Reviews for Pulmonary pathophysiology

The average rating for Pulmonary pathophysiology based on 2 reviews is 3 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2011-03-13 00:00:00 Douglas M Mac Millan Ourika, first published by Claire de Duras in France in 1823, is a noteworthy short story that discusses that place of Africans in French society during the early 19th century. Madame de Duras (nee Lechat) came from an upperclass family that had to flee the country during Robespierre's reign of terror. While temporarily exiled, her father encountered a Senegalese girl about to be sold into slavery, and insisted that the girl, Ourika, come to live with his family. This forty seven page story is based on the life this girl lived amidst the French upper class. Ourika lived in France as a loyal servant to Mme de B and remained by her side as they watched France crumble around them. Growing up in Mme de B's household, Ourika became accomplished at art, music, and other subjects that her mistress believed were important to a young girl's future. Yet, because she was both immersed in culture and black, Ourika had no future. Only a man not of wealth could bare the burden of fathering mulatto children, and, as a result, Ourika became cut off from the world. Eventually, she chose to become a nun because it was the only alternative she believed would not remove her from the rest of the world. Claire de Duras penned this novel twenty five years before the abolition of the slave trade in France. This era was a time when few women were published, and male authors took offense to Mme de Duras being a successful author. Ourika was published as far away as St Petersburg, and enjoyed a wide readership. A few male contemporaries attempted to use Mme de Duras' name as an attempt to have their own works published. She passed away five years after writing Ourika, and only wrote one other circulated novel. Despite being a short story, Ourika speaks volumes of the rights of blacks and to a certain extent women in revolutionary France. A notable tale of a slave girl, Clare de Duras brought these rights to her readers attention through publication. Despite not being the best of literature, I enjoyed Mme de Duras story from a historical standpoint, and am glad that I included it in my women's history month lineup.

Review # 2 was written on 2016-06-06 00:00:00 Robin Hood To imagine that Ourika is a simply a tale about a woman who is distraught over a man is to severely misread the richness of this novel, which offers a complex regard of race, blackness, womanhood, identity, and intercultural acceptance. With its harsh criticisms of political fervor generated by the French Revolution as well as social behaviors--namely, French upper-class elitism--this was a risky novel for its time. It tells the story of a Senagalese girl who, one day, suddenly realizes she is "not-French" (which is to say, black) while overhearing a conversation with her adopted mother and her mother's companion. This remarkable scene is telling of the novel's main premise: whose right is it to negate you as a person, to negate your very being? Yet Ourika comes to discover (and despair) over just this: her status as an outsider is developed by being talked about by the very woman she trusted, loved, and admired. With it begins a continued recognition of negation that accompanies alientation--in addition to not-French, she is not-daughter, not-wife, not-mother, etc. and has no recourse to return home because she is also not-Senegalese, distanced even from understanding the nature of the violent uprisings . A quote from Trinh Minh-Ha may well summarize how to approach Ourika: "In trying to tell something, a woman is told, shredding herself into opaque words while her voice dissolves on the walls of silence." (Minh-Ha, "Writing Postcoloniality and Feminism") Throughout Ourika's life she is told who she is and who she is not; even the story itself, told by Claire de Duras, is based on a true story; by being retold by a French woman, the true Ourika (the woman whom the story is based on) is erased; the true referent cannot even tell her own story. And yet, Claire de Duras uses her own French-born privilege to tell Ourika's story, in essence giving voice to a woman who otherwise could not. Ourika's development throughout the novel is a remarkable one; though in some instances she resigns herself to utter despondency, she ultimately comes to realize the advantage knowledge has over ignorance: "Mes peines altéraient sensiblement ma santé; mais, chose étrange! elles perfectionnaient mon esprit." ("What I lost in happiness, and above all health, in what seemed a contradiction perfected my wit/mind") and, "Un sage d'Orient a dit: 'Celui qui n'a pas souffert, que sait-il?'" ('A wiseman from the Orient once said: 'Those who have not suffered, what do they know?'") The knowledge of her status as an outsider brings about her misery, but it ultimately brings about her freedom from her misery and the prison built by socially-constructed means of exclusion. Lastly, Ourika is the only French novel I have read so far that testifies to the Christian faith. In an interesting and even riskier twist (particularly due to the French Revolution's fervent and obsessive desire to destroy anything resembling a higher power) Ourika finally finds peace in belief in a universal, divine God. Without this key aspect Ourika would be just another novel of endless, pointless despair, but she is able to come to terms with her own adoption by seeing it as a metaphor for the adoption of mankind by a heavenly father. Through God's grace she is able to finally make sense of misery and the problem of Evil, and is ultimately able to make peace with her being.