medicalized Body and Anesthetic Culture 1
2 Confronting the Cadaver: The Denial of Death in

Modern Medicine 19
3 Time and Efficiency in the Age of Calculative

Rationality: A Metabletic Entry Point 45
4 The Zombie Body of Linear Perspective Vision 65
5 Applications of Terror Management Theory 85
6 Terror Management in Medical Culture 105
7 Dehumanization in Modern Medicine and Science 127
8 Objectification of the Body as a Terror Management

Defense 151
9 The Objectification of Women and Nature 167
xi
xii Contents
10 The Role of the Medical Cadaver in the Genesis

of Enlightenment-Era Science and Technology 181
11 A Theological Context 205
12 The Changing Nature of the Cadaver 223
13 Anesthetic Culture 247
14 Psychiatry’s Collusion with Anesthetic Culture 275
15 Mindfulness—The Way of the Heart 301
Index 321
List of Figures
Fig. 2.1 Plate XXXI from the manuscript of Guy de Vigevano

of 1345 at Chantilly 30
Fig. 2.2 Vesalius, page xxi of De human corporis fabrica
(1543 edition) 31
Fig. 2.3 Anatomical drawing from page 174 of De human
corporis fabrica by Vesalius 33
Fig. 4.1 Drawing of horizon line and vanishing point
by Leon Battista Alberti 70
Fig. 12.1 Plate to Johann Dryander, Anatomia Mundini,
ad vetustissimorum, eorundemque aliquot manu
scriptorum, codicum fidem collata, iustoque suo
ordini restituta, Marpurg 1521, fol. 65r 238
Fig. 12.2 Title page to the second edition of Andreas Vesalius’
De Corporis humani fabrica, 1543 239
xiii
CHAPTER 1
The Medicalized Body

and Anesthetic Culture
Pixar has long been known for their state-of-the-art animated films, from
Toy Story to Finding Nemo. More recently, a beautiful, heart-warming
film, Coco, has introduced an international audience to an annual
Mexican ritual to honor the dead, Dias de Muertos, or the Day of the
Dead. In the movie, a prepubescent boy, named Miguel Rivera, discov-
ers his great-great grandfather played a guitar that resembled that of
the famous pop singer, Ernesto de la Cruz. In his quest to discover the
man’s true identity, he is thrust into the netherworld of the dead, where
he undergoes a great adventure to retrieve his long-lost and forgotten
ancestor.
The fictional narrative of the film introduces the audience to the
practices and rituals that are familiar to the Mexican people. Altars to
deceased relatives honor the dead with photographs, decorations that
include Mexican marigolds, intimate possessions and ofrendas, offer-
ings of favorite food and beverages of the deceased (Brandes, 2009).
The Mexican people celebrate the holiday between October 31 and
November 2, the period of time established by the Roman Catholic tra-
dition for the celebration of All Hallows’ Eve, or Halloween, All Saints’
Day, and All Souls’ Day, designated for remembrance of saints and loved
ones who have passed away.
In watching the film, I was reminded of similar rituals the world over,
most commonly found in indigenous cultures, and especially common in
South America, which honor the dead in a variety of ritual celebrations
similar to the Mexican tradition. For example, I recalled the Haitian
© The Author(s) 2018 1

B. D. Robbins, The Medicalized Body and Anesthetic Culture,
https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-349-95356-1_1
2 B. D. Robbins
Vodou practice of offering animal sacrifices, a chicken for example, to the

Gods, or lwa, which include among them the dead who have passed on
into the spirit realm (Ramsey, 2011).
On May 5 of each year, the people of Bolivia celebrate Día de las
Ñatitas (Day of the Skulls), in which family members exhume the bones
of relatives three years after their interment. This ritual, dating back to
indigenous tradition, allows the family to preserve the skulls of family in
their homes, where they are believed to offer protection to the house-
hold throughout the year. In November, the skulls are gifted with offer-
ings, such as a crown of flowers, cigarettes, and alcohol (Arguinzoni,
2016).
In contrast, contemporary North American and European practices
related to the dead have shifted quite dramatically over the past several
centuries. Whereas the church cemetery had once been located in the
center of town, burials in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries have
tended to occur in cemeteries located outside the commercial areas of
cities, in more rural and decentered locations, or the practice of crema-
tion has replaced the burial (Aries, 1975).
Prior to the nineteenth century, the family was primarily responsible
for care of the dying and dead. The process of dying and preparation
of the dead was a highly visible and ritualized process, even to children,
which by the twentieth century, with the proliferation of hospitals and
funeral homes, was largely taken over by professionals. As a result, prepa-
ration of the dead has become increasingly invisible and the relationship
to the deceased has become more distant, both spatially and emotionally
(DeSpelder & Strickland, 1992; Gordon & Marshall, 2000; Johnson,
2018; O’Connor, 1986). As late as early twentieth century, the liv-
ing room of the family home was known as the “Death Room,” due to
its role in housing the deceased during the funeral wake. Today, most
deaths occur in hospitals, and funerals are held in funeral homes where
embalming and preparation of the body occur out of sight and mind of
the mourning family. As a consequence, death has become more sani-
tized, and non-professional mourners are preserved from the encoun-
ter with the process of decay and dissolution of the body of the dead.
Obviously, there are practical benefits to these arrangements, not least
of which is sanitation and protection from potential contagion. But the
downsides are apparent, too, since the invisibility of death fosters, in our
daily lives, a different, more aloof relationship to death, and enables a
social pattern of death denial (Aries, 1975).
1 THE MEDICALIZED BODY AND ANESTHETIC CULTURE 3
The history of San Francisco offers a poignant illustration of the place

of the dead in contemporary North American society. During the gold
rush, the population of San Francisco 49ers ballooned so quickly, and
contagious disease spread rapidly and claimed many lives. Cemeteries
in the region quickly filled and were kept far from the living (Brooks,
2017; Trufelman, 2017). By the late 1800s, the demand for land and
the desire of the living to distance themselves from the dead led to an
outcry to remove the human remains from cemeteries within the city
limits of San Francisco. By the turn of the twentieth century, burial of
new dead within the city was outlawed by the Board of Supervisors of
the County of San Francisco (Trufelman, 2017). In 1814, the city passed
an ordinance to begin a process to remove the dead from the city, to
be relocated to the town of Colma, roughly 10 miles South of the city.
Hundreds of thousands of bodies were disinterred and moved to new
burial sites in Colma. For the dead without living relatives, bodies were
relocated into mass graves and their tombstones were repurposed for use
in the oceans to prevent beach erosion or as masonry along the pathways
of Buena Vista Park.
In the transfer of the dead from San Francisco to Colma, a process
that took decades, partly as a result of legal battles, many bodies were
left behind and even to this day remain buried beneath the city’s infra-
structure (Brooks, 2017). During construction of University of San
Francisco’s Gleeson Library in the 1950s, for example, roughly 200 bod-
ies were discovered in the area that had been the Masonic Cemetery. In
1966, during the construction of the Hayes-Healy residence hall, more
human remains were discovered, and in 2011, as builders excavated
land for the Center for Science and Innovation, dozens of coffins, skel-
etons, and skulls were unearthed (Brooks, 2017). In the area that was
the Golden Gate Cemetery, workers developing land for the Legion of
Honor found somewhere in the neighborhood of 750 bodies. The state
of the bodies suggests previous excavators operated without respect for
the dead. They “just plowed through burial sites, and plumbers laid
pipes right through bodies and skeletons,” and headstones were callously
thrown into the ocean (Kingston, 1997, n.p.).
The disregard for the dead of San Francisco and its contrast with
indigenous cultures, such as in Mexico and Bolivia, where the remains of
the dead are celebrated and kept close to family, couldn’t be more stark.
This clash of cultures between White North American and European
attitudes toward the dead and indigenous people has more recently
4 B. D. Robbins
played out in protests of Native Americans in response to the Dakota

Access Pipeline project. When the pipeline threatened sacred burial
grounds at Standing Rock Indian Reservation, Native American peo-
ples united to resist the threat to the sacred land of the Sioux (Enzinna,
2017; McKenna, 2017; Ravitz, 2016). The Sioux people of Standing
Rock Reservation offer Protection Prayers to the dead in order to aid the
deceased in their passage from the land of the living to the spirit world.
If the burial ground is disturbed, they fear, the dead may remain caught
among the living and wander the land (Ravitz, 2016). Moreover, the
pipeline, according to the Sioux people, would bring a potential danger
to their supply of water from Lake Oahe, since the transport of crude oil
through the line would travel within close proximity to the Lake on its
way under the Missouri River (Enzinna, 2017).
When the protesters, who deemed themselves “water protectors,”
were attacked with dogs by private security guards, the Standing Rock
protest gained international attention (Enzinna, 2017). However, while
President Barack Obama halted construction of the pipeline in order to
commission more environmental research on its impact, 470,000 barrels
of crude oil now (as of 2018) flows through the pipeline due to a rever-
sal of Obama’s order upon the election of Donald Trump (McKenna,
2017).
For the Sioux people of Standing Rock, and the hundreds of Native
American tribes who joined them for the protest of the Dakota Access
Pipeline, the approval of the pipeline by President Trump is much more
than a setback. Many experience the event as a re-traumatization, the
opening of a deep and festering wound suffered by Native Americans
due to past wrongdoings by colonialist white people against indige-
nous people of America (Itkowitz, 2017). The continuation of the
pipeline project, for example, is a bitter reminder of the building of the
Oahe Dam by the Army Corp of Engineers which led to the flooding
of 56,000 acres of farm land on the Standing Rock reservation in the
1960s (McKenna, 2017). The Sioux people experience the pipeline as a
violation of the 1851 treaty which provided the Sioux with a much wider
range of land that, just a few decades later, led to an even greater restric-
tion of land after gold was found in the Black Hills (McKenna, 2017).
The ongoing violations of trust have contributed to historical trauma,
which has been linked to high rates of mental illness, alcoholism, pov-
erty, and suicide among Native American people (Brown-Rice, 2013).
The callous treatment of Native American people and disregard for

the health of ecosystems in the name of material gain, driven by greed,
are symptoms of a cultural sickness that I shall refer to as “anesthetic
consciousness.” As a state of mind, anesthetic consciousness refers to a
form of psychic numbing and is characterized by symptoms of alexithy-
mia and experiential avoidance. Alexithymia refers to an incapacity to
gain insight into one’s emotional life and the emotions of others, and
is associated with diminished empathy (Taylor, Bagby, & Parker, 1997).
Alexithymia is, itself, associated with experiential avoidance, an aversion
to the experience of unpleasant or aversive experience that is character-
ized by defensiveness and various forms of psychopathology (Kashdan,
Barrios, Forsyth, & Steger, 2006).
In this book, I will examine anesthetic consciousness as a cultural
habit ingrained in White European and North American colonialist cul-
ture, and that can be traced to habits of comportment that emerged in
the late Middle Ages and early Renaissance as a response to a conflu-
ence of social and historical events. As a cultural habit, anesthetic con-
sciousness is characterized by tendencies to objectify self, others, and the
natural world. Through an attitude of dispassionate concern, anesthetic
consciousness is associated with empathic disengagement and tenden-
cies toward exploitative attitudes toward other people and nature, vio-
lence, and expressions that range between the extremes of hedonism
and asceticism. As a state of mind, anesthetic consciousness tends to
express itself in quasi-dissociative attitudes in which mind and body are
experienced as split off from one another, which amounts to a kind of
self-objectification. As a perceptual habit and epistemological attitude,
it orients itself to the world through ongoing attempts to gain mastery
and control, and it seeks to manage risk through the acquisition of power
and domination. Beneath ongoing and paradoxically counterproductive
attempts at control, lurks the unexamined fear of death and sophisticated
and elusive strategies to deny mortality. Cutoff from the embodied, expe-
riential wisdom of the living organism through psychic numbing, the
victim of anesthetic consciousness fails to appropriately orient him- or
herself toward enriching and nourishing intrinsic needs, instead remain-
ing insatiably geared to extrinsic goals, such as the acquisition of material
goods, power, and status, which ultimately fail to satisfy and therefore
only amplify desire toward destructive ends.
Anesthetic consciousness has become a culturally normative and
socially rewarded attitude through influential social institutions which
6 B. D. Robbins
have cultivated detached concern as an epistemological ideal. To under-

