JSA #8: A Medical Review
Continuing JSA Week…
JSA #8 “Darkness Falls - Part 2: Shawdowland”
David Goyer and Geoff Johns, writer
Stephen Sadowski, penciler
Black Canary has been injured escaping from Obsidian and his shadow minions. Luckily she has stumbled across Dr. Mid-Nite who takes a look at her wound with his equipment:
Ultrasonic Scanning — Possible fracture, eighth floating rib. Possible puncture in right common iliac artery
The first part makes no sense. The 11th and 12th pair of ribs, since they are not part of the ribcage, are known as “floating ribs.” There is no eighth floating rib.
The common iliac arteries are a pair of large arteries in the lower abdomen/pelvic area. Damage to one of the common iliac arteries could easily lead to a dangerous loss of blood.
After assessing her wounds, Dr. Mid-Nite moves on to treatment:
Dr. Mid-Nite: This is a fibrin sealant foam made from elastic proteins. It should stop the bleeding, seal off your severed arteries.
I’m going to assume Johns wrote this part because it follows a pattern I’ve noticed when he writes medical scenes. He’ll take a cutting edge medical concept and then extrapolate one or two steps further. In this case, starting in 1998 — a year or so before this comic came out — there was a great deal of press about the Army working on new bandages that incorporated fibrin (one of the proteins our bodies use to form clots). These fibrin bandages were supposed to stop bleeding better than regular bandages. Johns has taken this idea and gone one step further, giving Dr. Mid-Nite a fibrin foam (a 2002 article suggests that the Army had a similar idea, but could never get the foam to work). As far as I know, the Army is still working on their bandages.
Later, Black Canary and Dr. Mid-Nite free the rest of the JSA:
Dr. Mid-Nite: Watch your breathing Hawkgirl. It’s shallow and rapid. Your carbon dioxide levels are dropping. Don’t let the anxiety overwhelm you.
While what Dr. Mid-Nite is saying is entirely correct — it’s just too damn wordy (I’d call it a clear case of Claremont-level wordiness). For Heaven’s sake, just say, “Stop hyperventilating.”
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March 21st, 2007 at 2:49 pm
That second example with the hyperventilating highlights a problem I see in a lot of the stuff you feature here — a writer just plain trying too hard to sound impressive. It’s one thing to have a little bit of technical terminology (in any field, not just medicine) to heighten verisimilitude (and that word is itself technical jargon). But over and over again we see writers stumbling over abstruse terminology when the scene doesn’t need it at all, and in fact takes the readers out of the moment instead of persuading them of its realism. No one wants to feel the writer elbowing them in the obliquus externus abdominis going “Look at all this research I did, pretty impressive, huh?”
Now, I’m the son of two doctors and grew up with this stuff as constant background noise in my childhood. I expect my tolerance for medical jargon is slightly higher than average, and if this bugs me I have to assume it bugs other folks even more.
That said, if writers stopped doing this you’d have less to post about…so by all means I hope they carry on!
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