When I use a word . . . . Medical trigger warnings

Various literary figures are having trigger warnings put on them by universities. The warnings tell students that texts contain material that they may find upsetting. Even Shakespeare is not immune. The latest subject of a warning is Ernest Hemingway, for The Old Man and the Sea, which won the Pulitzer Prize in 1953 and was specifically commended by the Nobel Committee when it gave Hemingway the Nobel Prize in 1954. Looking again into the textbooks that I used when I was a medical student, I now wonder why nobody issued a trigger warning about them; some of the descriptions they contain are very upsetting. But there is some evidence that trigger warnings are not effective in reducing the anxiety caused by reading texts that might be upsetting. Rereading The Old Man and the Sea, I found it much less upsetting than many medical texts.