stand its cultural roots, I will draw upon phenomenological, qualitative
research of medical students working with cadavers in gross anatomy.
The findings reveal how medical culture institutes a kind of anesthetic
consciousness that begins with the suppression of the memorial body
of the cadaver, thereby reducing the body specimen to a mechanism as
a basis for acquisition of power to heal and ultimately with the aim to
defeat death. The memorial body, in this case, refers to the body of the
cadaver which recalls the personhood of the deceased and the living body
of the donor. The body of the cadaver invites the student to imagina-
tively engage with the dead in their private lives. The qualitative data
reveal how the suppression of the memorial body of the cadaver initiates
students into an attitude of detached concern toward living patients and
through which the living body of patient and self become appropriated
through a form of mechanistic objectification.
Once the phenomenology of the medicalized body is sketched out
through the descriptions of medical students, I turn to the method of
metabletic phenomenology to examine the cultural genesis of medical
culture as worldview that emerged as a means to cope with the ubiq-
uity of death and dying in medical practice. Through a close reading of
historical evidence, interpreted through the lens of the psychology of
death denial, I aim to provide a range of evidence to support the hypoth-
esis that modern anatomy and its impact on medical practice has served
as an agent of cultural transformation. Medical dispassion, through the
suppression of the memorial body and the denial of the lived body of
everyday life, provided a template upon which the major innovations in
the arts and sciences would come to transform everyday life in ways that
would normalize and institutionalize anesthetic consciousness as a perva-
sive cultural pattern. I will trace the influence of anesthetic consciousness
on the birth of linear perspective art, the objectivist epistemology of the
new physics that gave birth to the Scientific Revolution, and the colonial
conquest of foreign peoples and their land which would radically trans-
form the world within just a few centuries of time.
Metabletic phenomenology interprets historical events through a
psychological lens. In this case, the history of the medicalized body is
informed not only by qualitative, phenomenological research on the
experience of the body; our cultural–historical analysis also draws
upon state-of-the-art empirical research in personality and social psy-
chology. The study of medical culture and its cultivation of anesthetic
consciousness are particularly informed by an enormous body of evi-

dence that has been generated in support of terror management theory.
Influenced by the work of Ernest Becker, terror management theory
studies how human experience and behavior is shaped by the various
ways we cope with the fact that we are creatures who die and not only
that, we live with an awareness of death as a fate that we bear with us and
that will befall not only ourselves but those we love.
With terror management theory as a guide, given its sound basis in
empirical psychological evidence, the examination of anesthetic con-
sciousness is provided with a secure foundation. Understood through
existential theory, and by examining its role in medicine and modern cul-
ture writ large, anesthetic consciousness can be thoroughly disclosed as
a sophisticated and powerful method of coping with human mortality—
an approach to coping with death that yields great utility but at a heavy
price of severing us from the experiential wisdom discovered through
lived embodiment.
When coupled with existential theory, metabletic phenomenology
is fully equipped to operate more optimally in the service of a cultural
therapy. In existential and depth-oriented psychotherapy, the individual
patient examines his or her past through a deep and passionate engage-
ment in a fully present mode of awareness, to the extent possible. As
the past is rediscovered and relived in the present, the client discovers a
renewed understanding of the past in the service of opening new orienta-
tions to the future. An existential approach to cultural history, informed
by metabletic phenomenology, operates in a similar way. Through an
examination of the past in light of its existential import, insights into our
historical origins enliven our collective imagination and point toward
new possibilities for ourselves and our relations to one another within
the communal body within which we participate.
Our existential analysis of anesthetic consciousness, as a cultural ther-
apy, will strive to reorient the collective consciousness of Western cul-
ture toward a renewal of our lived, embodied experience. To accomplish
this task, as in individual existential therapy, the rekindling of sensuous
awareness must begin with the courage to face our mortality and to
rediscover our relation to the past through a renewed appreciation for
what the dead can still teach us.
As I have suggested already, indigenous cultures provide us with
examples of how cultures can institute practices to encourage its people
to reconnect with the past through honoring the dead. Over the past
8 B. D. Robbins
centuries, as anesthetic consciousness has become a habit, modern cul-

ture has tended to keep the dead, and death, at a comfortable distance.
Like the town of San Francisco, we have tended to export death to the
outer limits of our cities, and to the extent that cities mirror the inner
landscape of our collective imagination, we have likewise managed to
keep our mortality at a psychological distance. However, cultural heal-
ing from historical traumas of the West will necessitate a return to lived
experience in order to authentically confront our mortality. Through a
return to lived experience, and a recovery of the memorial body, there
is hope for cultivation of new habits of mindful awareness, includ-
ing the rediscovery of the relational, embodied beings we are, with an
innate capacity for empathic engagement to care for one another. In the
end, our cultural therapeutics aims at the recovery of lived experience
for the greater good of rediscovering the dignity of the person, the care
of whom is the implicit meaning and purpose of medical theory and
practice.
This book is structured in order to move back and forth between
qualitative and quantitative research in psychology, and cultural and his-
torical analysis, so that insight into the psychology of individuals may
shed light on the psychological import of our collective existence as a
culture and society. The ongoing return to the psychological import of
medical culture, and its influence on psychology and society, provides the
backbone of the work. With that said, I can now describe how this com-
plex and multilayered analysis will unfold over the course of the book.
Confronting the Cadaver: The Denial

of Death in Modern Medicine
Through a cultural hermeneutic interpretation of the cadaver in the

history of modern medicine, Chapter 2 will argue that at least some
medical interpretations of embodiment serve as a form of death denial.
This analysis will draw on four major sources of evidence to support
this contention: (a) the history of cadaver dissection in Western medi-
cine, (b) diary entries by medical students taking a course in gross anat-
omy, (c) responses to a panel on cadaver dissection held at Daemen
College, and (d) interviews with Gunther von Hagens, the creator of
the “BodyWorlds” exhibit, which features plastinated corpses for the
purpose of “edutainment.” In each of these cases, the data suggest that
medical education works implicitly to manage death anxiety through a

set of defenses which conceal the nothingness of death. Namely by mak-
ing death into a concrete event, preserved for example in the form of the
cadaver or plastinated corpses, and by speaking rhetorically about death
as a mechanical process, the medical model of death conceals the existen-
tial terror that comes with the lived experience of death as the termina-
tion of existence.
Time and Efficiency in the Age of Calculative

Rationality: A Metabletic Entry Point
While a phenomenological study of medical students in gross anat-
omy provides some profound insights into the ambiguous status of the
cadaver and the suppression of the memorial body in medical education,
a deeper and more penetrating analysis requires an understanding of
medical culture within its larger historical context. Metabletic phenom-
enology, a psychological and historical approach to understanding the
changing nature of lived experience, can be utilized to illuminate how
the medical body emerges from within a peculiar, Western worldview. By
turning to a phenomenology of time, Chapter 3 situates medical culture
within a radical shift in the conception and experience of time in Western
culture. As the experience of time underwent a profound change, the
Western world, and medicine, became increasingly ordered for the pur-
pose of risk management as a coping mechanism for dealing with uncer-
tainty and human mortality. However, the emphasis on calculative
rationality for the purpose of risk containment paradoxically threatens to
undermine the conditions that make life meaningful and give it direction.
The Zombie Body of Linear Perspective Vision

The metabletic analysis of Western culture’s new conception and expe-
rience of time is further explored in Chapter 4. Time is examined for its
implications for an equally radical transformation in the conception and
experience of space and place. The emergence of the linear perspective
technique in Renaissance art, as developed by Brunelleschi and Alberti,
is systematically examined as a cultural artifact that uniquely discloses a
qualitative shift in the perception of spatiality, which in turn, implies a
transformation of lived embodiment. The lived embodiment of a culture
10 B. D. Robbins
informed by linear perspective vision is found to reflect the medical body

of the cadaver, whose memorial body has been neglected and suppressed
through a process of clinical detachment, expressed through an objectiv-
ist epistemology. The cultural myth of the zombie, within this context,
comes to be understood as a shadow of the neglected memorial body
and suppressed lived body that, within the cultural imagination, comes
to be replaced by the objectified body seen through the figure of the
medical cadaver.
Applications of Terror Management Theory

The suppression of the memorial body in gross anatomy is revelatory
of modern medicine’s overall coping mechanism for coping with the
ubiquity of death, dying and human suffering encountered in medical
practice. The cost of this style of coping includes a diminished capac-
ity for empathy in medical practitioners. A fuller comprehension of the
compensatory, defense mechanisms of modern medicine, as a means
of coping with mortality, requires a more systematic overview of terror
management theory, which is the focus of Chapter 5. In general, people
cope with death through two basic avenues, the enhancement of self-es-
teem and the protection of one’s cultural worldview. Neuroscientific evi-
dence has shown a brain area called the insula plays an important role in
the self-regulation of emotions associated with terror management, with
regard to both self-esteem and empathic engagement with others. These
principles of terror management theory provide a framework to unlock
modern medicine’s unique and rather ingenuous strategies for the man-
agement of death anxiety through cognitive and neurological manage-
ment of self-worth and worldview defense of medical culture.
Terror Management in Medical Culture

Chapter 6 explores the implications of terror management theory for a
deeper and more penetrating insight into the terror management func-
tions of medical culture. The contemporary physician finds him or herself
in a precarious position as a cultural hero who not only serves medic-
inal functions, but also is often expected to answer questions of deep
moral and spiritual import. Physicians, in this latter sense, function like
secular priests. A common motivation for entering medical school is a
desire for respect, an extrinsic motivation that, when dominant, tends to
be associated with surface learning driven by fear of failure, neuroticism,

and greater risk of exhaustion. In contrast, the motivation to enter med-
icine in order to help people seems to serve a protective function. These
research findings can be clarified in light of Ernest Becker’s theory that
self-esteem functions to protect the self against anxiety and mortal con-
cerns. In the case of medicine, the role of doctor can be understood as a
cultural hero-project. When the self-esteem of the physician is weakened,
the physician is exposed to increased risk of burnout. To protect self-
esteem, physicians can become prone to cognitive biases to protect self-
worth, which can lead to “medical narcissism” and “defensive medicine”
based on self-serving attributions that raise the risk of medical error.
Worldview defense in medicine is linked to racism, sexism, and stigma-
tization of certain out-groups by medical professionals. Finally, medical
scientism can operate as a form of existential dogmatism that, while serv-
ing as a worldview defense for medical professionals, can nevertheless
undermine the ends of science as an open-ended inquiry and put physi-
cians in conflict with patients and their families who differ in worldview.
Dehumanization in Modern Medicine and Science

In Chapter 7, the analysis explores how modern medicine and science
share propensities to objectify and dehumanize the person. The concept
of the person has been a neglected area of scholarship in medicine. This
neglect is related to the emphasis on third-person perspective method-
ologies that dominate the social sciences and medicine. A more ade-
quate comprehension of personhood requires holistic and non-reductive
approaches to science that integrate first-person and second-person per-
spectives of the person along with third-person perspectives. Resistance
to a paradigm shift in science, which would integrate qualitative and
quantitative methodologies, can be understood as defensive attempts to
maintain the existential dogmatism wedded to scientism and technization
as the dominant discourse of medicine, psychiatry, and psychology. This
defensiveness can, itself, be understood as a worldview defense that pro-
vides protection against anxiety linked to mortality concerns. However,
the dehumanization of the patient and indirectly the dehumanization of
the doctor and other medical professionals are unintended but devastat-
ing consequences of this existential dogmatism that reduces the person
to the status of a cadaver. Neuroscientific evidence demonstrates that this
reductive approach to the body is linked to the suppression of empathy
12 B. D. Robbins
and, consequently, is counterproductive to medical practice in which

healing relationships are essential for positive medical outcomes.
Objectification of the Body

as a Terror Management Defense
Cartesian subject–object metaphysics operative in medical discourse ren-

ders it impossible to grapple with the ambiguity of the cadaver. Within
this framework, the cadaver seems to present itself as an object, but an
object haunted by the subjectivity of the deceased. Chapter 8 seeks a
proper orientation to the ambiguity of the cadaver through an appreci-
ation of the distinction between the cadaver and the lived body. When
understood in light of the lived body, the cadaver can be more appro-
priately contextualized as an ambiguity that pivots on the dual axis of an
anatomical artifact versus a memorial body. When the cadaver becomes
too closely identified with the living patient, medicine tends to conflate
the object-cadaver with the embodied subject of the living patient. Just
as suppression of the memorial body serves a terror management func-
tion, however, the objectification of the living patient is also a coping
mechanism in the face of mortal risk; yet as a consequence, the patient is
dehumanized. The dehumanization of the patient in medical discourse
can be understood as the expression of a cultural neurosis by which
awareness of death is evaded by avoidance of bodily awareness.
The Objectification of Women and Nature

