Mysterious Medicine by Kerr Dunn L;

Author:Kerr Dunn, L;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The Kent State University Press

DISCUSSION QUESTIONS

1. Nearly twenty years before Ethan Brand returns, claiming he has found the Unpardonable Sin, the village doctor diagnosed him as mad. Do you agree with this diagnosis? Why or why not?

2. Analyze the paragraph in which Hawthorne describes the village doctor. What are his strengths and weaknesses? How would you describe the qualities he possesses that have endeared him to the community? In what ways do community attitudes toward the health care system in the twenty-first century affect the care members of that community seek out—or resist seeking out?

3. What is the Unpardonable Sin, according to Ethan Brand? How does Brand’s obsession with it reflect nineteenth-century anxieties about evolving trends in medicine? Do we experience comparable anxieties about health care today?

4. Ethan Brand believes that his “moral nature had ceased to keep the pace of improvement with his intellect.” In health care practice or biomedical research, do patients suffer—directly or indirectly—when providers or researchers value intellect over “heart”? What measures can educators take to ensure that health care professions and biomedical research students develop both intellectual capacity and compassion during their educational years?

5. Characterize Bartram’s response to Ethan Brand’s suicide. What does his response say about his character? What is his interpretation of the heart shape he finds? What is your interpretation?

6. Lawyer Giles experiences a “phantom limb” approximately twenty years before Silas Weir Mitchell coined the term (1871). Some scholars and physicians have noted that Poe also described illnesses that the medico-scientific community had yet to understand fully or name. Based on these examples, consider the validity of the romantics’ belief that both rational and imaginative approaches are valuable in understanding suffering and illness. Speculate on the role writers and artists can play in contributing to twenty-first century medico-scientific knowledge or, more directly, to healing patients.

7. Brand has chosen a type of death that ensures his body will not be available for medical observation. Does this seem a fitting act, given his reasons for dying? Today, medical educators still rely on the laboratory study of deceased bodies to teach anatomy. When a person donates his or her body to science, what measures are in place to ensure the donor’s dignity is preserved before, during, and after study?

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