What Causes Rigor Mortis

A few hours after a person or animal dies, the joints of the body stiffen and become locked in place. This stiffening is called rigor mortis. Its only a temporary condition. Depending on body temperature and other conditions, rigor mortis lasts approximately 72 hours. The phenomenon is caused by the skeletal muscles partially contracting. The muscles are unable to relax, so the joints become fixed in place. The Role of Calcium Ions and ATP After death, the membranes of muscle cells become more permeable to calcium ions. Living muscle cells expend energy to transport calcium ions to the outside of the cells. The calcium ions that flow into the muscle cells promote the cross-bridge attachment between actin and myosin, two types of fibers that work together in muscle contraction. The muscle fibers ratchet shorter and shorter until they are fully contracted or as long as the neurotransmitter acetylcholine and the energy molecule adenosine triphosphate (ATP) are present. However, muscles need ATP in order to release from a contracted state (it is used to pump the calcium out of the cells so the fibers can unlatch from each other). When an organism dies, the reactions that recycle ATP eventually come to a halt. Breathing and circulation no longer provide oxygen, but respiration continues anaerobically for a short time. ATP reserves are quickly exhausted from the muscle contraction and other cellular processes. When the ATP is depleted, calcium pumping stops. This means that the actin and myosin fibers will remain linked until the muscles themselves start to decompose. How Long Does Rigor Mortis Last? Rigor mortis can be used to help estimate the time of death. Muscles function normally immediately after death. The onset of rigor mortis may range from 10 minutes to several hours, depending on factors including temperature (rapid cooling of a body can inhibit rigor mortis, but it occurs upon thawing). Under normal conditions, the process sets in within four hours. Facial muscles and other small muscles are affected before larger muscles. Maximum stiffness is reached around 12-24 hours post mortem. Facial muscles are affected first, with the rigor then spreading to other parts of the body. The joints are stiff for 1-3 days, but after this time general tissue decay and leaking of lysosomal intracellular digestive enzymes will cause the muscles to relax. It is interesting to note that meat is generally considered to be more tender if it is eaten after rigor mortis has passed. Sources Hall, John E., and Arthur C. Guyton. Guyton and Hall Textbook of Medical Physiology. Philadelphia, PA: Saunders/Elsevier, 2011. MD Consult. Web. 26 Jan. 2015.Peress, Robin. Rigor mortis at the crime scene.  Discovery Fit Health, 2011. Web. 4 December 2011.

Pathophysiology Of The Following Signs And Symptoms

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Allen Ginsberg and HOWL Analysis and Response Essay Example For Students

Allen Ginsberg and HOWL: Analysis and Response Essay Throughout the ages of poetry, there is a poet who stands alone, a prominent figure who represents the beliefs and mors of the time. During the 1950s and 1960s, the Beatnik era in America brought forth poets who wrote vivid, realistic poetry in response to the rise of bigotry, crimes against the innocent, and the loss of faith in the national government. With little euphemism, they wrote about homosexual sex, drug abuse, and other brazen topics. Of this Beat Generation, as they were called, Allen Ginsberg rises above the rest as the pseudo-poet laureate of the group (Burns 125). His most well-known poem, HOWL, caused an incredible amount of controversy; however, it also forever changed the world of poetry. Allen Ginsberg was born in Newark, New Jersey in 1926 to an upstanding middle class Jewish family. In a lifetime of literary accomplishment, he has moved from the position of a curiosity on the borders of society to become the hero of a broad-based subculture. In 1943, Ginsberg entered Columbia University where he met Jack Kerouac and William Burroughs, two names that would later join him as fathers of a literary/social movement known as the Beat Generation. Ginsbergs subject matter focused on the activities of his social circle and included such things as drug use and homosexual sex. These topics hadnt been written about so openly, without some sort of literary masking before. Ginsbergs far-ranging, wildly expressive style greatly impacted the evolution of modern literature. His literary odyssey created a vast legacy of poetry and the publication of many books of poetry and prose. Perhaps most notable, Howl, was published