Plot Summaries Flashcards
Plot of Letters of Abigail and John Adams
1764: JA is Boston undergoing and describing variolation in a private “hospital”; given a special diet and purgatives; believes variolation is the smart thing to do to avoid the natural smallpox
1776: JA is in Philadelphia at First Continental Congress; he laments the infection of the army; AS has children variolated and worries; Canada is overtaken by smallpox; switches between political events and medicine
Plot of Lady Eleanore’s Mantle
- Outer story takes place at Province House
- Lady Eleanore arrives in Massachusetts Bay Colony and goes to a ball; she is overtaken with pride and lacks sympathy; Helwyse adores her and asks her to shed pride but is scorned at a ball in her honor; afterwards, the town comes down with smallpox originating from the mantle and infecting the prideful and rich first; Lady Eleanore degrades and a mob comes and burns her in effigy, leading to the end of the epidemic
Plot of Dr. Sevier
Dr. Sevier (a kind doctor) called to treat Mary Richling in Creole New Orleans; he lectures medical residents on public health conditions (malaria and yellow fever) and encounters Mary and moves her to a private room without payment; Richling served time in jail and works at a bakery; Dr. Sevier warns him to escape yellow fever and declines to give money to orphange as they failed to heed his warnings and only cared after the disaster
Plot of A Country Doctor
The doctor needs to go treat a patient, but his only horse died; a groom appears with horses and makes advances on his maid, Rosa; the doctor leaves and Rosa gets raped; strangely traveling instantaneously, the doctor finds a boy in bed, who asks to be allowed to die; the doctor doesn’t find anything wrong, then sees a wound in his side; the doctor finds himself naked in bed next to the boy but assures him that he is okay, then flees the scene feeling betrayed
Plot of The Use of Force
The doctor visits a sick girl; he fears she has diphtheria but she won’t allow him to examine her; he restrains her and forces her mouth open with a spoon, excited by the forcefulness; her secret is revealed as a diphtheria infection
Plot of Miss Gee
Miss Gee struggles to be a good person, but she is met with isolation and disregard; she goes and sees a doctor, who actually cares, but she then dies of cancer and is handed to the callous students for dissection
Plot of The Art of Healing
Auden’s father called medicine an art and warned him of aggressive or money-focused physicians; he trusts Dr. Protetch because he was victim of negligence and arrogance in medicine with his own fatal illness
Plot of The Plague
After rats come out and suddenly die, Oran is stricken with plague; Dr. Rieux tries to warn the authorities of the city to take caution, but they ignore him; the plague breaks out and the city is quarantined; the public becomes selfish and Father Paneloux calls the plague a punishment from God; Rambert, missing his wife, tries to escape with Cottard’s connections, but he decides not to in response to Rieux’s selflessness; Cottard, a criminal, lives in fear of arrest but enjoys the plague and becomes a smuggler; Rieux, Tarrou, and Grand battle the plague; Paneloux is shaken when a young boy painfully dies, but he adheres to his faith and eventually dies without treatment; the epidemic ends and Cottard is arrested by shooting guns into the street; Grand vows to make a fresh start; Tarrou battles the plague but dies; Rambert’s wife joins him but Rieux’s wife dies
Plot of Miss Evers’ Boys
Nurse Evers recruits men for the Tuskegee experiment; she battles her moral qualms with the experiment, but recruits Willie, a naive believer, Caleb, a hard realist, Hodman, a practical man, and Ben, a trusting and forgiving person; the experiment continues after penicillin is discovered; Caleb leaves and receives treatment in the army and tries to get treatment for his friend, but the experiment prevents it; after a Senate Investigation, the survivors receive treatment and compensation
Plot of Wit
Vivian Bearing, a university professor dying of ovarian cancer, gets final chemotherapy and begins to die; she reflects on her life through the wit of John Donne, realizing that she prefers kindness to hard intellectualism; after talking to a compassionate nurse, she signs a DNR and eventually flatlines and dies
Plot of The Lady of the Camellias
Marguerite is a high-class courtesan with TB; Duval meets her and falls in love and eventually she reciprocates; they move out to the countryside, but Duval’s father interferes and Marguerite leaves him as a sacrifice; in Paris, she writes a journal and suffers from her disease, eventually dies a “purified” martyr
