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The Glass Plate

sgknowles
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By Scott G. Knowles: As part of the STL Anthropocene Field Campus the research team visited the Wood Refinery Refinery History Museum on March 9, 2019. This museum is located on the grounds of the Wood River Refinery, a Shell Oil refinery built in 1917 and today owned by Phillips 66. The site is Roxana, Illinois, just upriver from Granite City, and just over two miles from the convergence of the Mississippi and Missouri Rivers. Sitting on the actual grounds of the refinery, the museum is an invitation to think across the micro, meso, and macro scales of the Quotidian Anthropocene, in terms of geography and also in terms of time. This refinery was built at the crux of the WWI, at a time when United States petrochemical production was entering an intensive phase of production, invention, corporate structuring, and global engagement. The museum is an invitation to think across temporal scales, backwards to the start of the refinery--through the individual lives of the workers and engineers whose lives defined the refinery--and forward to indeterminate points of future memory. This photo captures a key moment in an informal interview we did with one of the history guides. He had worked in the museum for decades before retiring. He explained to us that the museum sits in the former research facility of the refinery--and the glass plat he is showing reveals a beautiful artifact, a photograph made of the complex when it was built. Our guide only showed us this collection of slides after our conversation had advanced, perhaps after he was sure we were truly interested in his story, and the deeper history of the refinery. The pride in the place, the community of workers, and the teaching ability of the museum was manifest. The research team felt impressed, but also concerned about the health impacts (and naturally the environmental impacts as well) of the refinery. There was a mismatch in the scales--the memory of the individual tied to emotions of pride and knowledge of hard work done there--and the Anthropocene, global scale of petrochemicals. How do we resolve this mismatch? The glass plate is somehow a clue.

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ciera.williams
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The article explains how a team of medical staff treated (and consequently killed) a number of patients following the flooding of a hospital in New Orleans. The staff in question overdosed the patients to put them out of their pain as they saved other patients who were more likely to survive. The article calls into question the process of triage and how we go about it. Who has the authority to make these decisions, and what lines do we draw between ethics and compassion. The article provides a play-by-play of the events leading up to the flooding, and relevant policies that existed and have been created related to this incident. 

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a_chen
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From the links provided within the article, relevant information about Hurricane Katrina can be viewed with the commentary and archival articles that published in The New York Times that written by other authors.

Also the author has made in contact with Memorial Medical Center in Uptown New Orleans to focus on the investigation into the detail situations happened with the floodwaters. Afterwards, gained more information on the lethal injection issues.

[http://www.nytimes.com/topic/subject/hurricane-katrina?inline=nyt-class…]

[http://www.nytimes.com/topic/subject/hurricanes-and-tropical-storms-hur…]

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a_chen
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The article has first emphasis the number of death and corpses during and after the Hurricane Katrina, then with further investigation and research, the issue related to the lethal injection to the patient has raised. From the physician’s perspective, the lethal injection in this case is a way to relief the patient’s pain, as it is a “for” for the lethal injection, which not seems to be violating the medical ethical. From the conclusion parts of the article, the author provided the evidence that “that more medical professionals were involved in the decision to inject patients — and far more patients were injected — than was previously understood.”     

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jaostrander
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"Anna Pou, defended herself on national television, saying her role was to “help” patients “through their pain,” a position she maintains today"

"The laws also encourage prosecutors to await the findings of a medical panel before deciding whether to prosecute medical professionals. Pou has also been advising state and national medical organizations on disaster preparedness and legal reform; she has lectured on medicine and ethics at national conferences and addressed military medical trainees"