So, if you guys on my dash are anything like me, seeing the top pictures probably gave you an unpleasant jolt, which may or may not have been mitigated by scrolling down and reading the full story of the heroic innovations of a medical genius. You may actually be pretty annoyed with me for having reblogged it at all, regardless of how heartwarming the story attached to it.
But I beg of you, to read my addition and consider it.
Medical stuff is gross! It frequently is and there’s really no way around that! Doctors and nurses and pretty much any medical personnel have to train themselves out of that upsetting physical emotion to focus on the work they do. For courtesy to the general public that hasn’t undergone that training, they usually make an effort to keep it behind a white curtain, even (as much as possible) from the patient and family, certainly from the greater public.
Reactionaries can and will take advantage of that gut visceral response to try to turn the untrained public away from things that are, on the whole, a social and medical good, because for whatever ideological reason they don’t want them. Hence the anti-abortion protesters who print out glossy high-color photos of post-ops and thrust them into people’s faces when honestly, the aftermath of an abortion and the aftermath of an appendectomy have about equal levels of grossness and gore. Hence the TERF or other anti-trans activists who will try to scare people with descriptions of gender reassignment surgery in the most vulgar, reductionist terms in order to drum up public support for their anti-trans agendas. I seem to recall a campaign against stem-cell research, back in the 90s and early aughts, that ran on similar “look at these disgusting medical waste photos and tell me that you support this research!” lines.
Medical care is gross.
Bodies are gross.
Gross doesn’t mean bad, and the sooner we are able to get that straight in our collective consciousness, the sooner we’ll stop falling for shit like this.
Please, please, remember Doctor Gillies, and make the effort to detach yourself emotionally from that first visceral reaction. Just because something looks bad doesn’t mean it is bad. And a visceral reaction of disgust, bears absolutely no meaning on the actual objective morality of the thing.
What is disgusting to you could be, literally, life-saving to someone else. They make that decision. Your visceral disgust does not have, and should not have, any bearing on that.
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