Name
February 7, 2013
Professor
Essay #1: 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…show more content… She is totally fine with cutting open a penis, perhaps a little zealous, but for the right brain she has to look in the book. Ming’s name is very indicative of her personality. She is brief and to-the-point; she has to time to mess around. Along with the negative effects of an overly-involved family, positive features came out of the situation as well. Firstly, her performance on schoolwork is very highly regarded. She even manages to surpass Karl’s success. It took Karl two attempts to get into medical school, while it only took Ming one. She was able to achieve this almost entirely because of her family’s involvement. Her family pushed her to be tutored by Karl, and Karl managed to unintentionally push her away from everything except schoolwork. Due to Karl’s abuse Ming never fully matured socially, and stayed away from being sexual. Ming was handicapped socially; although she liked Fitzpatrick she was not sure how to go about talking to him. At one point she asked herself, “was that the kind of thing people said?” and admitted that she “often stumbled across humor” (Lam 2). This can be seen as a positive effect because she was able to fully focus on her schoolwork. She also shied away from anything sexual, somewhat replacing her sexuality with grades. After her and Fitzgerald got their tests back, they went through the notion of “I’ll show you mine if you show me yours.” Another positive effect of the extreme family