Chapter 9 explores how dehumanization as a terror management defense
is especially prone to impact attitudes and behaviors toward women. A
compelling body of evidence demonstrates that reminders of feminine
reproductive functions, including menstruation, lactation, and preg-
nancy, are typically associated with nature. Reminders of the creaturely
aspects of women and thoughts about nature tend to trigger anxieties
about death and dying. As a result, the animalistic or mechanistic objec-
tification of women serves a terror management function. Animalistic
objectification reduces the woman to an object that is less than human,
whereas mechanistic objectification idealizes the feminine body as a
means to suppress creaturely aspects of feminine reproduction that are
experienced as threatening. Objectification can take on various forms,
which are explored systematically.
The Role of the Medical Cadaver in the Genesis

of Enlightenment-Era Science and Technology
Between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries, a profound cultural shift

took place. In Chapter 10, a review of Carolyn Merchant’s classic text,
The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology and the Scientific Revolution, illu-
minates how the exploitation of the natural world hinged upon the iden-
tification of women’s bodies with the natural world. The cosmos of the
Middle Ages and Renaissance was understood to be an integrated, holis-
tic, and hierarchical order in harmonious relation, wherein the organism
of the body reflected the intrinsic natural order of the larger cosmos.
With the revival of Neoplatonism in the Renaissance, the intellectual cli-
mate placed increasing emphasis on the separation of matter and form,
the duality of appearance and form, and mathematical models geared
toward the manipulation of matter. The devaluing of the natural world
corresponded to the devaluing and persecution of women, including the
witch trials and exclusion of women from their previous role in medicine,
particularly in the role of midwife. A pervasive theme of objectification
provided the basis for the rationalization of cruelty and violence in var-
ied forms, including experimentation upon animals, the subjugation and
domination of women, the enslavement of black people, the exploita-
tion of workers, and the desecration of the natural world. The defensive
objectification of the body, women, and nature emerged as a cultural
strategy for coping with a religious crisis.
A Theological Context
Ernest Becker’s existential theory posits that an ideal society will provide
for its members an adequate symbolic action system to propel a cultural
hero-project. In his assessment, modern society’s crisis of meaning leaves
us vulnerable to death anxiety and neurosis. Consistent with Becker’s
evaluation of modern society’s shortcomings, Chapter 11 provides
an assessment of how modern culture in the West erupts from out of
a religious crisis. This crisis provided the background against which the
mechanistic and objectifying view of the body and nature appear as dom-
inant themes. In the Middle Ages, Trinitarian theology and Christology
informed a relational conception of the cosmos, in which the body was
experienced as sacred, infused with supernatural grace through the incar-
nation, and intrinsically harmonious with nature. The nominalist revolt
14 B. D. Robbins
against Scholasticism, as described by Michael Allen Gillespie, led to a

radical change in Western culture’s understanding of God, nature, per-
sonhood, and the body. This theological transformation was preceded by
major world events, including the Great Schism, the Hundred Years War,
the Black Death, and the Crusades, which challenged the Medieval view
of the cosmos and set the stage for the new mechanical philosophy of the
Enlightenment. Fundamental to this shift in worldview was a transfor-
mation of the Medieval view of the body as sacred into the profane body
described by modern anatomy.
The Changing Nature of the Cadaver

The first documented autopsies occurred in the late Middle Ages during
the thirteenth century. Based on research by Katherine Park, Chapter 12
outlines how dissection of the body in the Middle Ages remained an
operation performed upon the sacred bodies of revered saintly women
and family members. However, as dissection was adopted in the ser-
vice of medical education, and for the purpose of identifying normative
anatomical structures in the fourteenth century, anatomical dissection
focused on the dissection of foreign criminals. By restricting dissection
to unknown and stigmatized individuals, dissection in medical schools
lent themselves to a defensive style of psychological distancing from the
memorial body of the cadaver. Vesalius exploited the new linear per-
spective technique in art for his illustrations as a means to enhance an
attitude of detached concern in relation to his anatomical specimens.
Historical evidence linking Vesalius to Galileo through mutual influences
at University of Padua strongly suggests Vesalius’ attitude of detached
concern informed and shaped the epistemological orientation of the new
physics of Galileo. This epistemological attitude was also informed by
the nascent Neoplatonism emerging in the elite circles of learned men
in Northern Italy, especially through the influence of Toscanelli. As
Vesalius’ desacralized attitude toward the cadaver gained ascendency, the
Church began to emphasize the incorruptibility of saintly bodies.
Anesthetic Culture
By use of the historical phenomenological method of metabletics,
Chapter 13 traces the cultural habit of anesthetic consciousness to the
attitude of detached concern instituted through subculture of modern
anatomical medicine and medical practice. This cultural habit and its ten-
dencies toward mechanistic objectification nature, the body, and others
are seen through as a template for the objectivist metaphysics and episte-
mology of detached objectivity. This detached objectivity, in turn, forms
the basis of mastery through prediction and control in modern culture.
The metabletic analysis highlights two periods of history that illustrate
how a confluence of influences in medicine, art, theology, and the new
science gave birth to a cultural habit of anesthetic consciousness. An
examination of the figure of Paolo dal Pozzo Toscanelli reveals his cen-
tral role as a cultural agent, whose influence contributed to the nomi-
nalist revolution, the revival of Neoplatonism in the Renaissance, the
development of linear perspective technique in art, the new anatomy of
Vesalius, the new physics of Galileo, and the launch of colonialism at the
Council of Florence, which contributed to Christopher Columbus’ dis-
covery of the New World. A focus on America in the 1830s reveals how
the anesthetic culture of the Enlightenment casted a shadow that cul-
minated in the invention of medical anesthesia, the genocide of Native
Americans, the emergence of the Temperance Movement, and the birth
of consumerism beginning with the first department story, A. J. Stewart
and Company. These historical developments are analyzed to reveal their
implicit connection as expressions of a new Gnosticism which functions
anesthetically to escape experience through psychic numbing.
Psychiatry’s Collusion with Anesthetic Culture

As a cultural habit, anesthetic consciousness can foster extreme, dys-
functional behavior in vulnerable individuals. The lone mass shooter is
among one of many examples of pathological behavior that can be linked
to anesthetic culture. In Chapter 14, an in-depth case study of Las Vegas
shooter Stephen Paddock will illustrate how anesthetic consciousness
likely played a key role in Paddock’s violent behavior. Anesthetic con-
sciousness can be linked to Paddock’s case, including his sociopathic
father, pathological gambling, aloof social behavior, materialistic val-
ues, conformity to toxic masculine norms, and violent behavior—all of
which have been associated with hypoactivity in the insula of the brain
and are associated with severely impoverished empathy and sympathy
for others. When Paddock’s physician prescribed him a benzodiazepine
drug to treat his anxiety, this likely pushed him over the edge into vio-
lent behavior. Paddock’s case is a microcosm of a larger, problematic
16 B. D. Robbins
cultural pattern in which psychiatry tends to collude with anesthetic

consciousness.
Mindfulness—The Way of the Heart

Anesthetic consciousness is an obstacle to the organismic valuing pro-
cess by which people orient themselves to intrinsically motivated, felt val-
ues, which is the basis for experiential wisdom. As a coping mechanism
in response to the human finitude and mortality, it is a self-defeating,
maladaptive strategy. In contrast, Chapter 15 illustrates how the cultiva-
tion of mindfulness creates present-centered, embodied awareness of felt
values which enhances the organismic valuing process, and becomes a
basis for authentic life review by which we can come to terms with death
and dying. Through the cultivation of mindfulness as a style of being,
the person develops attentive awareness of interoceptive feedback from
the body, which cultivates compassionate and empathic engagement
with others. As a prescription for the detached attitude of medical cul-
ture, mindfulness cultivates a phenomenological orientation by which a
relational ontology can be recovered, and an experiential revolution in
science can be borne out. Through a phenomenological orientation to
the body, an anatomy of the relational body can rediscover the circuit of
intentional consciousness linking brain, heart, and others as the basis for
science and medical practices founded on ethical responsiveness to the
suffering of the other.
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CHAPTER 2
Confronting the Cadaver: The Denial

of Death in Modern Medicine
With some consideration of the role of the cadaver in the history of

modern medicine, I aim to provoke the reader to seriously consider that
at least some medical interpretations of embodiment serve as a form of
death denial. I will point to several sources of evidence to support this
contention, including: (a) the history of cadaver dissection in Western
medicine (though, I will have more to say about this in Chapter 3),
(b) diary entries of medical students taking a course in gross anatomy
and responses to a panel on cadaver dissection I witnessed at Daemen
College, and (c) interviews with Gunther von Hagens, the creator of the
“Bodyworlds” exhibit, which features plastinated corpses for the pur-
pose of “edutainment.” In each of these cases, the evidence indicates
that medical education often works implicitly to manage death anxiety
through a set of sophisticated defense mechanisms which conceal the
nothingness of death. Namely, by making death into a concrete event,
preserved for example in the form of the cadaver or a plastinated corpse,
and by speaking rhetorically about death as a mechanical process, the
medical model of death conceals the existential terror that comes with
the lived experience of death as the termination of existence.
A key finding is that modern anatomy and medicine, by focusing on
the mechanical body of the cadaver, tend also to avoid recognition of
what I call the “memorial body” of the mourned person. The loss of dis-
tinction between the memorial body—a recollection of the lived body
of the deceased—and the cadaver has led to a tendency in medicine, and
in the larger culture, to deny the existence of the lived body. I contend
© The Author(s) 2018 19

B. D. Robbins, The Medicalized Body and Anesthetic Culture,
https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-349-95356-1_2
20 B. D. Robbins
that this denial of the lived body serves as a form of death denial by
concealing what is, in fact, existentially lost with death: the self as lived
body nested in relationships within the living world. While it will take
several chapters to fully “flesh out” this claim, this chapter will focus on
exposing how what appears to be a sober and rational view of death as
a mechanical malfunction of the body, when viewed existentially, can
be understood, rather, as a highly advanced and typically unacknowl-
edged defense mechanism against death as an existential possibility for
ourselves.
When we look at religious worldviews that have become more mar-
ginalized in our culture, and which have been exposed to radical cri-
tiques by the likes of Nietzsche, Feuerbach, Marx, and Freud, we have
become accustomed to judging supernatural belief in the afterlife as
quaint and naïve delusions by which people protect themselves against
death anxiety and other sources of human anxiety and misery, such as
injustice or servitude. But a particularly medical version of denying death
has been too close to us—too ingrained in modern, Western conceptions
of reality—for it to be easily exposed as a similar form of death denial.
I hope to demonstrate that a “medical model” of death, however, does
serve just such a function and that this seemingly more “rational” form
of death denial is just as prone to compensatory distortions of perception
as the religious beliefs we are quick to scorn. Once we can see through
the delusions of the “medical model” of death, we’ll find ourselves in
a better position to see through other, similar distortions and delusions
of the “medical model” as it becomes applied to psychiatry. To lift the
veil on the “medical model” of death, in turn, exposes a different but
suppressed understanding of the body (and by implication, the mind),
which in turn will demonstrate some fallacies at the roots of the concep-
tual foundations of psychiatry. By exposing these fallacies, we will be bet-
ter prepared to examine a potential alternative approach to working with
people who suffer.
Death Denial
In The Denial of Death, Ernest Becker (1973) postulated that identifi-
cation with human systems of meaning—in essence, culture—serves as a
buffer against death anxiety. As Becker (1973) wrote:
2 CONFRONTING THE CADAVER … 21
The idea of death, the fear of it, haunts the human animal like nothing
else; it is a mainspring of human activity—designed largely to avoid the
fatality of death, to overcome it by denying in some way that it is the final
destiny of man. (p. 11)
The awareness of mortality—matched with a strong motive for sur-

vival—necessitates the creative use of cognitive mechanisms for man-
aging, coping with, or otherwise defending against the intense fear of
death. While the individual dies, symbolic systems endure for long peri-
ods of time, if not forever. By identifying with country through patri-
otism or a religious worldview through faith, a person is afforded some
semblance of immortality.
Becker’s theory has been developed into a testable social psycholog-
ical theory called terror management theory (Greenberg, Solomon, &
Pyszczynski, 1997). According to this theory, mortality salience is pre-
dicted to trigger death anxiety, which in turn leads the person to use
conscious and/or unconscious strategies to bolster his or her sense
of self-worth and significance in face of the threat that his or her exist-
ence may lack ultimate meaning (Pyszczynski, Greenberg, & Solomon,
1999). Conscious, proximal, or explicit cognitive strategies may include
thoughts about pushing the time of death back to a later date in one’s
life by, for example, imagining one’s own death occurring much later in
life during old age surrounded by loved ones. Unconscious, distal, or
implicit cognitive strategies for coping with death anxiety include cling-
ing more vehemently to one’s cultural worldview or seeking ways to
boost self-esteem. These hypotheses of terror management theory have
been tested and largely supported in over 150 different empirical studies
over the past several decades (Greenberg & Arndt, 2011).
Terror management theory is built upon the basic insight that homo
sapiens, like other living creatures, were born with a nervous system
designed to respond to dangers by mobilizing the body to take action
to cope with the threat (Greenberg & Arndt, 2011). The fight-or-flight
response, linked to activity in an important midbrain structure of the
limbic system, called the amygdala, corresponds to the subjective expe-
rience of fear and anxiety (Amaral & Adolphs, 2015; Davis & Whalen,
2001; Fox, Oler, Tromp, Fudge, & Kalin, 2015; LeDoux, 2000). The
subjective experience of fear and anxiety corresponds to felt bodily sensa-
tions of physiological activity by which the body prepares to take action
against external threats (Laird & Lacasse, 2014). The midbrain structure
22 B. D. Robbins
closely linked to emotions in response to threat, called the amygdala,

