A Comparison Of Bloodletting And Miraculous Cures

William Osler once said “Medicine is the science of uncertainty and the art of probability.” While this quote was said nearly one-hundred years ago, it still holds the same weight as is once did. In Bloodletting and Miraculous Cures by Vincent Lam, this quote is shown to not only be true in regards to medicine, but also for people as a whole; even so there are many factors that contribute to a person’s personality early on that can be traced to decisions and personality traits later in their lives. One of these factors is the amount of interaction and influence a person’s family has with them. In Bloodletting and Miraculous Cures, there are two extreme examples

Dr. Vincent Lam is a profound Canadian physician and writer. Bloodletting and Miraculous Cures is his award winning novel that speaks on the reality of what it’s actually like to be in medical school aiming to be apart of a medical profession and the difficult expectations students must face while still managing to stay sane during those challenging years of their lives. It’s a collection of short stories partly based off of his experiences in the medical field, following the lives of fictional characters Ming, Fitzgerald, Chen, and Sri as they endure medical school and later work as doctors. Dr. Lam does a remarkable job at incorporating unique and compelling characters with intriguing storylines who face common and extraordinary moral dilemmas that seem to shape their overall characters. Lam introduces themes of love, fear, tradition, drugs, death, self doubt, duality, etc.

Prominently featured in the mission statements of virtually of every medical school and medical institution in the world is the call for empathetic doctors. These institutions wish to train medical professionals that possess qualities of sympathy and compassion, and hospitals wish to employ health professionals that showcase similar qualities. The reality, however, is starkly different, as physicians, jaded by what they have seen in the medical world, lose the qualities that drove them to medicine in the first place. In Frank Huyler’s “The Blood of Strangers,” a collection of short stories from his time as a physician in the emergency room, Huyler uses the literary techniques of irony and imagery to depict the reality of the world of a medical professional. While Huyler provides several examples of both techniques in his accounts, moments from “A Difference of Opinion” and “The Secret” in particular stand out. Huyler uses irony and imagery in these two pieces to describe how medical professionals have lost their sense of compassion and empathy due to being jaded and desensitized by the awful incidents they have witnessed during their careers.

relationship that they are blinded of what is really happening. In F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel, The

With the usage of these stylistic elements of time progression, precise word choice, and comparisons from his own personal life, Fitzgerald illustrates wonderfully how all people at some point in their lives will eventually “crack-up”. Explaining to us how we will experience the sudden external blows, and the build up of “internal cracks”.The usage of his real life examples of other well known people. All of these thing shows to us that “Of course all life is a process of breaking

The descryiption of the human’s desires and greed’s are best describe by Erich Fromm, “Greed is a bottomless pit which exhausts the person in an endless effort to satisfy the need without ever reaching satisfaction.” As human being we are never satisfied with what we are previously blessed with. After accomplishing a goal or want, instead of stopping we go after something else . Greed and desire are dominating forces that always outweigh contentment. These desires and wishes leads always lead to destructive path, ending in complete devastation. Fitzgerald uses Jay zGatsby and numerous other characters as a representation that a person will fail dynamically to achieve everything that they desire because the people will never be satisfied.

Despite these admirable qualities, he dies alone, drunk, and betrayed. Through Dan Cody, Fitzgerald suggests that 1920s society manipulates its visionaries, milks them for their hard-earned money, and then, promptly forgets them.

Through the means of characterization, Fitzgerald expresses Tom Buchanan as another immoral character. Tom is portrayed as an egotistical, hypocrite who advocates white supremacy. His hypocrisy is shown when he speaks to Gatsby, he conduct himself as a “high” class citizen but dwells as a “low” class citizen. “I picked him for a bootlegger the first time I saw him, and I wasn’t far wrong.” “What about it?” said Gatsby politely. “I guess your friend Walter Chase

One of the main idea’s that Fitzgerald showed was the innocence of a character and their lose of innocence. We start to see the innocence in the character’s at the begin of the book and as the book goes on

Fitzgerald is a member of the Lost Generation and his life is portrayed through the character Gatsby. Both of these individuals experienced the pain of lost love and crushed expectations because “both Fitzgerald and Gatsby seem to ‘preserve a romantic state of mind’ in order to escape the painful reality that they had lost the women they love” (Sanders 109). Psychological and spiritual

The medical field is a career path that brings about many options and opportunities of great value. The noble idea of being a doctor tends to cloud the diligent studying and precise training that is actually required for this career. I have wanted to become a doctor since a very young age, and now that the opportunity is here for the taking, I have fully researched what it takes to succeed in this profession and various specialties of the practice. The road to a medical degree is one filled with thousands of notes, years of schooling, and many stressful nights, but the reward is one incomparable to any other. Saving people’s lives on a day-to-day basis has been one of my dreams for as long as I can remember, so the rigorous curriculum

Fitzgerald presents his audience with Daisy, a married “girl” who eventually reunited with the lost love of her life, Jay Gatsby. While breaking rules and being adventurous, Daisy ultimately brings Gatsby to his death. Although she explores her sexuality and runs off behind her husband Tom’s back, Daisy continues to be oppressed. Tom’s aggressiveness and wealth force Daisy to depend on him, making her a slave of her husband. Because of this, she can not leave him to be with Gatsby, the one she loves. Doing so would mean losing economic support and losing a stable life. In this way, her husband defines her life. There is an evident contrast however with Tom’s role. Tom keeps an apartment away from home for his mistress and gets away with it. Because he is the man, society would not dare punish him for exploring his liberties. Daisy on the other hand is inferior to Tom and, as a social norm, is not allowed to indulge in such freedoms because doing so would bring shame to her honor.

In conclusion, Fitzgerald uses this tragic story to express his feeling about the American Dream of the American people during the 1920's. The characters in the novel are being used to reflect the gradual demoralization of the people in the society. Every person living in this

     Fitzgerald shows that the American Dream is not easily achieved by giving each leading man obstacles in the pursuit of their golden girl. Both Jay

These were ultimately a failure and is why his later writings – like Tender is the Night – take on a more somber tone and pessimistic style (Baughman, Judith). Though he was not wealthy at this point in his life, Fitzgerald was able to experience a feeling of failure and poverty that led him value his wealth more. This of course was a mistake, as his overdependence and worship of money aided in his descent. He took this experience and allowed his character, Dick, to make the same treacherous mistakes. Fitzgerald’s trials and tribulations with family, love, and war, went on to heavily influence many of his writings, especially Tender is the