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Quality, reliability and safety are primary concerns in your professional world—and in ours. At SiTEL of MedStar Health, we provide a comprehensive education and training solution to those who work in healthcare. As seasoned professionals, we have many years of experience in the practice and management of medicine and healthcare, respectively. We understand how training impacts performance in hospitals.
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Blog
30
Aug
2010
2010
Anti-Comic Book Crusader’s Papers Available
Posted by Todd Borghesani
As we present to enterprises that want to achieve high-reliability in high-risk environments, we recommend a blended learning solution. Driven by a client’s business outcomes and needs, we design their training regime, combining simulation training in real settings, online content, as well as dynamic content in the shape of VIDEO GAMES and/or simulations.
As I roll through my pitch…
Our potential client stops my spiel and says, “Games, did you mean video games?”
I know what’s coming. I can tell by her tone. My expression reveals nothing.
She looks at me sideways and says, “Video games are so violent.”
After listening to arguments defending the industry on Ben Sawyer’s Serious Games listserv…I’m ready.
Today games are as comic books were: the vanguard medium of artistic expression.
TAKE A TRIP DOWN MEMORY LANE
Fredric Wertham. Among comic books aficionados his name is still synonymous with prudery and repression. The psychiatrist whose 222 boxes of papers the Library of Congress has opened to the public. In comics lore, Dr. Wertham has become something of a cryptic figure himself. But long before Tipper Gore, Edwin Meese, Andrea Dworkin, and our current crop of anti-video game crusaders took their turns at policing the national palette, Wertham was on the job, insisting that comics turned America’s kids into crooks and worse.
“His copy of ‘Kid Colt, Outlaw’ (1967) includes a note that of the 111 pictures, 69 were scenes of violence,” the Library of Congress notes. “An issue of ‘Justice League of America’ (1966) includes markings calling attention to the sounds of violence like ‘thud,’ ‘whapp’ and ‘poww’.”These documents and the rest of Wertham’s papers are now part of the public record and open to all scholars.
He laid it all out in his 1954 best seller, The Seduction of the Innocent. “The average parent has no idea that every imaginable crime is described in detail in comic books,” Wertham warned. “If one were to set out to show children how to steal, rob, lie, cheat, assault and break into houses, no better method could be devised.” When civil libertarians reminded Wertham about the First Amendment, the doctor cried foul.
Patient notes by psychiatrist Fredric Wertham describe the effects of a “Superman” comic book on a young boy. (Library of Congress/Abby Brack photo)
“I do not advocate censorship,” he pushed back, “which is imposing the will of the few on the many, but just the opposite, a step to real democracy: the protection of the many against the few. That can only be done by law. Just as we have ordinances against the pollution of water, so now we need ordinances against the pollution of children’s minds.”
He was only calling for a law “that would forbid the display and sale of crime comic books to children under fifteen,” he insisted. Sure, Wertham didn’t advocate censorship. He just wanted the government to make it illegal for comic books publishers to sell to the people who actually bought them.
BURN ALL COMIC BOOKS
After years of pummeling by historians, it’s now a bit unfashionable to be too hard on the guy. The Library of Congress blog offers a broader portrait of him. Born in Munich, Germany, Fredric Wertheimer came to the United States in 1922. In the 1940s he opened an outpatient mental health clinic in Harlem for the poor.
Wertham was an eloquent critic of Jim Crow segregation. His research on its harmful psychological effects was cited in the 1954 Brown versus the Board of Education Supreme Court case. And he spoke out for the welfare of people behind bars, including Ethel Rosenberg, who was eventually convicted and executed for espionage, along with her husband, Julius.
Unfortunately, Wertham used his good reputation, idealism, and erudition to help whip up national hysteria against a form of literature. As he made the rounds before state governments and televised Senate Committee hearings, cities passed laws against comics that included prison sentences for selling them. Encouraged by school administrators, children staged mass comic book burnings, one described in David Hajdu’s gripping book about the crusade, The Ten Cent Plague.
