Word: fatalism
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...cotter pin apparently fell out of a coupling on a string of coal cars halted on a slight incline. One coal car rolled back down into the mine. Gathering speed, it flew off the track on a curve in the tunnel and struck the mine wall, showering the fatal sparks that ignited coal dust in a vast explosion. At Tsurumi, outside Yokohama, another cotter pin evidently sheared off the wheel housing of a southbound freight car. The loose lost wheel caused the last three cars to derail and sprawl across the adjacent track. Seconds later, alerted by a warning flare...
...before action was taken. Often, the psychiatrist found that the patient could be treated better (and more cheaply) outside a hospital. Dr. Chope also insisted on starting an "open door" psychiatric wing in the general hospital. Many psychiatrists, including some on his own staff, feared this would be a fatal error. If a violent patient committed an assault, the county would never forgive it. There has been no such incident, and the psychiatric wing is bursting its unlocked doors...
...victim of cystic fibrosis, almost invariably a child because the disease is usually fatal before adulthood, has an inherited enzyme defect that damages the oxygen-exchange cells in his lungs and reduces the elasticity of the lung walls. He does not breathe enough air in, nor let enough out. His windpipe and lungs become clogged with thick viscid mucus. The trick is to loosen and thin this mucus...
...lengthening lifespan and medical wonders, death may take on connotations of failure. Whose failure, or what kind of failure, is not at all clear, but the essence of the feeling is there. As Jerome Bruner puts it, "Death today has become somehow impersonal and unnecessary, perhaps like a fatal vitamin deficiency that might have been prevented or at least delayed...
...Cells. In the acute leukemia of childhood, drugs given to fight the cancer also cut down resistance to infection. One common infection, Dr. Zubrod said, exerts its deadly effects because the child lacks a form of white blood cell known as the granulocyte. The condition used to be 100% fatal. But the Government-sponsored Anti-Leukemia Task Force found that adult victims of a different kind of leukemia, the chronic myelogenous form, have a great excess of granulocytes. Some have donated blood from which up to 100 billion granulocytes have been extracted and given to a single child victim...