seems to play an important role in monitoring changes in our heart rate
and respiration (Khalsa, Feinstein, Adolphs, Li, & Hurlemann, 2016),
thus providing feedback to our brain about our body’s readiness to cope
with hazards that confront us. Another important structure of the cor-
tex, the insula, plays a vital role in gathering interoceptive feedback from
the felt sensations of the body, including the heart, which provides the
basis for insight into the emotions of one’s self as well as empathic res-
onance with the emotions of others (Singer, Critchley, & Preuschoff,
2009; Zaki, Davis, & Ochsner, 2012).
In fear and anxiety, we feel a pounding in our chest corresponding to
an increased heart rate, by which the supply of blood is better enabled to
usher nutrients to muscular cells to keep them moving (Ehlers, Margraf,
Roth, Taylor, & Birbaumer, 1988). We feel the clamminess of our hands
and the sweat on our brow as skin conductance increases, an indirect
indication of the body’s coolant system designed to keep the body at a
moderate temperature as it goes into action with an increased metabo-
lism, which burns energy at an increased pace (Epstein & Roupenian,
1970). We feel the rush of hormones that initiate rapid metabolism of
sugar and conversion of the body’s store of energy, which flows into the
blood to enable the muscles to make use of that energy to keep moving
and to stay strong (Rodrigues, LeDoux, & Sapolsky, 2009). For this rea-
son, stress increases blood glucose levels and impairs control of blood
sugar in diabetic patients (Halford, Cuddihy, & Mortimer, 1990). Also
in fear and anxiety, we may feel a coldness in our upper extremities as the
blood flow rushes to our lower torso and legs, to prepare the body for
flight, or perhaps as an adaptation to slow loss of blood in the event of
injury (Stemmler, Heldmann, Pauls, & Scherer, 2001). Or alternatively,
if the body prepares to fight, we may feel the heat of the blood flowing
into our upper extremities, getting them ready for enhanced grasping,
punching, and other aggressive behaviors. When flight from a threat is
our primary goal, we feel this internally as fear or anxiety. When fight is
the primary impulse, this is felt as anger or at more extreme levels, rage.
When these primitive and ancient survival mechanisms malfunc-
tion, they substantially inhibit our ability to cope with external threats
and severely impact our ability to thrive and survive in the world (Bach,
Hurlemann, & Dolan, 2015). Although sometimes fear and anxiety can
be somewhat enjoyable, considering that people seek experiences such as
horror movies, roller coasters, and hang gliding precisely because they
produce arousal by stimulating the fight-or-flight response, much of the

time, the experience can be quite unpleasant. Evolution is not particu-
larly concerned with whether or not we enjoy the experiences of anxi-
ety or anger, but merely with its capacity to keep us alive, at least long
enough for us to procreate and protect our children, better ensuring
the propagation of our selfish genes (Nesse, 2004). Propagation of self-
ish genes is primarily what drives evolution, not the hedonic, subjective
well-being of individuals.
The brain’s cortex expanded rapidly over the course of evolution,
but in humans, expansion and reorganization of the prefrontal cor-
tex afforded particular survival advantages (Semendeferi, Armstrong,
Schleicher, Zilles, & Van Hoesen, 2001). An enhanced prefrontal cor-
tex gave human beings a vastly improved capacity for problem-solving
and self-regulation of our own behavior (Fuster, 2002). This gift of
problem-solving is closely linked to the frontal lobe’s ability to project
and manage goals by which we direct and regulate our own behavior.
Enhanced self-regulation, in turn, empowers us with advantages in our
ability to manipulate and control our environments to achieve complex
and innovative ends (Passingham & Wise, 2012).
However, and this is the rub: our ability to project long-term goals
also brings with it the recognition that, eventually, our possibilities for
goal-achievement will come to end. We have an implicit understand-
ing that our ultimate possibility, death, is also the end of possibility as
we know it. At an implicit or unconscious level, this recognition of our
mortality is terrifying. So, at a conscious level, we avoid thinking about
it, or we manipulate our thoughts to make death feel less threatening
(Pyszczynski et al., 1999).
The evidence for terror management theory is compelling. Given that
medical professionals are not immune to death anxiety, and given their
exposure to death on a regular basis, we should expect to see a range
of coping mechanisms for addressing death anxiety. Indeed, research
on clinical practitioners of medicine, nurses as well as doctors, demon-
strates that death anxiety is common among health professionals (Boyle
& Carter, 1998; Kane & Hogan, 1986; Nia, Lehto, Ebadi, & Peyrovi,
2016; Servaty, Krejci, & Hayslip, 2007). If not managed well, a clini-
cian’s death anxiety can have a negative impact on the quality of the pro-
fessional’s care (Peters et al., 2017; Tolle, Elliot, & Hikam, 1984; Woo,
Kim, & Kim, 2013). In addition, the “emotional labor” of managing
the constant, ongoing confrontation with mortality, both in patients and
24 B. D. Robbins
in one’s self, can have detrimental effects on the health and well-being
of medical professionals, if not managed well (Sorensen & Iedema,
2009). Nurses seem to be particularly vulnerable to defense mechanisms
of depersonalization, detachment, and denial, and doctors are cultured
by the medical establishment into an attitude of “detached concern”
(Leiderman & Grisso, 1985; Lief & Fox, 1963; Sorensen & Iedema,
2009), which may negatively impact a physician’s ability to work through
their own emotional needs or the emotional needs of the patient and
their family (Sorensen & Iedema, 2007, 2009). As I will discuss in more
detail later, the “detached concern,” or dispassionate detachment prev-
alent in medical culture, which is central to medical training, is a likely
cultural antecedent to the Enlightenment-era emphasis upon objectivity,
by which a whole new worldview is born, including modern physics and
innovations in Renaissance art, not to mention modern anatomy.
Moreover, the profession of medicine is likely to have institutionalized
modes of discourse that shape ways of speaking, perceiving, and acting
which help physicians and other medical professionals to maintain com-
posure in the face of persistent mortality salience. Menzies (1960), for
example, observed how the nursing services of a general hospital oper-
ated as a social system to defend against anxiety. Modern medicine’s dis-
course around the cadaver helps to reveal at least some of the ways the
medical profession acts implicitly to deny the existential reality of death
and to manage the “emotional labor” associated with the confrontation
with mortality in daily, professional life.
The Concretization of Death as a Denial

of Existential Death
What is meant by “the existential reality of death”? As far as we know,

death is a great emptiness for us—a threshold beyond which we can
directly perceive nothing. Granted, we readily project our fantasies into
and live out of faiths in relation to this void. Nevertheless, that which is
beyond the threshold of death is unavailable to us in any direct or unme-
diated fashion. While many of us will be able to perceive and partici-
pate in our own process of dying—and even describe it to others while
we undergo it—we do not have access to the experience of death itself,
because to be dead is to no longer communicate to others that plenum
of experience that is so familiar and available to us now as we exist here
embodied and present to that which lies before us. To really grasp this
strange insight and to really take it in, we have to imagine that death can
never be an actuality for us. At least, it can never be an actuality for us in
this life with this body as we understand it now. My own death is an expe-
rience I can never really have. To incorporate this experience of death as a
possibility is to acknowledge the nothingness of my death. It is to say, in
effect, “My death can only be experienced as a possibility, because when it
becomes an actuality, I will no longer be there to experience it.”
To take up death as an actuality is to constitute death as a concrete
event, a real possibility that I can have. And in a certain manner of speak-
ing, as Heidegger (1962) teaches us in Being and Time, death, however,
can only ever be experienced as that which I am a being-toward. We are
always on the way to death, but to arrive there is to not be there at all.
“To be” is to be a living bodying forth of existence, and death is the loss
of this “to be.” Human being-in-the-world therefore has its existential
condition of possibility in its possibility for not-being-at-all, a possibility
which cannot be escaped and yet also a possibility that, as such, deter-
mines in an ultimate way the meaning of human being-in-the-world as a
whole. An essential aspect of being human is the existential fact that we
die, and our death reveals something important about us—that, until we
die, we exist, and beyond death, we are faced with a profound mystery.
We face the limits of our existence in death, which in turn delimits our
life as it exists in terms of a range of possibilities available to us. Death
is the point on the horizon of life where possibilities come to an end.
Like a deer erupting onto a dark and deserted wooded road, we never
know when death will lunge toward us over the oncoming horizon and
swallow our possibilities, drinking them down into an abyss of emptiness.
Yet, at the same time, in a certain manner of speaking, our possibilities
depend upon the impossible, that very emptiness, for their significance.
Any given possibility matters and makes a difference—has meaning, in
other words—because it runs the risk of not-being rather than being.
Death is at the very heart of what it means to be human.
Since death, understood ontologically, is a condition of possibility for
human existence, and only ever a possibility, when I make death into an
actuality or reduce it to some concrete, ontic event, this is a very subtle
and inescapable way of concealing death. It is, psychologically speaking,
a denial of death. But it is a form of denial that comes in many forms. In
more primitive forms, as might be witnessed especially among children,
the concretization of death often appears through the personification
26 B. D. Robbins
of death (Adams-Greenly & Moynihan, 1983). Here, death would be

conceptualized through some mythical figure, such as the grim reaper.
Among the Ancient Greeks, death was personified in the figure of
Thanatos.
In a somewhat less primitive form, death concretization may appear
through fantasies of post-death events—as would be the case when we
imagine what might happen at our own funeral. For example, some-
times suicides are motivated by revenge, particularly in cases of desperate
assertions of agency by the powerless against the oppressively power-
ful (Counts, 1984; Meng, 2002). Suicide can have a variety of motiva-
tions, including revenge, ridding one’s self of a burden, or an attempt at
rebirth into a new and better life (Maltsberger & Buie, 1980). Still, no
matter how understandable the motivations behind these acts of self-an-
nihilation, these acts nevertheless seem to rely on a certain delusion: the
misperception that the effects of one’s suicide may still be enjoyed by the
person after death. Yet, no one has such a guarantee.
My thesis is that a very advanced and sophisticated form of death
denial is also found in medicine and medical education. I am suggesting,
as well, that this form of death denial, like the above aforementioned con-
cretizations of death, also takes shape as a transformation of the onto-
logical nothingness of death—the possibility of the impossible—into the
possibility of a possible actuality. If I mistake death for a possibility—a
potential actuality—this is a very subtle way of denying the reality of
death as an impossible possibility, of an actuality that can never existen-
tially become actualized, since for it to be actualized would mean my
experience of actuality as such has evaporated. Poof, and it’s all gone. I
think medicine has a very peculiar and hidden way of making death into
an actuality, and it’s a reasonable hypothesis to say that this idiosyncratic
way of concretizing death in medicine plays an important function. It
helps doctors and nurses and other medical professionals cope with the
death and dying they face constantly on a daily basis. Without some of
coping mechanism, they would run the risk of burning out. So, let us
review quickly and make sure the line of argument is clear as a bell.
The first aspect of this thesis begins with the premise that mortal-
ity salience mobilizes people to defend against death anxiety. Medical
professionals are constantly confronted with the reality of death.
Consequently, medical professionals, who are persistently faced with the
need to cope with mortality salience, should be more likely to develop
rather sophisticated defense mechanisms for managing death anxiety.
Taking this first aspect of my thesis for granted, as supported by terror

management theory and research on clinicians in practice, my argument
will focus on the second part of my thesis: the premise that the concreti-
zation of death is an implicit, distal coping strategy for managing death
anxiety. The evidence suggests that modern medicine has a strong ten-
dency to concretize death through its concepts and images. Therefore,
embedded within the discourse of modern medicine, there are ways of
speaking and imaging death that strive to protect medical professionals
from the omnipresent bombardment of death salience and its concomi-
tant existential angst. In the case of modern medicine, this concretization
of death seems to emerge as a form of physiological reductionism which
confines the meaning of death to that of mechanical malfunction of the
anatomical body. Such a reductionism conceals the existential reality of
death as the loss of the possibility for embodied being-in-the-world. The
second thesis can be verified with an appeal to evidence in the medical
literature as well as through phenomenological description of students
working with cadavers for the first time.
Cadaver Dissection as Initiation Rite

in Medical Education
Cadaver dissection typically appears very early in medical education

and seems to serve the function of a rite of passage and initiation into
the worldview of modern medicine and its (historically and culturally)
unique conceptualization of the human body. The empirical evidence
suggests that many students experience an acute stress reaction during
their initial encounter with a cadaver in the dissecting room (Horne,
Tiller, Eizenberg, Tashavsten, & Bidale, 1990). However, the great
majority of these students adjust very quickly to the stress of the gross
anatomy course (O’Carroll, Whiten, Jackson, & Sinclair, 2002). How
do these students come to adjust to their initial stress? Research sug-
gests that the process of cadaver dissection promotes for the student a
clinical detachment, and for this reason, the experience with the cadaver
is an important part of the socialization process into the medical world
(Hafferty, 1988).
The process of coping with the cadaver and the confrontation with
death in medical education coincides with the emergence of a clini-
cal detachment, both of which are made possible by a concretization of
28 B. D. Robbins
death. This concretization of death becomes possible through a process

