Symbol
The timber rattlesnake was designated the state reptile of West Virginia in 2008. That state's legislature praised "...a proud contribution by the eighth grade class at Romney Middle School, from West Virginia's oldest county, in West Virginia's oldest town, to have been instrumental in making the timber rattlesnake the state reptile..."
This snake became a prominent symbol during the American Revolution in part because it had a fearsome reputation. The use of the timber rattlesnake as a symbol of American anger and resolve to defend itself was no idle threat. During the period of 1763–1787, medical knowledge was not up to the challenge of treating a timber rattlesnake's bite. First, at the time, European standards of medical practice were based on the ideas and concepts of Galen, where disease was caused by imbalances in the body; this was the standard to which all doctors practicing medicine in the colonies were trained. Because of the then poorly understood effects on the nervous or hematological system of this species' venom, a physician would prescribe a course of action that wound up killing the patient faster (bleeding with leeches) or prescribing herbs without testing of their efficacy as a cure beyond imitation of Native American practices Secondly, Linnaeus only described and identified this snake in 1758; firsthand experience with timber rattlesnakes among London scientists would have been poor, the flora and fauna of the colonies would have been disdained as savage by thinking circles, and published information on its habits would have been thin, allowing for hearsay and superstition to grow on both sides of the Atlantic.
Read more about this topic: Timber Rattlesnake
Famous quotes containing the word symbol:
“The symbol of perpetual youth, the grass-blade, like a long green ribbon, streams from the sod into the summer, checked indeed by the frost, but anon pushing on again, lifting its spear of last year’s hay with the fresh life below. It grows as steadily as the rill oozes out of the ground.... So our human life but dies down to its root, and still puts forth its green blade to eternity.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“In a symbol there is concealment and yet revelation: here therefore, by silence and by speech acting together, comes a double significance.... In the symbol proper, what we can call a symbol, there is ever, more or less distinctly and directly, some embodiment and revelation of the Infinite; the Infinite is made to blend itself with the Finite, to stand visible, and as it were, attainable there. By symbols, accordingly, is man guided and commanded, made happy, made wretched.”
—Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881)
“Whether he admits it or not, a man has been brought up to look at money as a sign of his virility, a symbol of his power, a bigger phallic symbol than a Porsche.”
—Victoria Billings (b. 1945)