Talk:Disturbed character

Problems

This article has a great many things seriously wrong with it. First, there is no clinical definition of "disturbed character"; there are just a great many terms applied to a great many character and personality problems. To pick out the phrase "disturbed character" as though it is meaningful in its own right is wrong.

There are numerous problems of grammar and usage. Perhaps the most notorious is the sentence

"In 1886 he joined Pasteur's adversaries who tried to discredit his method of antirabies vaccination whenever a death of patient occurred and who were ready to unleash hostile campaigns in the French press that was always looking for scandal and in the scientific press, that had gained an important position in society since the first half of the nineteenth century."

This sentence is astoundly long, goes all over the map, and has dangling pronouns and subordinate clauses all over the place. Who had gained an important position? Pasteur? Clemenceau? Pasteur's adversaries in general? The French press? The scientific press? If one divides one's writing into sentences of reasonable length, one can focus each sentence clearly.

Also

"Instead of using underhand means, Pasteur showed science in action, personified the march of progress and at the same time his aggressive adversaries were consumed by envy and "cast into the shadowy realm of the wicked", along with archaic opponents of Pasteur's method."

might be a compound sentence, or a simple sentence with a compound verb phrase. One can't just mix these things willy-nilly.

Also, are you saying that Clemenceau was a disturbed character? I think that's what you are saying, but no connection is made, making the whole section something that doesn't seem to fit in with the topic of the article.

Also, the doctrine of spontaneous generation was a hot topic at the time, but the people supporting it were not necessarily evolutionists. Darwin's theory of evolution had only been published 5 years prior; there wasn't time for battle lines to be drawn on this issue. In fact, Darwin didn't comment on spontaneous generation until 7 years later. Evolution should be left out of the argument.

And who was the "Tiger"?

I've fixed some of the more egregious stylistic errors, but I'm not really an expert, either on psychopathology or on its relationship with the Pasteur/Clemenceau dispute.

SamHB 22:28, 15 December 2013 (EST)