by which the body as it is lived through is taken up and seen through the
dead body of the cadaver. The flip side of the concretization of death is
the concretization of life. In medicine, we can find a tendency to reduce
the meaning of the living, experiential body to the body understood
through the anatomically dissected and depersonalized corpse of the
cadaver. In German, there is a grammatical distinction between the living
body (leib) and the corpse (korper), but this distinction is lost in English
translation (Leder, 1990). And this distinction is virtually absent in the
content of most variations of the gross anatomy course found in any typ-
ical medical school. Yet, it is obvious enough: A corpse does not have
experiences, but living human bodies do.
The living body is an opening onto a world of sentient awareness,
situated within the context of a network of meaningful projects and in
relation to significant others—a living, pulsating world of meaningful
possibilities which is precisely what is lost with death. When through the
image of the cadaver the living body is conceptually reduced to a deper-
sonalized, anatomical and mechanical corpse, this means the lived body
has been repressed or put out of play. The living body becomes concre-
tized, and to the extent that the living body is made concrete, death too
becomes concretized.
When life becomes reducible to a biomechanical, cause-and-effect
chain of events situated within a physical space of objects externally
related to each other—reduced, in other words, to a corpse—then we
miss the way in which our lived experience is a bodying forth of a range
of possibilities which are actualized through time. Death too gets trans-
formed from its ontological status as the possibility of having no more
possibilities. Death then becomes reduced to an actuality that medical
technology promises to manage and control with increasing knowledge
and efficiency. To live death in this concrete way is to engage in a very
subtle and implicit form of death denial. Perhaps this is why medical pro-
fessionals have a difficult time accepting death and will often, instead,
pursue with patients unnecessary and costly interventions to extend life
(Jones, Moga, & Davie, 1999). When death is understood primarily as
mechanical malfunction, then all one can do is keep fixing the machine.
Yet when death is understood as inextricably part of, and essential to, the
structure of human existence, there is room for both genuine anxiety in
the face of annihilation and also a place for coming to terms with death
through genuine acceptance of our ultimate fate. One cannot find one’s
self bereaved before a cadaver; but the memorial body can be mourned.
Think of the dead body at the funeral of a loved one. When my father
died, I remember looking at his corpse in the coffin, and what I saw
there was a figment of the person he had once been. His body served
as a memorial of his past life. Within the context of the funeral parlor,
his body was a memorial body. Now, contrast this image of my father,
or your deceased loved one, with the cadaver in the dissection room of
medical school. Initially, the face of the cadaver is concealed by cloth.
The students come to forget the memorial body of the cadaver lying on
the table. They are asked, in effect, to exchange their experience of the
person’s memorial body with the experience of a cadaver as a fascinating
machine, a tool for learning. Some students find this transition more dif-
ficult than others. It only takes a small reminder—a touch of nail polish,
a tattoo, etc.—to bring the student back to the memorial body of the
cadaver. But medicine has nothing to say about this memorial body.
If we look to the history of cadaver dissection, we find a similar ambi-
guity at play (van den Berg, 1978). For example, we can examine the
fourteenth-century drawing of a dissection by Guy de Parc (see Fig. 2.1).1
It was taken from a text by the physician Vigevano. Here, we can see the
physician making the first incision into the cadaver’s abdomen. And
where does he look? Into the eyes of the cadaver. Does he search for
signs of life? Does he expect a wince of pain as he cuts into the flesh of
the body? We cannot know for certain, but it seems clear that for this
physician, the body retains many of the features of the memorial body.
The cadaver is more than a cadaver; it is also the desiccated shell of a for-
mer soul.
On the other hand, less than a century later, dissection in art reveals
a different physician, represented well by Andrea Vesalius, who is the
grandfather of modern anatomy (see Fig. 2.2).2 In a famous self-portrait
of Vesalius, we can see that he is not looking into the eyes of the corpse;
instead, he gazes at us. He seems to be proudly inviting us in to marvel
at his work—the carved arm from which flesh has been stripped away to
reveal muscle and nerves. But, if we look more carefully, we can notice
something very strange about this body. This is not a memorial body
at all. It appears to be a living person, standing by Vesalius’s side, with
his face concealed. Vesalius is the inventor of modern anatomical dis-
section—dissection which he performed upon dead bodies. But in this
image from 1542, we find next to him not the body of the deceased
30 B. D. Robbins
Fig. 2.1 Plate XXXI from the manuscript of Guy de Vigevano of 1345 at
Chantilly
but the body of the living—the body of the living now transformed and
figured through a different style of vision—a vision which confuses and
conceals the difference between the body of the living and the body of
the dead. Here, Vesalius’s style of vision conceals death and concretizes it
so that he no longer trembles like Guy de Parc before a deceased friend;
instead, the living body has been concretized into the mechanical body
of his anatomical vision, an anatomical vision that has turned away from
the memorial body and, in that motion, has also turned from the imme-
diate perception of death’s possibility. His corpses do not just lie there;
Fig. 2.2 Vesalius, page xxi of De human corporis fabrica (1543 edition)
32 B. D. Robbins
they are reanimated like Frankenstein’s monster—and, wearing their

shorn flesh proudly, they dance (see Fig. 2.3).3
Is it too far-fetched to say that a man of genius like Vesalius is suf-
fering a form of death denial? But we are not restricted to an analysis of
Vesalius and his drawings. Today, the modern Vesalius has arrived, and
his name is Gunther von Hagens—the man who invented the process
of plastination, a technique of preserving bodies which permits him to
put them on display (von Hagens, Tiedemann, & Kriz, 1987). His show,
called BodyWorlds, has now traveled the world and within the past year
has been available to the curious patrons of science centers across our
nation (Burns, 2000; Stone, 2011). He refers to his work as “edutain-
ment”—a cross between education and entertainment, by which the
public can now see what before had been hidden behind the closed
doors of the dissecting room. Now, the anatomical body has emerged
from the secret chambers of medical school and is available for mass
consumption. And, just like Vesalius, his cadavers do not just lie there;
he puts them into motion; these are animated corpses: horseback rid-
ers, basketball players, and mothers whose most private interior places
have been exposed for all to see. In one of his most famous pieces, von
Hagens paid homage to Vesalius by repeating one of Vesalius’ most
famous images—a corpse holding up his own flesh. But what Vesalius
only dared to render as an anatomical drawing, von Hagens makes
available to us as an actual human body, plastinated, posed and put on
display.
Gunther von Hagens is acutely aware that his work confuses and
obscures the line between life and death. As he said in a recent interview,
“I actually try to bring my specimens as near as possible to life by nar-
rowing the gap between life and death…” (McNeill, 2017, n.p.). More
strikingly, he actively seeks donors, and in his campaigns to persuade
people to offer their bodies to him, he claims to offer them a second life.
“I…see body donation for plastination as a kind of second life experi-
ence,” he wrote. “We always like to have new opportunities in life. Why
shouldn’t we have more opportunities after death?” (Bloch, 2000, n.p.).
Dead bodies of course cannot have opportunities. To have opportu-
nities, we must have possibilities, and dead people no longer have pos-
sibilities. They are dead. But von Hagens, like Vesalius before him, has
momentarily lost sight of that distinction between death as a possibility
and death as an actuality. Through his plastinated corpses, he has concre-
tized death, and he has weaved such an incredible illusion, he has even
convinced himself of its magic.
Fig. 2.3 Anatomical drawing from page 174 of De human corporis fabrica by
Vesalius
34 B. D. Robbins
If we look to the dissection rooms of medical schools, we find similar

examples of death concretization. As I mentioned previously, proponents
of cadaver dissection in medical school have argued correctly that the
experience of gross anatomy is a key component for the development of
clinical detachment among medical students. But taken too far, clinical
detachment can result in the atrophy of the physician’s human capacity
for empathy—a quality that is often in short supply among graduates of
medical school, as some empirical evidence suggests is the case.
I will have much more to say about the erosion of empathy in med-
ical school, but, for the sake of illustration, for now, I will offer only
one anecdotal example. In the fall of 2005, medical students gathered
together for a panel discussion on the gross anatomy experience, and
students on the panel discussed their first experiences working with a
cadaver. One student described her initial trepidation as she anticipated
her first cut into the cadaver’s flesh. Like Vigevano in Guy de Parc’s
drawing, this student stood before a memorial body and trembled in
awe before it. But as she explained, once that first cut was made and her
virginity was broken, that memorial body soon vanished—and she grew
increasingly fascinated by the marvelous architecture of the human form.
And, then, like Vesalius, she began to lose sight of that subtle distinction
between the body of the living and the body of the dead. And this is
why she could innocently tell her mother at the breakfast table, “I would
love to dissect your body, Mom!” She would love to dissect her mother’s
body, she said, in order to witness her mother’s mangled spinal column.
It hadn’t occurred to her that, for her wish to come true, her mother
would have to die. I can think of no better illustration of death’s con-
cretization through the reduction of the living and memorial bodies into
the single body of the anatomical, medicalized corpse it had become to
her. And what a wonderfully subtle denial of death it was.
On that same panel sat a future donor, who knew all too well that he
did not have long to live. An audience member asked him why he had
decided to donate his body. Echoing the words of Gunther von Hagens,
the donor explained that he did it in order to have a second life—so that
when he died, he could continue at least to give something back to the
world of the living. And this was very touching to hear from this man
who was facing death. But what I found most remarkable was his plea to
the medical professionals and especially to the educators in the audience:
He did not want to be forgotten. Do not conceal my face, do not hide
my name; tattoo my name on my back, he said; I want you to remember
me. And, as I heard him say those words, I realized that he was asking
for those students, as they explore the flesh of his body, that they pay
him the respect to see his body not only for the fascinating machine that
it is, and was, but also to preserve his memorial body—to make his body
into a memory of the person he was and to honor the gift of his body to
their education.
What the physician, educator and student forget, the donor reminds
us. The memorial body can be concealed, but he cannot be repressed for
ever. A painted fingernail. A piercing. A tattoo on the back. These things
are reminders of a life past; they signal the re-emergence of that memo-
rial body, calling out to the student: “Do not forget. Where you are, I
once was. Where I am now, you will be.”4
Lessons from the Dead