in 1956 by Lawrence Ferlinghettis City Lights bookstore in San Francisco. A landmark court decision found Howl to be not obscene (Ehrlich 57). Allen Ginsbergs monumental poem was first heard in a series of famous readings that signaled the arrival of the Beat Generation of writers. The first of these readings took place in October 1955 at the Six Gallery in San Francisco. It was Allen Ginsbergs first public performance, and it made him instantly famous at the age of twenty-nine. The poem is part Walt Whitman, part Old Testament hellfire ranting, and one-hundred-percent performance art. The lines in the famous first part of the poem tumble over each other in long unbroken breaths, all adding to a single endless sentence: I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked, dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix, angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night (Ginsberg 5) The rhythms of the rolling, crashing words portray a vivid picture of Ginsbergs friends and their numerous adventures across America. Ginsberg is describing his fellow travelers, the crazy, lonely members of his community of misunderstood poet artists, unpublished novelists, psychotics, radicals, pranksters, sexual deviants and junkies. At the time that he wrote this hed seen several of his promising young friends broken or killed: who distributed Supercommunist pamphlets in Union Square weeping and undressing while the sirens of Los Alamos wailed them down, and wailed down Wall, and the Staten Island Ferry also wailed, who broke down crying in white gymnasiums naked and trembling before the machinery of other skeletons, who bit detectives in the neck and shrieked with delight in police cars for committing no crime but their own wild cooking pederasty and intoxication (Ginsberg 7) Each of these describe real-life events by people Ginsberg knew, but the poem is especially dedicated to Carl Solomon, Ginsbergs insane hyper-intellectual friend who hed met in a mental hospital years before. In the poem, Ginsberg makes mention of Solomons actions at a lecture where he threw potato salad at the professor teaching on Dadaism. It is Carl Solomons insanity that drove Ginsberg to write this poem, especially because it reminded him of his mothers own unspeakable insanity (which he finally wrote about in Kaddish, but here he can only say with mother finally ******). Carls insanity also reminds him of himself (Hyde 22). This first section of the poem is a seven page typed list of all the spirits broken, impaired , or thoroughly destroyed by a force he would not name until the second part of the poem. (Burns 104). Since he did not feel that he was writing for publication, Ginsberg felt free to experiment. He replaced his normally short lines with the Kerouac and jazz influenced long line. He employed a cataloguing style similar to that used by Walt Whitman in Song of Myself, and he broke the long lines into a triadic ladder structure that he learned from William Carlos Williams. Ginsberg describes the poems structure as a huge sad comedy of wild phrasing, meaningless images for the beauty of abstract poetry of mind running along making awkward combinations like Charlie Chaplins walk, long saxophone -like chorus lines I knew Kerouac would hear the sound of. (Schumacher 220) Part I of Howl was not completed , though, in the order in which it now appears. Ginsberg went back over the poem, categorizing each stanza thematically from A to D. He then grouped the stanzas accordingly. The categories were: A. Lines proceeding from or around New York, including Columbia University and Madison Avenue, the Lower East Side, and Ginsbergs apartment. B. Lines relating to the break of life between the womb of college days and the shock and alienation entering the world, making a crippled living outside of family and academic shelterthis motif accounting vocational failure or readjustment, leaving the city, or nervous breakdown, typical post-college crisis. (Schumacher 226) C. The Bill Of Rights EssayI didnt linger on it too long, I assure you. Ferlinghetti was found innocent of publishing obscene books and was quickly set free. Though this is Ginsbergs most famous poem, when a friend of mine asked him to sign a copy of it at a poetryreading he said, This isnt my best work. The year of 1955 was particularly difficult for Allen Ginsberg. Seeking a new creative direction after failing to get his collectionEmpty Mirror published, he decided to take his analysts advice and quit his day job, move in with his lover (Peter Orlovsky,) and devote all of his time to poetry. Having quit his job, though, he found himself plagued with