Essay Questions

Do you consider the Doctor to be a pedophile?

This is a difficult question because it is hinted at rather than being stated. The doctor himself raises the issue of his feelings for the young girl, and also admits that he knows his feelings to be strange and unexplainable. In some ways, he seems to blame the girl for her own peculiar savage beauty that he believes has drawn him to her. She is wild, and that is what he finds so attractive. Her eyes in particular captivate him. The fact that he is able to tell us that he is noticing her eyes is a red flag; he should not be aware of the things that will one day make a pretty little girl into a striking woman. He does seem to have pedophilia tendencies but the story stops short of actually calling his behavior or his feelings pedophilia.

What might be the hardest aspects of being a doctor on call in the 1930s?

One of the most difficult things about the role of the doctor would be making house calls on families he has never met before. Because they are unfamiliar he has to sum up the situation extremely quickly. He has to take into account the social setting, the dynamic that he observes within the family members. He needs to sum up obvious symptoms, tests that need to be done, and what the symptoms might point to. There are so many things that need to be taken into account in the earliest seconds of his visit. This takes both experience, and also a great deal of "gut feeling". The latter is something that Williams was particularly known for as he was not a believer in scientific medicine, but subscribed to the school of occult medicine and gut instinct.