My observations on death denial in medicine became a fascination,
which ultimately led me to embark on a more systematic, empirical inves-
tigation of the matter. A friend and colleague at Daemen College, Dr.
Gary Styn, who taught gross anatomy with cadavers, allowed me access
to his classroom and to his consenting students who agreed to par-
ticipate in a study of their experience in the class. My student, Ashley
Tomaka, assisted me with the study through ethnographic observations
of the classroom, where she took extensive field notes. Students were
asked to write journal entries at key time points in the course, both prior
to and after the start of cadaver dissection. Faculty in the Physician’s
Assistant program, Cara Innus and Joel Patterson, provided invaluable
guidance and feedback. I took the ethnographic field notes and journal
entries and submitted them to a careful qualitative analysis and presented
the results at the International Human Science Research Conference
in Trento, Italy. After incorporating feedback from the audience at the
conference, we went on to publish the study a year later in the jour-
nal, Omega: Journal of Death and Dying (Robbins, Tomaka, Innus,
Patterson, & Styn, 2008).
Our study yielded several key findings that we found quite illuminat-
ing. In general, students were initially anxious prior to the dissection of
the cadaver, but they quickly adjusted to the task. The stress very quickly
yielded to a combination of fascination before the body of the deceased
and the challenge of mastering a new language of anatomy to describe
what they were seeing. Students in some cases also described a range
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three weeks (farther than to Europe) by steamers of the Brazilian
Lloyd Line. After making calls along the Brazilian coast, at
Montevideo and Buenos Aires, these boats continue up the Paraná
and Paraguay Rivers, arriving at last once more in their own country.
This new railway and others now in construction will be an immense
factor in opening the great central table-land of Brazil, with its rich
possibilities for agriculture, cattle raising, and mining.
The São Paulo-Rio Grande, another important railway, 853 miles,
runs from São Paulo to Sant’ Anna do Livramento on the border of
Uruguay, where it connects with the Central Uruguay Railway to
Montevideo. Improvements have been made so that with better
connections and sleeping cars to the border, which were lacking part
of the way in 1916, the journey is now made in comfort in 4¹⁄₂ days to
Montevideo. The road runs through a rich, often beautiful country; in
some places with splendid scenery and fine forests, in others with
open grazing lands where good cattle are visible, past small towns
and pleasant rivers. People who are willing to work could find
agreeable homes in this section with excellent temperate climate.
Low land values are spoken of, which if genuine should make this an
attractive region now that fairly good transportation exists with more
in prospect. This line has several branches of its own, while other
railways are connected with the through line, local roads to ports or
to interior towns. One of these, the Paraná Railway, has its main line
from the port Paranaguá to the State capital, Curityba, and to Ponta
Grossa on the São Paulo-Rio Grande; it has north and south
branches, the latter to Rio Negro and to São Francisco.
The southern part of the São Paulo-Rio Grande Line belonged to
the Compagnie Aux Chemins de Fer de Brasil which had a
concession for the entire State of Rio Grande. Roads from Porto
Alegre and from the city of Rio Grande extend to the line from São
Paulo, thus making connection with Montevideo and Buenos Aires.
From the Cacequy junction a line goes west to Uruguayana on the
Uruguay River. Along this river the Brazil Great Southern operates in
Rio Grande 110 miles from Quarahim on the Uruguay border through
Uruguayana north to Itaqui, with an extension to São Borja 77 miles
farther up. At Quarahim an international bridge 700 yards long
connects the Brazil and Uruguay Railways. Across the Uruguay
River connection is made from Uruguayana with Argentine Railways,
and a direct route to Buenos Aires.
There are other roads in the São Paulo, which has the best
system in Brazil and the most mileage: over 4000.
The Paulista Railway, extending northwest from Jundiahy
through rich coffee territory with Barretos a recent terminal, has
many branches and a mileage of 721.
The Mogyana goes much farther north, crossing a corner of
Minas and entering the State of Goyaz, on the way to the capital city
of that name. It has arrived at Santa Cruz, still quite a distance from
Goyaz, though with a total mileage of 1081.
The Southern São Paulo Railway runs along or near the coast
100 miles from Santos to Juquiá.
The Leopoldina. An important British line or system nearly 2000
miles in length is the Leopoldina, the main line extending from
Nictheroy, on the bay shore opposite Rio, to Friburgo, Campos,
Victoria, Leopoldina, and other points in the States of Rio, Minas,
and Espirito Santo. Lines run also from Rio and Mauá up the
mountain to Petropolis and beyond, connecting with the main line.
This follows the Parahyba Valley for some distance and then crosses
four mountain ranges, a work involving many unusual feats of
engineering. On the main line the maximum grade is 8 per cent, on
the Petropolis section 15 per cent. The territory traversed is highly
productive, and in spite of expensive construction good returns in
normal times are assured.
The Great Western. Under British control is the Great Western
Railway which has Pernambuco as its centre. Lines extend north
along the coast and also to the interior with 1000 mileage in the
several states of Pernambuco, Alagôas, Parahyba and Rio Grande
do Norte. It reaches the ports of Maceió, Parahyba, Cabedello and
Natal. Two and a half million passengers were carried in one year
and much freight.
In the state of Bahia short lines run back to the interior, one, 140
miles, from Nazareth, south of the bay, and one from São Felix, 165
miles, to Santo Amaro, serving the best sugar district, as Nazareth
that of cacao and manganese ores. The principal road is from Bahia,
281 miles, to Joazeiro, on the São Francisco River; the oldest,
opened in 1860, is along the coast to Aracajú in Sergipe, 268 miles.
Two other small railways are farther south, in all about 950 miles.
The Brazil North East Railway operates in Ceará about 472
miles, one division from the port of Forteleza, another from the port
Camocím to Granja and Crato.
The State of Pará has less mileage than most of the others, the
short line, 40 miles built, at the junction of the Tocantins and
Araguaya to avoid bad cascades. Another road, the Bragança, runs
northeast from Pará to the Atlantic Coast.
The Madeira-Mamoré is in some respects the most remarkable
railway in Brazil, perhaps in the world. It was built in accordance with
a treaty with Bolivia in settlement of the Acre difficulty, and in
compensation for the surrender by that country of the Acre Territory,
to give access to that Republic by making a way around the
prohibitive falls and rapids on the Madeira and the Mamoré Rivers.
In the heart of the wilderness, 570 miles up the Madeira River and
about 1100 miles from the sea, this road, 202 miles long, was
constructed. In 1871 an American, Colonel George Earl Church, a
Civil War veteran, and a distinguished civil engineer, turned the first
sod of the railway, but work was soon suspended. In 1877 P. T.
Collins of Philadelphia undertook the task and completed 20 miles of
railway, but the difficulties were too great, especially the mortality,
modern methods of sanitation not then being understood; the work
was therefore abandoned. In 1907 the recent operations were
begun, again in charge of Americans, and the road was opened for
traffic, July 15, 1912. From Porto Velho the road runs up the river to
Guajará-Mirím, the road of course on the Brazilian side of the river,
and in the State of Matto Grosso, which is thus made accessible as
well as Bolivia. The new little American town of Porto Velho of 1500
population has an ice plant making six tons a day, a wireless
telegraph to Manaos and other conveniences. The road passes
through a jungle which is cut out 100 feet wide. Two days are
required for the short journey. At Abuná they halt for the night;
leaving early next morning they should arrive at the terminus at 3:15.
About 60 miles south of Abuná, Villa Murtinho is passed, opposite
the town of Villa Bella in Bolivia, at the junction of the Beni and the
Mamoré, which two rivers form the Madeira. A road across from Villa
Church opposite Guajará-Mirím or from Villa Bella to Riberalta on the
Beni was in the plan, as the Beni below Riberalta is unnavigable on
account of rapids. Automobile roads are now in construction, at least
one from Riberalta to Puerto Bello (Villa Bella) or to Villa Church.
CHAPTER XLIX
BRAZIL: RESOURCES AND INDUSTRIES
Brazilian industries as we have already seen have the variety

befitting a country of its enormous area. The States of Minas,
Pernambuco, and São Paulo can produce almost anything, but even
these have specialties. Of the various products of Brazil, as in the
other South American countries except Bolivia, the vegetable are the
most important, with coffee far in the lead. Stock raising comes next;
minerals of prodigious variety and richness are third. Manufactures,
developing later, may in time largely satisfy the requirements of the
inhabitants.
Agriculture
Coffee, we all know, is in value the most important crop of the

country, growing over vast areas, chiefly in what we may call the
northern part of South Brazil, the States on or near the edge of the
tropics, São Paulo, Rio, Minas, and Espirito Santo. North and south
of these States coffee grows and flourishes more or less according
to local conditions. There are said to be 1,400,000,000 coffee trees
in Brazil, which produce perhaps three-fourths of the world supply,
more than half of them in the State of São Paulo. The State contains
about 60,000 plantations. Probably more than 1¹⁄₂ billions are
invested in the industry, $900,000,000 in São Paulo. The larger part
of the crop moves over the wonderful railway between São Paulo
and Santos and goes out from that port, some from adjoining States
as well as from São Paulo. For ten years the average value of the
coffee exported was $120,000,000.
Great fortunes were made by some who embarked many years
ago in the business; the coffee king, Colonel Schmidt, who has
8,000,000 trees and produces 11,000 or 12,000 tons of coffee yearly,
was himself a poor immigrant. But the best lands were taken up long
since; production is increasing in other countries, as well as
consumption, and there is not now the opportunity of earlier days.
São Paulo especially has the rich red soil that the plant loves, the
sloping ground, the right climate, and the water supply, over a
greater extent of accessible territory, probably, than any other land in
the world; though districts in other countries produce coffee of equal
excellence. Here of course there are different varieties and grades,
the original plants having been imported from Arabia and Java and
preserving their characteristics. Life on the faezendas, as the farms
are called, is agreeable both for the rich proprietor and for the Italian
and other laborer, who has his own garden and whose wife and
children help in the picking season. The rows of trees extend for
miles in even lines; there are great cement drying grounds in the
sun, pulping machinery, and store-houses. The business generally is
in the hands of Brazilians, though there are foreign stock companies,
paying large dividends. Coffee is about 40 per cent of the Brazil
exports and 97 per cent of São Paulo’s.
Cacao. Other agricultural industries are of importance and
capable of infinite expansion. Cacao is a product the consumption of
which is rapidly increasing. Bahia stands second in production, a
crop of 40,000 tons being exported from the city in 1917. Cacao
forms 60 per cent of the State’s export. Large areas of suitable land
are said to be available for plantations in States south of the
Amazon, including North São Paulo and Matto Grosso. That grown
in Maranhão ranks as the best. The groves run inland along the river
valleys, full of rich red soil. There are two gathering seasons, one
from September to April, the next crop beginning in May, less
important. It is said that one person can take care of 1000 trees,
which yield from 5 to 13, sometimes 20 pounds annually. A
plantation at pre-war prices cost 80-85 cents a tree. Three hundred
are planted to an acre. The investment of a moderate sum is pretty
sure to give good returns after three or four years.
Sugar plantations are increasing and sugar is exported in
considerable quantities. This was one of Brazil’s earliest industries,
but languished on the discovery of gold in the 17th century, to be
followed by several revivals. The amount exported varies, in 1909 it
was 70,000 tons, in 1916, 54,000. It is cultivated near the coast and
inland, chiefly from Rio Grande do Norte south to São Paulo, though
it is also raised down to Rio Grande do Sul, where the 1916 crop
was worth $3,000,000. In one year 441,000 tons were produced,
109,000 exported. The yield in some States farther north is 20 tons
to the acre. In general little fertilizing is done and crop rotation is not
followed, so that lands have become degenerate after centuries. The
most flourishing seats of the industry are in Rio, and in Pernambuco,
1000 miles north. In Rio, Campos is the focus. The State has 31
large sugar mills, Pernambuco has 46. São Paulo is third, other
States have fewer, but small mills are scattered everywhere making
brown sugar and cachaca, native rum. In the large mills the best
machinery is used, and it is said that 300,000 tons is the total output.
The export is to Uruguay, Argentina, Great Britain, United States,
and Portugal. Almost every cotton, coffee, or other faezenda grows
its own sugar. Eighty or ninety pounds a head are used. Cane ripens
in the northern States in about 15 months; south of Rio in 18-20
months.
Tobacco was in use in Brazil in prehistoric days. The State of
Bahia is the centre of the largest production, though it is raised in
almost every State. The quality varies in different localities, but in
some it is said to be equal to the best Havana, especially in Bahia,
where the soil is similar. Forty-five thousand tons were exported in
1902, chiefly to Germany; in 1916, 2100 tons, valued at over
$7,000,000. A plantation of 37 acres earns $10,000 a year.
The Coconut is another product, which might be more important.
It is found near the coast from Parahyba to Bahia, 1,250,000 trees
bearing 50,000,000 nuts, the size of which compares well with
others. One hundred million trees are also reported. At present there
is practically no export, but large possibilities exist for an important
industry. There are three shipping ports, Cabedello, Maceió, and
Recife, three-fourths of the trees near the first two. On the plantation
the nuts sell for $25-$35 per 1000, according to size, and in cities at
$42.50. No attempt is made to produce copra, as the natives are
fond of the milk and fruit. With New York price $160 a ton for copra
and $10 freight it is better to sell the nuts at home, but if business
were done on a large scale, good profit would result. Improper
spacing injures production; of two groves, one 75 trees to the acre
and one close by, 130 trees, the yield of the first is four times that of
the second. Labor is cheap, disease and pests unknown. The by-
products are valuable; fibre for cord or rope, the husk for fuel, the
milk for breakfast, and palm leaves for building or for hats. To
develop 2000 acres of land a capital of $30,000 is estimated as
necessary, giving a net return for the first seven years which would
average $31,865 a year, 105 per cent on the capital, with gross
receipts for the last year of $300,000. If the profits are half the
estimate the investment would seem a good one.
Other Nuts. The Brazil nut is an equally well known edible, mostly
exported from Pará; in 1914 over $2,000,000 worth. The trees are
large, often 150 feet high. Babassú nuts are exported, some
thousands of tons, chiefly from Bahia, yielding a high percentage of
oil, similar to that from the coconut. Also the souari or butternut
brings a good price and has commercial possibilities, having a larger
percentage of fat than other known species. Its cultivation is believed
to be more profitable than that of coconuts. Tagua nuts are exported
in small quantities.
Cotton is an important product likely to have a large increase,
though a diminishing amount is exported, $8,000,000 worth in 1914
and $500,000 in 1916. This does not indicate lessening production
but large increase in cotton milling. Cotton of long silky staple of high
merit here grows wild or with careless cultivation. Growing in almost
all parts of the country, it is best on the northeast promontory and
along the coast to the Amazon. There is little culture, not yet ¹⁄₂
million bales, where 20 might be produced. United States cotton
buyers in 1916 were astonished to find here the long silky fibre. One
of the best varieties is similar to the Peruvian, a hardy, prolific
perennial growing 13 feet high and yielding for at least three years.
One tree was bearing after 16 years. Maranhão has raised this kind
for centuries. It has the high percentage of 38 to the boll and is
similar to that cultivated by the Incas. Under the names Moco,
Serido, and Sede de Ceará, this cotton is grown in these north
States. Gossipium microcarpum, related to peruvianum, is said to
produce a pound of clean cotton from 120 bolls. These varieties
have fuzz on the seeds, but four other varieties have clean seeds,
the most important, the Gossipium vitifolium found wild in Brazil, still
producing long silky staple. Sea Island and the best Egyptian belong
to this stock. These varieties can be cultivated here without fear of
rival anywhere, and offer a fine field for the investor. In the State of
Pernambuco cotton production is more important than sugar. Much
is produced in São Paulo. Export growers, and good roads or
railways are needed to stimulate production.
Cereals are obviously of far less importance in Brazil than in
Argentina, yet many tons are produced and the possibilities are
large. Rio Grande do Sul alone produces wheat in quantity, though
not enough for her own needs; Santa Catharina, São Paulo, the hills
of Rio and Minas are suitable for cereals, and wheat, barley, oats,
and a little rye are seen in the south near European colonies. The
chief cereal grown is maize; in patches it is found everywhere, and in
enormous fields in the centre of Brazil. With mandioca it is the food
of the common people, in spite of the large consumption of flour in
the cities.
Fruits. The fine fruits of Brazil deserve greater exploitation. I have
eaten really delicious pineapples in Rio only. There may be as good
elsewhere, there cannot be better. The oranges of Bahia have an
equal reputation. It is from that State that the navels were introduced
into Florida. If superior to the California fruit as were the old Floridas,
it is time they were more extensively cultivated and exported to the
United States.
Rice is growing in importance. Formerly imported, its production
has increased until now there is an export balance.
Beans are raised and consumed in great quantities; recently some
have been exported.
Forestry
It is well known that the forest country of Brazil has an enormous

