Hiroshima Suffering Quotes

How we cite our quotes: (Chapter.Paragraph)

Quote #4

Dr. Sasaki had not looked outside the hospital all day; the scene inside was so terrible and so compelling that it had not occurred to him to ask any questions about what had happened beyond the windows and doors. Ceilings and partitions had fallen; plaster, dust, blood, and vomit were everywhere. Patients were dying by the hundreds, but there was nobody to carry away the corpses. (3.10)

Dr. Sasaki was so overwhelmed by the suffering and injuries of the people in his immediate vicinity that he couldn't devote any energy/thought to what was actually going on beyond the walls of the hospital. He ended up at the hospital working straight for days trying to help all the injured who flocked in from the outside.

Quote #5

Miss Sasaki lay in steady pain in the Goddess of Mercy Primary School, at Hatsukaichi, the fourth station to the southwest of Hiroshima on the electric train. An internal infection still prevented the proper setting of the compound fracture of her lower left leg. A young man who was in the same hospital and who seemed to have grown fond of her in spite of her unremitting preoccupation with her suffering, or else just pitied her because of it, lent her a Japanese translation of de Maupassant, and she tried to read the stories, but she could concentrate for only four or five minutes at a time. (4.5)

Miss Sasaki ended up being the most grievously injured (physically speaking) of the book's six subjects. She sustained a nasty break in her leg that, to make matters even worse, no one seemed to know how to fix/disinfect. And she hadn't even received help for quite a while. As a result of these circumstances, she was not a happy camper.

Quote #6

When Father Kleinsorge arrived at the hospital, he was terribly pale and very shaky. He complained that the bomb had upset his digestion and given him abdominal pains. His white blood count was three thousand (five to seven thousand is normal), he was seriously anemic, and his temperature was 104. (4.13)

Although Father Kleinsorge had been mostly up on his feet after the blast, he definitely ended up feeling the effects of radiation poisoning. He was so badly off that that doctors thought he wasn't going to make it, and he had health problems for the rest of his life.