It is not, for one thing, a medieval word; instead, it is an invention of the 16th century attributed, as it were, posthumously, by historians after the Gothic style had been trampled into virtual insensibility by the Italian Renaissance.
By self-experimentation he developed (1885) conduction, or block, anesthesia (the production of insensibility of a part by interrupting the conduction of a sensory nerve leading to that region of the body), brought about by injecting cocaine into nerve trunks.
A report produced by the Farm Animal Welfare Council in 2009 said that chickens and turkeys were likely to be conscious for up to 20 seconds after having their throats cut, adding that "such an injury would result in significant pain and distress before insensibility supervenes".
The old man's blood is stirred, and he attacks his youthful enemy with such furious and headlong rushes, buffeting him grievously with both hands, that Aeneas put an end to the battle, though barely in time to save the discomfited Trojan from being beaten into insensibility.
He memorialized his near-constant insensibility by giving open access to Robert Frank, Annie Leibovitz, and other image-makers, who captured him, backstage or in hotel rooms, half dressed and thoroughly zonked.
We climb right up into the Soto's new Fire Dome & get pounded into insensibility by the pistons.
Four weeks later, on November 18th, Bigelow published his report on the discovery of "insensibility produced by inhalation" in the Boston Medical and Surgical Journal.
Otherwise, the essay is an exercise in aesthetic insensibility, eschewing description of the art for aspersions, often pithy, on the artist's ethics.
(Koons's uncannily mediocre paintings suggest an insensibility in two dimensions that is as amazing, in its way, as his genius in three).
What bothers many readers about the picture of the world offered by Roth's fiction and Bellow's may not come exclusively from misogyny, per se, but rather from a sort of obtuseness, an insensibility to the idea that love could be rooted in qualities that are neither entirely physical nor emptily conventional (that is, wifely or stereotypically feminine).
("What power could now prevent the fertility, the insensibility of nature?" Woolf writes.
