Doctors’ amicable images are in the minds of most people, but William Carlos Williams depicts a bizarre doctor in his short story “The Use of Force”. The doctor is called to Olson’s home to diagnose a girl named Mathilda who is suspected to have diphtheria. Because of her uncooperativeness, the doctor has no other way working but to use force on Mathilda in order to check her throat and to confirm the diagnosis. In consideration of his using of force in this story, the doctor is becoming less dutiful and more hypocritical with the development of the story.
What cannot be denied is that the doctor’s using of force is based on his duty. As a doctor, he has the responsibility of diagnosing each of his patients and prescribing the right medicine or assigning medical treatment. Because of the fatal problem which the doctor suspected, Mathilda’s throat must be examined right at the first place. “When finally I got the wooden spatula behind the last teeth and just the point of it into the mouth cavity, she opened up for an instant but before I could see anything she came down again and gripped the wooden blade between her molars she reduced it to splinters before I could get it out again” (Williams 1592). Mathilda’s resistance and stubbornness undoubtedly increase the difficulty for the doctor to examine. However, even if Mathilda’s mouth is already hurt, the doctor has to continue diagnosing the illness because Mathilda is a patient and as her main doctor, he has the
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With the defend of the little girl is going on, the doctor starts to threaten the girl by saying that “Will you open it now by yourself or shall we have to open it for you?” (1591). This point demonstrates that the doctor is losing his patience little by little because of the girl’s continuing incooperation. And eventually the doctor is completely furious: “Then I grasped the child’s head with my left hand and tried to get the wooden tongue depressor between her teeth.”
Very relevant topic raised by the author. For example, I was always afraid of since the childhood of doctors and all doctors. It seemed to me always that the doctors can do only hurts. And if he is a psychopath hidden and especially the surgeon! What can be more dangerous than such combinations.
The themes in the novel tell a complete story of life, science, and the science of life. “It was very dehumanizing to be thought of as Mo, to be thought of as Mo in the medical records: ‘Saw Mo today.’ ” (Skloot 201). This animal like referral to patients then demonstrates just how far medical ethics has come. It also proves that these dehumanizing tactics are a major theme in the story.
“He’s dead, you can’t save him, there is nothing you can do about it” this sentence haunts medical professionals as doctors are trained to save lives. Perhaps what’s even more haunting is a doctor ending a patient’s life. Samuel Shem’s the House of God sheds light on the issue through its intern, Roy who goes through a rough time after killing a patient. Roy falsely thought he killed the patient to release his suffering, however, that’s not the case as he killed him to make peace with his own death.
At times, doctors have to choose between the preservation and honor of a patient's dignity or to break ethical guidelines to help the human races’ health. A doctor who puts his patients’ well-being as his priority, usually respects the patient’s wishes. However, many factors influence a person’s decision to conduct an unethical experiment. In the contemporary biography, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, Rebecca Skloot shows that scientists constantly discover and develop new concepts and procedures that help heal numerous people, despite the unethical experiments that they conduct on living organisms.
This shows exactly how doctors can behave and how it doesn’t hurt to be more aware of their actions . This also comes back to consent, because if Henrietta Lacks had given consent and understood exactly what she was giving consent for there would be no book written about her . Henrietta Lacks would have still died but at least the life changing trait she had that the
Carl Williams: the non-ideal victim: HEATHER JONES 214139974 Carl Williams; convicted drug trafficker and murderer, was serving a life sentence in Barwon Prison’s Acacia unit when he was beaten over the head with the stem from an exercise bike and killed by Matthew Johnson in 2010. The first link that is listed when his name is searched in Google is the Wikipedia page titled “Carl Williams (criminal).” The initial impression is that he is not regarded as a victim of murder, but largely still as the killer he was. This is understandable. Williams is responsible for ordering the deaths of and killing members of Melbourne’s underworld, all of whom have left behind families and loved ones.
