Word: goodwins
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...Stephen Goodwin's "Scratch" contrasts with the tightly drawn plot of "A Common Mistake." The story meanders from a description of a river, to a poker game, to a quarrel between two men over money, to violence over a pool game. Structurally, "Scratch" is a terrible story. And yet, Goodwin probably has more writing talent than any other contributor to the Lion Rampant. His story begins, The water was named in derision by a generation of luckless farmers: Burnt Crop Creek, because they had watched the stalks of cotton and even of corn wither in the sun, and heard...
This is clear, forceful writing. As a short story, "Scratch" is a failure, but no one can realistically expect perfection from undergraduate writers. The technical side of writing can be learned, but Goodwin has the one necessary endowment of a developing author--a facility with words, an entertaining style. It is the lack of this attribute which makes the rest of the Lion Rampant a failure...
...phlebitis. In the creeping insidious form, there is no such history of clotting disease to alert the doctor. The patient usually complains of nothing more precise than shortness of breath or fainting, though in slightly more severe cases he may collapse completely on exertion. What has happened, said Dr. Goodwin, is that small blood clots have blocked some of the narrower blood vessels leading to the lungs. The patient can still inhale and exhale just as much air, but he does not oxygenate enough blood, so he tends to breathe too hard...
Mississippi Metaphor. Post-mortem findings indicate that these patients have suffered from what Dr. Goodwin called "showers of clots." Then, switching to an appropriate Mississippi Delta metaphor, he suggested that their effect is to silt up the channels through which the lungs' blood flows. One result, which should help physicians in diagnosing the disorder, is that the concentration of oxygen in the arterial blood goes down with exertion, and so does the level of carbon dioxide...
Lung-artery disease is most likely to be diagnosed correctly, said Dr. Goodwin, if physicians have a suspicious eye and ear open for it. In difficult cases, a series of electrocardiograms may be decisive. And regardless of difficulty, it is important to diagnose the disorder early -when there is still hope of arresting it with anticoagulants. It probably is never "cured" in the literal sense, and only rarely is it reversed so thoroughly that the patient is freed of his handicap...