Hospitals
One of the points the author strives to make is that doctors and doctors alone are not synonymous with health care provisions. At one point, fairly late in the narrative, he uses a very accessible metaphor to underline this point:
“Doctors and patients do not alone a hospital make. Look about you at the others who labor in the same vineyard.
Ethics
Throughout the narrative, the author comments upon basic ethical standards which any doctor must observe using comparison metaphors. For instance, on the subject of requiring the patient to be unclothed, he turns to the Bible (apocryphal additions to book of Daniel) to make the connection. Today, of course, fewer readers would make the connection than when it was written:
“To cover the nakedness of another is an act of charity. To gape needlessly is to be like the lewd elders who spied upon Susannah in her garden.”
Essentially, he is calling any doctor who allows a patient’s body to be exposed without necessity nothing less than a Peeping Tom.
The Doctor as God
Interestingly, the author addresses the common view of doctors “playing God” through the lens of what he considers a failure; the patient died. The mother of the patient, however, has given serious thought to this comparison:
“The doctor is one of the angels. He has finished the work of God.”
When the doctor muses to himself that the young girl’s problems were not fixed and, indeed, the girl died even before he could address that failure, the mother responds, quite poetically, through direct metaphor:
“Only a fine line that God will erase in time.”
More Bible Stuff
One can easily conclude this is a work from another era simply through the number of metaphors which allude to theology, religions and the Bible. In describing the way a certain doctor proceeds to diagnosis, he writes:
“He had trained himself to gaze at his patients as though he were Adam and each patient the second human being created.”
This is the End
This is an instructional text much more reliant on dense metaphorical imagery than most; certainly much, much more so than college textbooks published today. Fittingly, then, the entire thing draws to a close with a rather morbid metaphorical representation of the psyche of one who treats patients so long:
“By the time Death comes to claim me, I shall already have been dead for many years—from long immersion in the habit of it.”
