Nerve agents: A guide for emergency nurses. Part 1

Recent incidents in the UK and the alleged chemical attacks in Syria by the Bashar al-Assad regime have brought the subject of chemical weapons back into the public domain. To date these types of event have been relatively rare because terrorist plans to harm large numbers of people have mostly been thwarted. This is the first part of a two-part article on nerve agents. Part one gives an overview of these agents, their historical background and manufacture, and how the agents affect physiology. Part two, which will appear in the next issue, considers the pre-hospital response to the use of nerve agents, including effective triage and decontamination, and in-hospital treatment

The screenplay and the spectator: Exploring audience identification in narrative structure

In ‘The protagonist’s dramatic goals, wants and needs’, published in Journal of Screenwriting in 2010, screenwriting analyst Patrick Cattrysse offers a revision of character ‘want’ and ‘need’, a common trope in screenwriting guides and manuals, to develop a protagonist’s arc throughout a story. His revision expands on this theory to include the audience and their subconscious connection with a character. This connection can generate feelings of sympathy and empathy, which can lead to identification. It can also create feelings of fear or anxiety in the audience based on their knowledge of the character. In ‘Her body, himself: Gender in the Slasher’ (1987), film analyst Carol Clover identifies the ‘Final Girl’ theory, a trope found in the horror ‘slasher’ subgenre. The Final Girl is easily identifiable for both screenplay readers and film spectators and is an ideal theoretical model to explore the revision that Cattrysse speaks of, in a practical setting. This article investigates how the screenplay and screenwriter can play a leading role in better understanding the implied reader or spectator in film studies. It concludes that scholarly research into screenwriting can benefit the writer in a practical setting

Pirates in the Age of Projects, 1688-1707

This dissertation retells the history of pirates in the anglophone world, 1688-1707. It argues that the appellation “pirate” became applied to some within global seafaring communities as part of a contest among people of middling means to define the purpose and organisation of overseas expansion. These merchants, landowners, priests and politicians acted as part of an “Age of Projects”, a societal impulse triggered by the hardships of war, in which people attempted unlikely schemes for financial as well as political and social gain. Many of their plans were colonial or imperial in scope, and pirates – imagined as the absolute enemy of thalassocracy – retained a particular value within them, as they could be pinpointed as signifiers of larger moral and ideological deviance within the societies who hosted them. Defining who was or was not a pirate, eradicating or returning them to landed society, and rooting out their abettors became a means for individuals to demonstrate control over movements of people and, in turn, to advance a particular vision of empire. By exploring how pirates were created as part of this phenomenon, the thesis uses the methodologies of global history. Each chapter is oriented around a project in which the eradication of pirates became central, and traces the local, regional and global contexts which influenced its attempted realisation. In particular, Chapter 1 considers how admiralty courts attempted to suppress “piratical” Franco-Irish connections in Europe and the Atlantic. Chapter 2 traces the relationship between the Company of Scotland’s Darien Scheme and Caribbean piracy. Chapter 3 examines how the Earl of Bellomont attempted to use the existence of Madagascar pirates to transpose Irish colonisation strategies to North America. Chapter 4 focuses upon how Anglicans on both sides of the Atlantic used the sheltering of pirates in Pennsylvania to aid the creation of a missionary society. Chapter 5 covers three attempts to colonise Madagascar, which formed part of a larger contest over how exchange between the Atlantic and Indian Oceans should be managed.PhD funded by the Cambridge AHRC