preview

Analysis Of ' Cutting For Stone '

Good Essays

Cindy Ziyi Zhuang
MDA 110 Contemporary Issues and Cases in Healthcare
Midterm Paper
03/01/2015
Beyond Caring In his fiction “Cutting for Stone”, Dr. Abraham Verghese presents a story of Marion and Shiva Stone, conjoined twins who are separated at birth by their presumed surgeon father, Dr. Thomas Stone. The twins were orphaned almost immediately after they were born. Their mother, Sister Mary Joseph Praise, an Indian nurse nun at Missing Hospital in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, and Dr. Thomas Stone’s perfect surgical assistant, dies from uterine rupture during the childbirth. Their presumed father, being shocked by the catastrophic death of his loved one, leaves the twins to two of his colleagues, Dr. Kalpana Hemlatha and Dr. Ahbi Ghosh, who …show more content…

But down to its most fundamental level, patients’ needs is nothing more than the presence of someone that could offer them the great comfort they long for. Nonetheless, it is sad to see that this humanistic aspect is fading away and being corroded by the rapidly modernizing health care settings. Accompanying with the enormous technological progress, medicine as a modern science has been affected in many positive ways. However, the timeless tradition and the everlasting secret of medicine is merely care giving. Modern medicine has been relying too much on technology, which is cool, but also very cold from a humanistic aspect. All the patients are presented by a series of numbers via binary signals of the internet. Nowadays, medicine is more about running tests and diagnosing based on numbers, as opposed to investigating symptoms upon the physician’s observational skills and comprehensive knowledge. As bedside caring becomes less concerned as it was in the old days, the diminishing of the sense of caring in medical professionals appears as a side effect. There is no doubt that technology enables medical professionals to perform all types of fancy tasks, though it is their offering of compassion that comforts the patients the most. And this quintessence of medical practice ought not to be overlooked at any point of the history of medicine. There is a frequently recurring keynote in Verghese’s story, where the chief examiner poses

Get Access