The Use of Force 1

In William Carlos Williams' short story, "The Use of Force", everything starts off relatively calm. The doctor initially appears to be a normal doctor dealing with a usual case. There is a sick young girl with a high fever who needs her throat to be checked for diphtheria. This is a serious concern as there have been recent cases of diphtheria related deaths. He smiles and asks nicely for the girl to open her mouth. The girl, however, is reluctant and the idiotic parents refuse to step in and take control of their child. For the two aforementioned reasons, the doctor is visibly getting upset and annoyed. “At that I ground my teeth in disgust,” the doctor says. And in an instance the story takes a whole new turn. “Then the battle began. I had to do it.” He was determined to check the girl’s throat. Although I could sympathize with the doctor for having to deal with such difficult people, I was certainly not expecting the doctor’s change of character. He goes from your average, smiling doctor to an angry, violent, almost psychopathic man who claimed, “I could have torn the child apart in my own fury and enjoyed it. It was a pleasure to attack her.” This change in behavior was still shocking although it was foreshadowed through the doctor’s visible annoyance and disgust with the family. I was surprised with the doctor’s excessive use of force. In this current day and age, a doctor would simply use methods such as using laughing gas and anesthesia to deal with a problem such as this. In my opinion, since force is used over medication, the short story must be set in a time where anesthesia or laughing gas was not available to the general public. Either that or the doctor is just a psychopathic who needs a few more sessions with his therapist.