Gitney House of Horror

Comparing the medical madmen in the texts we've been reading so far, I started wondering about which madman had done the most "damage". Knox had in a way encouraged the murders for bodies from Burke and Hare, Frankenstein abandoned his most precious creation and left him for dead, and Jekyll chose his "better half" over friends and his normal life. But when reading the Pox Party, it hit me of how much Octavian had went through. His whole life he was told to be devoid of emotion and to see things from an observational standpoint, he was never given the chance to be a child, or even a human for that matter. He was a specimen for results and slave work. Octavian did not even know his mother's name. When Octavian joined the Americans in the war he finally felt how it was to have someone actually care about him, he began to experience these emotions that he had never fully been able to embrace before. Perhaps Private Goring saving his life gave Octavian this realization that he was more than just an experiment, he was a human being with value to his life. After reading through this story and watching Octavian be used as a token, watching his mother die from a Pox Party in the Gitney house, then being able to escape; I saw the development of someone who had been under lock and key their whole life. I realized from the Pox Party just how damaging the experiment had been on Octavian. I concluded that the medical madmen in the house of Gitney had done the most damage out of all the madmen we have gone through so far in our texts. They prevented someone from being a human, from living the life they were given. It took Octavian doing hard labor for the Americans side, to crack a smile. It was hard work for Octavian, but HE had chosen to do that work. Not because someone else had made him do it, but it was because he wanted to. Then he only ended up back in that horrible place he had escaped from. That instance was when it all hit me, of how such experimentation and twisted hierarchy could make a human being feel as though they had no worth. The Gitney House withheld the horrors of stealing a human life, both mentally and physically.

Krista Stites