area. The entire rubber region is estimated by a Brazilian authority
as covering 1,000,000 square miles, half of which is in Brazil. Other
forest regions of a different character are on the highlands and at the
south, all together covering 1¹⁄₂ million square miles. The forests
contain the varieties that might naturally be expected with others
peculiar to the country, medicinal plants, trees with gums and resins,
woods hard and soft, but mainly hard; some ornamental, others
useful as timber; plants supplying tannin, quebracho and others; the
beautiful Araucanian (Paraná) pine, the candelabra tree, of which
there are 800,000,000 in Paraná. The wood is said to be 20 per cent
stronger than the pine of Sweden; the trees are nearly 200 feet high,
with a diameter at the base of ten feet. Other figures are 100 feet tall
and three feet in diameter.
The timber industry is of slight development, but Paraná and
Santa Catharina afford much good building material. The Brazil
Company has in the two States over 500,000 acres with
5,000,000,000 feet of good standing timber and three mills. One of
these, at Tres Barros, located on a railway, has a capacity of
40,000,000 feet a year, with planing mill, box factory, etc. There is a
great market in Brazil and Argentina. Among unusually valuable
trees is the peroba, with a trunk weighing 30 tons, worth $7 a ton on
the spot. The imbuya tree which resembles mahogany is heavier
than water. An infinite variety is found with infinite uses.
Rubber still has some importance, in spite of the great diminution
of export owing to the development of the Ceylon plantations. Once
the price was $3 a pound; in June, 1921, 15¹⁄₂ cents. Unfortunately
the industry in past years was very badly conducted, with short-
sighted policy, wasteful methods in tapping trees, foolish importation
at excessive cost of all kinds of supplies including food, far too high
prices to the laborers; partly in consequence of extortion and cruelty,
a scarcity of labor; in addition, high export duties. The idea prevailed
that people could get rubber nowhere else and must pay whatever
price was asked. It was a severe shock when Ceylon rubber came
more and more into the market, and was found to be a formidable
rival. Although not generally considered equal to Pará fina, the
Ceylon answers for most purposes.
The Government is now lending aid to the industry, encouraging
plantations, and better methods otherwise. The export tax at Pará
has been slightly lowered but is now 24¹⁄₂ per cent. A Government
investigation, however, in 1912-14 at a cost of $47,000,000 did little
besides paying fat salaries to favored individuals. The Ceylon export
has recently been 300,000 tons to Brazil’s 37,000. So far synthetic
rubber with the special therapeutic base has cost four times the
hevea. The Pará fina is of course the hevea brasiliensis, which
constitutes the larger part exported from the Amazon, 80 per cent of
a good workman’s product. Sernamby is a by-product of scraps or
careless work, though even the better is liable to be contaminated
more or less with leaves, nails, etc. Caucho from the castilloa
elastica is not so good, and in procuring it the tree is usually
destroyed, as previously stated. Near the mouth of the Amazon
where some collectors are quite independent, owning their own
homes on the edge of the forest, are white rubber trees producing
fraca or weak rubber; not so good as the hevea which has the most
resilience, and is tough and elastic. For many purposes these
qualities are essential, hence the higher price. Red rubber
coagulates badly.
Men from the State of Ceará, especially in times of drought, have
been glad to go to the Amazon as rubber collectors; and half wild
Indians of Peru and Bolivia have been employed. The rubber is
collected in the dry season, June to November. Dr. Oswaldo Cruz, a
famous Brazilian physician, said of some of the Amazon regions that
there were no natives, as all the children die; others declare that the
normal condition of older persons is to be afflicted with malaria,
beriberi, dysentery, pneumonia. Still others maintain that much of the
higher land is fairly healthful for persons of careful habits who have
good food. Conditions are improving. American and other companies
are organizing on a more scientific basis than formerly, and with
humane plans which in the long run will prove profitable. Lands have
been secured in desirable locations where men can live all the year,
raise their own vegetables, and not be dependent for their entire
living, aside from fish, on canned stuff at enormous prices. To put
Amazon rubber on a better basis it is necessary that the output be
cleaner, the expenses of the collector smaller, and his living better
through local cultivation of fruit and vegetables, which here grow
luxuriantly, and with better habitations on suitable sites, so attracting
a better labor supply. A further reduction by the Brazilian States of
the rubber export tax, now about 24 per cent in Pará, seems also
desirable.
Besides the hevea and caucho, two other varieties of rubber are
exported, the maniçoba and the mangabeira, which have a place,
like the balatá of the Guianas and Venezuela and the Guayule shrub
from Mexico. The first is from the manihot tree which grows up to
4000 feet altitude, on a rocky soil where there is not too much rain; it
is good for many purposes. The mangabeira, mostly from
Pernambuco, grows on a sandy soil at 3000-5000 feet, but is a wet
rubber not highly valued.
The Ceylon rubber trees, the seeds of which were taken from the
Amazon and germinated in Kew Gardens, first blossomed in 1881.
The seeds were used to plant more trees. In 1900 four tons of rubber
came from the East, in 1910, 800 tons; the output in 1916 was about
150,000 tons. One million, three hundred thousand acres are now
producing in Ceylon, India, Borneo, and elsewhere, a monument to
British enterprise.
Herva Matte. A very important export, rather forestal than
agricultural is called in Portuguese herva matte, the yerba mate of
Spanish. Paraná is its special home where it grows wild in the
forests, straying over into the neighboring States of Matto Grosso,
São Paulo, Santa Catharina, and Rio Grande do Sul, and being
native as we have seen to Paraguay, and to Misiones in Argentina.
The trees or shrubs often grow in sections with the tall Paraná pines,
the tree with the candelabra top, which is not only an ornament to
the landscape but supplies good lumber, and pine kernels as large
as chestnuts. These when boiled make a nutritious food, much
relished by the Italians. The chief export of matte is through the city
of Paranaguá, after preparation in the mills of the region. In 1915,
75,800 tons were exported, largely to Argentina, some also to
Europe; 40,000 tons is an average amount. It is much used by the
residents of Paraná, but in most of Brazil coffee has the preference.
Fibres. Besides cotton Brazil produces fibres of excellence from a
variety of plants. A wonderful article but little known to the general
public is the remarkable paina, called in Europe kapok, 34 times as
light as water, 14 times, as cork. Chiefly produced in the Orient, it is
obviously excellent for life preservers, also for mattresses, pillows,
and for whatever needs to be light, warm, elastic, and impermeable.
The best fibre, best packed, comes from Java, inferior grades from
India and Africa. Introduced into Venezuela, it was so packed with
stones and refuse that it was rejected when sent to Europe, although
the article was of fine quality. Careless exporters of all articles should
take warning. Other good fibres of Brazil are aramin, from which
coffee bags are made; pita, from which the Amazon Indians make
hammocks woven with much art, and sometimes with feathers
interspersed along the edge. Palms and aloes supply other fibres,
some equal, they say, to the famous henequen (sisal) of Yucatan.
Banana fibre is used by north lace makers for a curious stiff shiny
lace, some quite beautiful, fine and intricate, and some with a
darned-in pattern of heavier silk thread, on a filmy background.
Carnaüba Wax, which forms an under coating of the leaves of the
carnaüba palm, is not unlike beeswax. Nearly 600 tons were
exported in 1915 valued at $2,400,000. The trees grow in the north
States, especially in Rio Grande do Norte, where there are
15,000,000 trees, and in Ceará. Large amounts of the product are
used locally. The wax is of excellent quality, melting at a low
temperature and burning with a bright light. Mixed with a little
beeswax and 10 per cent fat, it is easily worked and makes candles
of high quality. It is much used for shoe blacking.
CHAPTER L
BRAZIL: OTHER INDUSTRIES
Cattle Industry
A leading industry of Brazil which, it has been said, may even in

São Paulo supersede in importance that of coffee is live stock. Two
packing houses now slaughter 300,000 cattle per year, one Brazilian,
at Barretos, the other an American, the Continental Products, at
Osasco near São Paulo, exporting chiefly to France and Italy.
Another American Company has at São Paulo a plant that will
handle daily 1500 head of cattle, 1000 hogs, and 2500 sheep. In
tributary territory, which would include parts of Matto Grosso and
Minas, 2,500,000 cattle are estimated. It is said that the best
breeding ground is Matto Grosso, where the cattle run wild as once
in Texas, though each rancher has a certain range and his cattle are
branded. The Brazil Land and Cattle Company procured 8,000,000
acres in Matto Grosso, Paraná, and Minas, mostly well watered and
with good grazing, except in Matto Grosso. Much fencing was done
and buildings were erected. Recent increase in prices has improved
prospects. This property is now owned by the Continental Products
Company, in which the Wilson packers are interested.
Other vast lands are available. From the ranges of Matto Grosso
the cattle are driven across to fattening pastures of southwest Minas
and northwest São Paulo where the land has been planted to grass,
though it is said that a native grass, caipim gordura, grows there all
the year round. Argentina’s alfalfa lands make the cost of fattening
an animal six months $7.50, while with caipim gordura in Brazil
$1.33 covers the expense. Some Brazil grasses are of the highest
class while others are good only for goats. On the Araguaya River
the grass is 16-17 feet high. The Jaragua is over 3 feet. In
Amazonas and Pará cattle are said to flourish but not goats or pigs.
Rio Grande near the Uruguay line has fine grazing lands; those in
Minas and São Paulo at an elevation of 1200-1400 feet where
animals never need shelter are excellent.
Before the packing houses were started jerked beef only was
marketed from the herds, hence, as thin cattle were preferred for that
purpose, there was no object in improving the grade. Now there is
systematic progress. Breeding farms are operated, fine stock has
been imported, and in time high grade meat, perhaps equal to the
Argentine, will be marketed. Twelve thousand tons were sent to
Europe and the United States in six months in 1916, though the first
experimental 1¹⁄₂ tons was sent in November, 1914. At the School of
Agriculture, Piracicaba, São Paulo, are good imported bulls, and one
of native type, the Caracú, with pale buff hide, fitted to be the base of
standardized herds. It seems that in some sections, notably Matto
Grosso, a cross with the Indian zebu, which has a hump, and its
descendants, is best qualified to resist the climate and the insect
pests of that region; but in the pastures of Paraná and Rio Grande,
Herefords, Durhams, Jerseys, etc., will flourish. The zebu is of large
size and its skin is excellent leather, but packers say the hump does
not pack well, and the shoulder is thin. Plants now or soon to be in
operation south of São Paulo are three: in Rio Grande, one of Swift,
one at Pelotas, Brazilian, and one at Sant’ Anna of Armour. The
President of Paraná has been extending high roads towards
Guarapuava to tap the State of Matto Grosso, and a large drove of
cattle has come down. He desires to have an American packing
house established in the State and will arrange with a suitable
company to make no advance on the export tax for 15 years.
Paranaguá, a port which we have already noted, is well served by
the Brazilian Lloyd Line and the Funch-Edye from New York. Similar
concessions are offered in Santa Catharina, which State has lower
export duties; and by the Governor of Rio Grande, who would
exempt from all export taxes any foreign company; though a tax of
10 milreis, $3.33, is imposed for every cow slaughtered, to protect
the herds from decimation. If all the herds number 30,000,000,
2,500,000 or more might be slaughtered yearly without diminution.
Cattle formerly were killed for their hides only, and the export of
these is still important; 37,000 tons exported in 1915 were valued at
$13,000,000.
Sheep raising seems inappropriate for a tropical climate, but in
Rio Grande do Sul development is possible, also on the highlands of
São Paulo, Minas, and Matto Grosso. Experiments with Romney
Marsh have been successful for both wool and meat. Now there are
11,000,000 sheep, 7,000,000 goats, 18,000,000 hogs, 6,000,000
horses, and 3,000,000 mules and donkeys in the country.
Manufactures
While Brazil may not be called a manufacturing country, she had