In the essay, The Devil’s Bait by Leslie Jamison, Jamison emphasizes her paper about Morgellons Disease. Throughout her essay, Jamison introduces the urgency of the disease by going to a location that is known to have many people asking the doctors to believe them. The reason Morgellons Disease is an urgent topic that must be discussed is because many people feel like their voices are not being heard and ignored. Many have a disease whom they see as needing emergency treatment, however they are being told it is their brain playing tricks on them. The rhetor is compelled to speak about this issue for it gives those whom she interviewed a sense of voice and a call out to doctors to be more understanding of their patients.
In the first section, Kalanithi uses analysis to look at the moral aspect of operating on patients. He says that he needs to learn the identity and the wishes of his patients so he can have more respect to them as he operates on their brains and could take one of those away from the patient. He sympathises with other medical professionals by saying “Those burdens are what makes medicine holy and wholly impossible: in taking up another’s cross, one must sometimes get crushed by the weight” (98). The word play he employs adds to the effect of how serious it is to operate on someone and know a doctor might take a person 's identity away if the are a millimeter away from where they were suppose to cut.
Reality is often deceiving, and tragic situations can happen unpredictably to people in our surrounding. In Lorrie Moore’s short story “People Like That Are the Only People Here: Canonical Babbling in Peed Onk”, the Mother and the Husband attempt to cope with the situation after they learnt that their Baby has a Wilms’ tumor on the kidney. Through this story, the author suggests that it is difficult for family members to deal with the illness of a loved one. The story’s narration plays an essential role in conveying the general mood of the story.
After reading this case I was terribly shocked about the fact that something like this could happen in our medical history. I couldn’t believe how a patient could be neglected so much. Based on the material that we have learned the lack of ethical theory of deontology in Dr. Evan was disturbing. As a doctor Dr. Evan’s role is to care for patients, keep them away from harm and prolong their life. Though in the trial he stated as if he didn’t care.
Andrew Davidson uses several rhetorical strategies throughout “Following my accident...,” an excerpt from The Gargoyle. These add great amounts of emotional depth, AND SOMETHING ELSE. In the opening paragraph, Davidson describes the doctor’s incisions to release a “secret inner being”(line 4), a “thing of engorged flesh”(6). This introduces a divide between the narrator, and his body; establishing it as it’s own entity.
Atul Gawande in his article “Whose body is it, anyway?” introduced couple of cases, which discussed a controversial topic, doctors dealing with patients and making important medical decisions. These are difficult decisions in which people might have life or death choices. Who should make the important decisions, patients or doctors? Patients don’t usually know what is better for their health and while making their decisions, they might ignore or don’t know the possible side effects and consequences of these decisions.
However, if patients refuse help and allow their condition to worsen, they lose their purpose because, without permission for care, healthcare workers can do nothing to help the suffering patient. Many refuse to watch their patients suffer more than necessary, like the physician in the story; this is why the physician acts with impropriety. Moreover, as they try to pry Matilda's mouth open, the narrator claims, "I had to have a throat culture for her own protection" (Williams 1938). The doctor is so committed to the diagnosis that they are blinded by the extenuating circumstances of Matilda's perturbation. By saying "had," this excerpt implies that this was not a matter to be discussed and negotiated between Matilda and the doctor but a mandatory procedure that does not care for Matilda's distress.
In the case of Henrietta Lacks and her family, the mistreatment of doctors and lack of informed consent defined nearly 60 years of the family’s history. Henrietta Lacks and her children had little to no information about serious medical procedures and the use of Henrietta’s cells in research. Henrietta’s cells launched a multibillion-dollar industry without her consent and doctors even took advantage of her children’s lack of education to continue their research without questions: “[Doctor] did not explain why he was having someone draw blood from Deborah… he wrote a phone number and told her to use it for making more appointments to give more blood” (188). Deborah did not have the knowledge to understand the demands or requests the doctors made of her, and the doctors did not inform her explicitly.
In the early 20th century around the time of the end to World War 1, a new era of poetry was born, the Modernism Era. Many ideas about this concept of modernism flowed around the way a person sees something through his own perspective, or first person point of view. As these ideas westernized, it reached America, many different poets in America rejected these ideas and others picked them up and ran with them. One poet in particular, William Carlos Williams, was one of the more well known names for his modernist poetry. Williams lived in Rutherford, New Jersey roughly his whole life.