Before her assumed death, Mildred Montag experienced a severe drug overdose and received emergency medical treatment to save her life.
Mildred's Near-Fatal Ordeal
At the beginning of Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451, Mildred Montag, the wife of protagonist Guy Montag, suffered a critical drug overdose. She had taken a large quantity of sleeping pills, leaving her unconscious and near death.
Her husband, Guy, discovered her in this dire state and immediately contacted emergency services. Instead of traditional paramedics, two handymen, who doubled as emergency technicians, arrived at their home. These individuals were equipped with specialized machines designed for such common incidents.
Emergency Medical Intervention
To revive Mildred, the emergency technicians performed two crucial procedures:
- They utilized a machine to pump her stomach, effectively removing the ingested drugs from her system.
- Following the stomach pump, they employed another device to completely replace her blood, cleansing her body of the remaining toxins.
Mildred survived this incident, but her detached demeanor and continued reliance on media and pills persisted throughout the novel. While the exact circumstances of Mildred's death are not explicitly detailed in the book, it is widely presumed that she perished during the catastrophic bombing of the city that occurs at the novel's conclusion.
