Letters to a Young Doctor Literary Elements

Medical Fiction, Short Stories, and Epistles

“Imelda” takes place in Comayagua, Honduras. Besides, a surgery room setting is predominant in "Letters to a Young Surgeon I, II and III.)

“Textbook” — (First Person), “Imelda” — (Third person omniscient). “Letters to a Young Surgeon I, II, and III” — (Third person limited/omniscient)

The tone in "Textbook" is cautionary, whereas the mood is serious. In "Imelda," the mood is somber whereas the tone is critical. “Letters to a Young Surgeon I, II, and III employ a professional tone and a contemplative mood.

In "Imelda," Dr. Franciscus the Antagonist whereas Imelda is the protagonist.

The foremost conflict in “Imelda” revolves around the performance of a successful corrective surgery on Imelda’s lips.

In "Imelda," the climax occurs when Imelda passes on in the hands of the famed Dr. Hugh Franciscus.

The problematic encounter between Imelda and Dr. Franciscus in "Imelda" due to her unwillingness to expose her cleft foreshadows a brutal ending or an unsuccessful surgery.

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Richard employs Greek allusion when he invokes "Asklepios" in "Textbook," which denotes the medical profession.

In "Letter to a Young Surgeon II," Selzer alludes to Biblical Jonah when describing surgical operations.

“Textbook” includes images (in Textbook of Physical Diagnosis) of various patients to elaborate the art of physical diagnosis.
Other imagery incorporated in the book includes images of wounds, diseases, body parts, blood, scalpel, laboratory, surgery room, death, and surgeons.

In "Textbook," Selzer writes, “To read this book is to understand that disease raises the sufferer, granting him from out of his fever and his fret an intimate vision of life." This remark is paradoxical because of the pain which people endure when they are suffering from illnesses. One would imagine that patients would not experience any "intimate vision." Selzer's philosophical and paradoxical remark underscores the intersection between suffering and the soul.

In "Imelda," the narrator confesses, "there was only the derelict hospital of Comayagua, with the smell of spoiling banana and the accumulated odors of everyone who had been sick there for the last hundred years. Of the two, I much preferred the frank smell of the sick.” The narrator would have been expected to prefer the banana’s smell to that of sickness. The narrator’s paradoxical preference underscores the narrator’s comfort with the medical profession.

The narrator in “Imelda” employs parallelism when describing his responsibilities in Honduras. In three consecutive sentences, the narrator begins with the phrase “I would.” The repetition underscores that the engagements were a routine.

"Divinity" is used” in Textbook” to denote a doctor’s superior sixth sense that should be relied on more than Medical technologies during Physical diagnosis.

In “Textbook,” “Textbook of Physical Diagnosis” denotes general physical diagnosis.

The narrator in "Imelda" personifies a lamp at Comayagua hospital while describing his visualization on how the lamp, like a human being, "breaks free" and heads to the morgue.