over 26,000 such plants in 1916; and her statesmen are eager to
increase these industries, for which her immense water power gives
her unusual advantages. The largest concern in this field has a
capital of $8,000,000 and an annual output worth $4,500,000; it
employs 2800 hands making sacking, yarn, rope, thread, etc., this in
São Paulo. In the textile field, the cotton mills naturally lead with over
200 mills and an investment of $80,000,000. They exist in various
States, employing 80,000 persons; one in Pernambuco near the city
of Olinda is a sample. The estate of 45 square miles of pasture and
woodland borders on the sea, the shore fringed with coconut trees.
Machinery and some technical workers were brought from England.
All the processes of making fine cloth are there followed; they spin,
dye, weave, color, and print. Native dyes are used in part. Of 3500
hands employed 70 per cent are women and children. Over $35,000
a month are paid in wages. Dwellings are rented at low prices or
owned by employes; schools, hospital, and dispensary are free. A
dairy and a stock farm belong to the estate, brick factories, a bakery,
etc. A lumber yard is important. One thousand tons of coal a month
are usually consumed, but in war time wood was used. The cotton is
bought, $200,000 a month, and as much a year is spent for
chemicals, drugs, etc. From 960 looms 1,500,000 metres of cloth 22-
26 inches wide are produced a month, from blue denim to fine
flowered fabrics; the products are sold in 80 stores owned by the
Company in various States. Brazil has 11 flour mills of commercial
importance, located in the States of Rio, São Paulo, Paraná, and Rio
Grande do Sul, at one time having no tax on wheat, but ten cents a
kilo on flour, by means of which the infant industry was started. In
1915, 800,000 barrels of flour were imported from the United States
and 600,000 from Argentina, a little from Uruguay; at the same time
enough wheat was imported and milled to make 2,750,000 barrels,
evidence of the work of the mills. For metal working there are 134
shops for imported iron. Factories exist of almost every kind. Leather
goods are produced especially shoes for which there are many
factories; hats, clothing and a variety of ordinary articles, such as
soap, hosiery, brooms, paper, wagons, etc. Brazil workmen are
skilful and the industries are certain to increase.
Mining
The mining industry of Brazil, if not precisely in embryo, for it has

been in a very flourishing condition, is now in a state of prospect; on
the verge of a great development rather than of active operation,
except for a few varieties of metals. At the moment there is little
working except in gold, diamonds, monazite, manganese, and coal.
Manganese has recently been the chief mineral exported on
account of war necessities, 245,000 tons valued at 7 million dollars,
in the first half of 1917, in contrast to 85,000 tons in the same part of
1914. The mines are in Minas, Matto Grosso, Bahia, and elsewhere,
those in Minas being accessible to the port of Rio. In Matto Grosso,
18 miles from Corumbá, there is a deposit called the Urucum,
estimated at 30,000,000 tons of undeveloped ore; one, the Quelez,
in Minas of 5,000,000, 30 miles from Rio, and others. The ore
averages over 50 per cent of metallic manganese, with a little iron
silicate and phosphorus. Americans are interested in the works as
the metal is valuable in the iron and steel industry. With better
transportation facilities for these and other deposits, a good future is
certain.
Gold mining was naturally the first to be developed. Minas has
been the chief producer. Of Minas Geraes the writer Diaz said, “In
this State what does not hide gold contains iron; what does not
contain coal spreads diamonds.” After the discovery of gold in 1693,
80,000 men toiled for a century at placer mining for the King of
Portugal. About $1,000,000,000 has been taken out. The Morro
Velho, said to be the oldest producing mine in the world, is now with
the Ouro Preto worked by British Companies. The first is being
worked at the depth of a mile with no sign of exhaustion. The gross
receipts for the year ending February 28, 1917, were over
$4,000,000, the profits $750,000, from a tonnage crushed of
187,400. The Ouro Preto Company operates the Passagem Mine
five miles from the former capital of that name, being the first to use
a stamp mill in 1819. The average thickness of the lode was ten feet,
now about eight. Gold properties exist in many States, the most
important around three mountain chains, the Mantiqueira and
Espinhaço, which cross Minas and Bahia, running into Pernambuco;
the range between Minas and Bahia, and Goyaz, continuing into
Piauhy and Ceará, west of the São Francisco River; the third east of
the Paraguay and Araguaya Rivers. Those most worked are in the
Espinhaco Range in Minas and Bahia. Dredging has been carried on
with varying success, but some of the companies have been
overcapitalized. An American Company has recently acquired some
old concessions of land in Goyaz, rich in gold and diamonds, where
extensive operations are expected shortly.
Diamonds. As for diamonds, since the first stone was discovered
in 1721, many precious gems have been produced. During 40 years
in that century $17,500,000 worth were exported. The city,
Diamantina, 500 miles from Rio, is the centre of one of the most
important fields. Gems are found in pot-holes, one of which
contained 10 pounds of diamonds and 28 of gold. Others are in clay
deposits in rocks of sandstone and schist. In the River Bagagem
near the border of São Paulo, 250 miles from Diamantina, three
great diamonds have been found: the Estrella do Sul, in 1853,
weighing 254 carats uncut, was sold to the Gaekwar of Baroda for
$400,000, the others weighing 117 and 175 carats. Other fields are
in Paraná, Bahia, Goyaz, Matto Grosso, and São Paulo, in Goyaz on
the Garças River, tributary to the Araguaya. Apparently most of the
stones are now smuggled. They are said to be finer than the Cape
diamonds and also to be sold for them. Black diamonds are found, of
great value in the arts, and many precious and semi-precious
stones, such as amethysts, tourmaline, topaz, etc., in various places.
Copper exists in several States, but production is slight. A mass
weighing over 2600 pounds was discovered years ago near the city
of Bahia, and there are six well known districts in the State. In Rio
Grande do Sul an extensive property was opened which showed 6.5
per cent copper and 30 grams gold per ton. Minas will probably rank
next to these States. Promising quantities are near Campos in Rio
de Janeiro; there are also ores in Goyaz, Paraná, Matto Grosso,
Parahyba, Ceará, Rio Grande do Norte and Maranhão; some are
hardly accessible. One of those in Bahia covers nearly 15,000 acres,
about 30 miles from the railway. Belgians and Dutch have operated
at Camaquam, Rio Grande do Sul.
Iron in actual mountains occurs in Minas, 12 billion tons of the
highest grade in 52 outcroppings. Deposits have been acquired by
American, British, German, and French interests. The manager of a
British company which owned 90,000 acres said, “One could travel
23 miles one way and 16 another on outcrops of ore, canga, or
rubble.” In one deposit 30,000,000 tons are in sight, 60 per cent
pure.
American interests, the Itabira Company, have secured deposits
which include the celebrated iron mountain of Itabira do Matto
Dentro in the east near the head of the Doce River. The hematite
iron district is reached from Rio by the Central and the Leopoldina
Railways; but this deposit will be tapped by a prolongation of the
Victoria-Minas Railway, now running along a part of the Doce River.
Also a branch will lead to a terminal 40 miles north of Victoria, Santa
Cruz, a small port which will be developed and equipped with special
loading machinery. Here will be erected a steel plant with an annual
capacity of 150,000 tons of steel products, pig-iron, steel plates,
rails, etc. The iron, 326 miles from this port, runs 69 per cent pure;
some in the United States runs 52 per cent. It will be several years
before manufacture can begin. Coal will be imported.
Development of iron properties has been retarded by lack of
transportation and fuel. Wagon roads are unknown. The altitude is
2000-4000 feet and the climate good. The coal is hardly good
enough or in sufficiently large supply. Oil development is uncertain.
As there is water power the use of electricity may be arranged.
Near Ipanema, São Paulo, iron is found. A large deposit has been
located in Paraná three miles from the port of Antonina. Other
deposits in the two States south give good promise. So far charcoal
has been used for a little smelting.
Coal mining has been carried on for a long time in a small and
primitive way, but most of the coal used has been imported. The
principal deposits found are in Santa Catharina and Rio Grande do
Sul, others are in Paraná and Pernambuco. In Paraná American
interests have made extensive purchases and expect to develop the
property at once. Rio Grande do Sul has been estimated to have
800,000,000 tons and to be able to supply 1,000,000 a year.
In Santa Catharina the veins are about ten feet thick; some in Rio
Grande are 4-10 feet, some 13. The property at Xarquedas,
operated for some years, produces 20,000 tons per annum. With
greater activity, in March 1918, 650 tons were produced daily from
two shafts, and 1000 or more was expected by the addition of a
third. With high volatile matter, good gas and salable coke are
procured for Pelotas. Coal is found in several river valleys in Santa
Catharina. State surveys are being made, and with improvement in
transport by land and water a great industry may be developed of
enormous value in promoting manufactures. Railway construction
has been authorized by the President to aid coal companies in work,
and other concessions have been made. The briquettes from Santa
Catharina coal show hardly less caloric value than those of the
Welsh patent fuel. Much is used by the Lloyd Brasileiro and other
steamship lines including the Japanese; by railways, mills, etc. A
little is exported to Argentina and Uruguay. The Rio Grande Railway
is or was burning coal mixed with wood on its locomotives. The best
coal is 42 per cent combustible, and when pulverized is equal to any
other. Bituminous schist sold at $12.50 a ton was used for gas in
São Paulo during the War. There are great seams 10-12 feet thick in
São Paulo and Rio Grande do Sul. Lignite occurs in Pará,
Amazonas, and Minas, enormous peat beds in various places.

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The Medicalized Body and Anesthetic

Culture 1st ed. Edition Brent Dean

THE MEDICALIZED BODY

ISBN 978-1-349-95355-4 ISBN 978-1-349-95356-1 (eBook)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2018934665

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2018

Cover image: © Nunzio Paci

Printed on acid-free paper

This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company

especially Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger, Maurice Merleau-Ponty,

1 The Medicalized Body and Anesthetic Culture 1

2 Confronting the Cadaver: The Denial of Death in

3 Time and Efficiency in the Age of Calculative

4 The Zombie Body of Linear Perspective Vision 65

5 Applications of Terror Management Theory 85

6 Terror Management in Medical Culture 105

7 Dehumanization in Modern Medicine and Science 127

8 Objectification of the Body as a Terror Management

9 The Objectification of Women and Nature 167

10 The Role of the Medical Cadaver in the Genesis

11 A Theological Context 205

12 The Changing Nature of the Cadaver 223

13 Anesthetic Culture 247

14 Psychiatry’s Collusion with Anesthetic Culture 275

15 Mindfulness—The Way of the Heart 301

Fig. 2.1 Plate XXXI from the manuscript of Guy de Vigevano

The Medicalized Body

© The Author(s) 2018 1

Vodou practice of offering animal sacrifices, a chicken for example, to the

The history of San Francisco offers a poignant illustration of the place

played out in protests of Native Americans in response to the Dakota

The callous treatment of Native American people and disregard for

have cultivated detached concern as an epistemological ideal. To under-

consciousness are particularly informed by an enormous body of evi-

centuries, as anesthetic consciousness has become a habit, modern cul-

Confronting the Cadaver: The Denial

Through a cultural hermeneutic interpretation of the cadaver in the

medical education works implicitly to manage death anxiety through a

Time and Efficiency in the Age of Calculative

The Zombie Body of Linear Perspective Vision

informed by linear perspective vision is found to reflect the medical body

Applications of Terror Management Theory

Terror Management in Medical Culture

be associated with surface learning driven by fear of failure, neuroticism,

Dehumanization in Modern Medicine and Science

and, consequently, is counterproductive to medical practice in which

Objectification of the Body

Cartesian subject–object metaphysics operative in medical discourse ren-

The Objectification of Women and Nature

The Role of the Medical Cadaver in the Genesis

Between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries, a profound cultural shift

against Scholasticism, as described by Michael Allen Gillespie, led to a

The Changing Nature of the Cadaver

Psychiatry’s Collusion with Anesthetic Culture

cultural pattern in which psychiatry tends to collude with anesthetic

Mindfulness—The Way of the Heart

Enzinna, W. (2017, January/Feburary). “I didn’t come here to lose”: How

Confronting the Cadaver: The Denial

Time and Efficiency in the Age of Calculative

The Zombie Body of Linear Perspective Vision

Applications of Terror Management Theory

Terror Management in Medical Culture

Dehumanization in Modern Medicine and Science

The Objectification of Women and Nature

The Concretization of Death as a Denial

Cadaver Dissection as Initiation Rite