TYPES OF ARTICLES
Methods of Treatment. After choosing a subject and formulating his purpose, a writer is ready to consider methods of treatment. Again it is desirable to survey all the possibilities in order to choose the one method best adapted to his subject and his purpose. His chief consideration should be the class of readers that he desires to reach. Some topics, he will find, may be treated with about equal success in any one of several ways, while others lend themselves to only one or two forms of presentation. By thinking through the various possible ways of working out his subject, he will be able to decide which meets his needs most satisfactorily.
Exposition by Narration and Description. The commonest method of developing a special feature article is that which combines narration and description with exposition. The reason for this combination is not far to seek. The average person is not attracted by pure exposition. He is attracted by fiction. Hence the narrative and descriptive devices of fiction are employed advantageously to supplement expository methods. Narratives and descriptions also have the advantage of being concrete and vivid. The rapid reader can grasp a concrete story or a word picture. He cannot so readily comprehend a more general explanation unaccompanied by specific examples and graphic pictures of persons, places, and objects.
Narration and description are used effectively for the concrete examples and the specific instances by which we illustrate general ideas. The best way, for example, to make clear the operation of a state system of health insurance is to relate how it has operated in the case of one or more persons affected. In explaining a new piece of machinery the writer may well describe it in operation, to enable readers to visualize it and follow its motions. Since the reader's interest will be roused the more quickly if he is given tangible, concrete details that he can grasp, the examples are usually put first, to be followed by the more general explanation. Sometimes several examples are given before the explanatory matter is offered. Whole articles are often made up of specific examples and generalizations presented alternately.
To explain the effects of a new anæsthetic, for example, Mr. Burton J. Hendrick in an article in McClure's Magazine, pictured the scene in the operating-room of a hospital where it was being given to a patient, showed just how it was administered, and presented the results as a spectator saw them. The beginning of the article on stovaine, the new anæsthetic, illustrating this method of exposition, follows:
A few months ago, a small six-year-old boy was wheeled into the operating theater at the Hospital for Ruptured and Crippled Children, in New York City. He was one of the several thousand children of the tenements who annually find their way into this great philanthropic institution, suffering from what, to the lay mind, seems a hopelessly incurable injury or malformation. This particular patient had a crippled and paralyzed leg, and to restore its usefulness, it was necessary to cut deeply into the heel, stretch the "Achilles tendon," and make other changes which, without the usual anesthetic, would involve excruciating suffering. According to the attendant nurses, the child belonged to the "noisy" class; that is, he was extremely sensitive to pain, screamed at the approach of the surgeon, and could be examined only when forcibly held down.
As the child came into the operating-room he presented an extremely pathetic figure—small, naked, thin, with a closely cropped head of black hair, and a face pinched and blanched with fear. Surrounded by a fair-sized army of big, muscular surgeons and white-clothed nurses, and a gallery filled with a hundred or more of the leading medical men of the metropolis, he certainly seemed a helpless speck of humanity with all the unknown forces of science and modern life arrayed against him. Under ordinary conditions he would have been etherized in an adjoining chamber and brought into the operating-room entirely unconscious. This cripple, however, had been selected as a favorable subject for an interesting experiment in modern surgery, for he was to undergo an extremely torturous operation in a state of full consciousness.
Among the assembled surgeons was a large-framed, black moustached and black-haired, quick-moving, gypsy-like Rumanian—Professor Thomas Jonnesco, dean of the Medical Department of the University of Bucharest, and one of the leading men of his profession in Europe. Dr. Jonnesco, who had landed in New York only two days before, had come to the United States with a definite scientific purpose. This was to show American surgeons that the most difficult operations could be performed without pain, without loss of consciousness, and without the use of the familiar anesthetics, ether or chloroform. Dr. Jonnesco's reputation in itself assured him the fullest opportunity of demonstrating his method in New York, and this six-year-old boy had been selected as an excellent test subject.
Under the gentle assurances of the nurses that "no one was going to hurt" him, the boy assumed a sitting posture on the operating-table, with his feet dangling over the edge. Then, at the request of Dr. Jonnesco, he bent his head forward until it almost touched his breast. This threw the child's back into the desired position—that of the typical bicycle "scorcher,"—making each particular vertebra stand out sharply under the tight drawn skin. Dr. Jonnesco quickly ran his finger along the protuberances, and finally selected the space between the twelfth dorsal and the first lumbar vertebræ—in other words, the space just above the small of the back. He then took an ordinary hypodermic needle, and slowly pushed it through the skin and tissues until it entered the small opening between the lower and upper vertebræ, not stopping until it reached the open space just this side of the spinal cord.
As the needle pierced the flesh, the little patient gave a sharp cry—the only sign of discomfiture displayed during the entire operation. When the hollow needle reached its destination, a few drops of a colorless liquid spurted out—the famous cerebro-spinal fluid, the substance which, like a water-jacket, envelops the brain and the spinal cord. Into this same place Dr. Jonnesco now introduced an ordinary surgical syringe, which he had previously filled with a pale yellowish liquid—the much-famed stovaine,—and slowly emptied its contents into the region that immediately surrounds the spinal cord.