This particular burning took place in Spencer, West Virginia in 1948.
“The kids brought them into school on Tuesday, October 26, a cool, dry, sunny day, and they piled them on the grounds behind the building,” Hajdu recounts. “The books made a small mountain about six feet high. At the end of the day, the six hundred children who attended the school emptied into the yard and assembled in a semicircle facing the comics.”
After a student lit the cover of a Superman comic and threw it on top of the pile, “the flames rose to a height off more than twenty-five feet as the children, their teachers, the principal, and a couple of reporters and photographers from the area papers watched for more than an hour.”
OBEY, OBEY, OBEY AND OBEY
Following a series of McCarthy-like nationally televised hearings on comics, the terrified industry famously adopted a self- regulatory code that included the following production rules:
Policemen, judges, government officials and respected institutions shall never be presented in such a way as to create disrespect for established authority.
Passion or romantic interest shall never be treated in such a way as to stimulate the lower and baser emotions.
Respect for parents, the moral code, and for honorable behavior shall be fostered.
The treatment of love-romance stories shall emphasize the value of the home and the sanctity of marriage.
Did this self-correction turn our nation’s comic book readers into nicer people and better citizens? Who knows. Two things are for sure. Comic books got a lot less creative and interesting following the adoption of the code, and New York, the center of the comics industry, experienced a huge murder wave beginning in 1960 that didn’t taper down until the mid-1990s. But there’s an irony to the Wertham story. The psychiatrist was inadvertently a comic books collector himself.
Originally published in Ars Technica By Matthew Lasar
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Hollie Adejumo
Hollie Adejumo has been a high school intern at the SiTEL Clinical Simulation Center since 2010. Her principal areas of academic interest include chemistry, calculus, and global health. She is interested in providing medical services to the public and serving as a health advocate for underrepresented populations. Hollie hopes that her research will help to reduce unnecessary deaths in the future. She will pursue a bachelor’s degree in chemical engineering, which will enable her to combine her interests. Proceeding to obtain an MD/PhD will give her the ability to have autonomy in the practice of medicine. This year Ms. Adejumo will be assessing the need for orthopedic simulators, and hopes to begin designing a program for an orthopedic simulator by the end of the year. Outside of school, Hollie participates in a variety of activities. Although she has been a competitive swimmer for most of her life, she also enjoys running cross country and track.
Joyce Donnellan
As the Director of Learning Management, Joyce Donnellan brings over two decades of experience in critical care nursing education and professional development to SiTEL, Medstar’s Simulation and Training Environment Laboratory. She oversees the development and operation of SiTEL’s learning management system. Ms. Donnellan specializes in the development and integration of the learning management systems in complex and decentralized environments. She has extensive experience in education and training, including the development of curricula for both live and e-learning platforms. Ms. Donnellan enjoys collaborating with program directors, educators, and other stakeholders to develop training events and effective curricula. Her research endeavors include studying the impact of online learning on organizational behavior, as well as the integration of educational games into curriculum development. Joyce has presented nationally on e-learning topics, and on innovation in emergency preparedness training. She earned her Master’s of Science in Nursing degree from George Mason University.
Pamela Leonard
Pamela Leonard brings over 15 years of experience in critical care nursing and management to her role as the Director of the SiTEL’s Clinical Simulation Centers. Pam established the first simulation center for MedStar Health and now oversees the operations of several clinical simulation centers in the greater Washington, DC and Baltimore areas. She leads the Clinical Simulation Consulting Services at SiTEL, leveraging best practices pioneered at MedStar to integrate simulation training and education programs into healthcare operations. Pam works closely with Advanced Initiatives in Medical Simulation. AIMS is a coalition of individuals and organizations committed to promoting medical simulation as a way to improve patient safety, reduce medical errors, ensure provider competency, train people to respond to public emergencies and combat situations, and reduce health care costs.