financial difficulties. Living with his lover led to emotional problems; and to top it off he was suffering writers block. These problems led Ginsberg to begin studying Buddhism under his friend and fellow Beat writer Jack Kerouac. With the practice of Dhyana meditation, he hoped to attain a level of heightened consciousness similar to that he experienced during his visions of William Blake. It would take a great deal of study, however, until his Buddhist studies became infused into his work. In the meantime he immersed himself in Classical Greek and Roman poetry, Ezra Pounds translations of Chinese odes, and the works of Herman Hesse, in addition to classical Buddhist texts such as the Surangama Sutra. What seems to have had the strongest influence on Ginsbergs new writings of this period, however, was not literature but rather the painting of Paul Cezanne. Studying biographies of the painter and color reproductions of his work, Ginsberg sought to understand how Cezanne juxtaposed planes and made use of what he called petite sensation in such a way as to induce quick flashes of illumination in those looking at his works. The Great Bathers utilizes juxtapositioning of bathers in the foreground with a townscape in the background. It was this painting which provided Ginsberg with the illuminative flash comparable to his Blake vision. He would now seek the same effect with his poetry. The object would be to juxtapose written imagery in such a way as to produce what he and K erouac referred to as eyeball kicks. In Dream Record: June 8, 1955 Ginsberg recorded a dream in which he was back in Mexico having a conversation with Joan Vollmer, the accidentally murdered wife of William Burroughs. Devoting parts of the poem to passages about the dream, and parts to passages about Vollmers death, he was moderately successful in achieving the petite sensation effect. But despite praise by William Burroughs for the poem, Ginsberg was still basically blocked. He attempted unsuccessfully to complete two other larger works, and was only able to write in flashes, single lines of imagery recorded haphazardly in his journals. There was one line though, which he would soon return to alter somewhat and expand on greatly:I saw the best mind angel-headed hipster damned The poem which would grow out of this line was, of course,Howl. And quite a growth it was. Ginsbergs lover Orlovsky had recently left on a hitchhiking trip of the east coast, and Ginsberg now had some much needed solitude. One August afternoon Ginsberg was visited by the muse; she came back with a vengeance. In a few short hours the entire first section of Howl was finished. Ginsberg described how he: sat idly at my desk by the first-floor window facing Montgomery Streets slope to gay broadwayonly a few blocks from City Lights literary paperback bookshop. I had only a secondhand typewriter, some cheap scratch paper. I began typing, not with the idea of writing a formal poem, but stating my imaginative sympathies, whatever they were worth. He is an extraordinarily prolific artist, having had over forty books published and eleven albums produced. Aliens friendship and literary experimentation with Jack Kerouac and William Burroughs began in 1945, and a decade later as this core group expanded to include other poets and writers, it came to be known as the Beat Generation. (Hyde 72). He has received numerous honors, including the National Book Award for Poetry, a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship, National Arts Club Medal, 1986 Struga Festival Golden Wreath, and the Manhattan Borough President David Dinkins Medal of Honor for Literary Excellence 1989. A potent figure in the cultural revolution of the sixties, he has been arrested with Dr. Benjamin Spock for blocking the Whitehall Draft Board steps, has testified at the U. S. Senate hearings for the legalization of psychedelics and been teargassed for chanting Om at the Lincoln Park Yippie Life Festival at the 1968 Presidential convention in Chicago. His Collected Poems 1947-1980, were published in 1984 with White Shroud and the 30th Anniversary Howl annotated issue in 1 986. Several books of his photographs and a recordlCD of his poetry-jazz album, The Lion for Real, appeared in 1989. He is a member of the National Institute of Arts and Letters, and is a Distinguished Professor at Brooklyn College and a member of the Executive Board of PEN American Center. A practicing Buddhist, Alien cofounded Naropa Institutes Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics in Boulder, Colorado. In 1997 the Beat Generation lost their beloved poet, and Allen Ginsberg became a legend (Schumacher 312).