Document Type
Review Essay
Abstract
[First paragraph]
In what can be called the hospital sequence from the cinematic adaptation of Margaret Mitchell's Gone with the Wind (1939), Scarlett O'Hara (Vivian Leigh) somewhat reluctantly serves as a nurse to wounded Confederate soldiers as General Sherman held siege over Atlanta during the late summer of 1864. As she and her sister in law Melanie Wilkes (Olivia de Havilland) tend to their wounded fellow Southerners, the principal physician, Dr. Meade (Harry Davenport), informs an unnamed soldier (Eric Linden) that one of his legs has gangrene and will have to be amputated. When a medical aide reminds Dr. Meade that the hospital has no chloroform to anesthetize the patient, he responds, "[t]hen we'll have to operate without it." Going home to see his family for the first time over a three day period, Dr. Meade leaves the operation in the hands of Dr. Wilson, an otherwise unknown and silent colleague. Scarlett is quickly recruited by the same aide to assist with the operation, but upon seeing and hearing just what such a procedure entails, she escapes from the hospital in very short order. Victor Fleming's camera does not return to the operating room, but given its proximity to the remainder of the hospital, every other wounded man, physician, nurse and aide could all too clearly hear the agonized horror coming from within it.
Repository Citation
Adams, Richmond. "'One of the Many Little Human Documents': Dr. Mandelet as (Civil War) Physician in The Awakening." Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture vol. 15, no. 3, 2015, pp. 1–16. https://digitalcommons.odu.edu/reconstruction/vol15/iss3/12