Analysis Of Frank Huyler s The Blood Of Strangers

Prominently featured in the mission statements of virtually of every medical school and medical institution in the world is the call for empathetic doctors. These institutions wish to train medical professionals that possess qualities of sympathy and compassion, and hospitals wish to employ health professionals that showcase similar qualities. The reality, however, is starkly different, as physicians, jaded by what they have seen in the medical world, lose the qualities that drove them to medicine in the first place. In Frank Huyler’s â€Å"The Blood of Strangers,† a collection of short stories from his time as a physician in the emergency room, Huyler uses the literary techniques of irony and imagery to depict the reality of the world of a medical professional. While Huyler provides several examples of both techniques in his accounts, moments from â€Å"A Difference of Opinion† and â€Å"The Secret† in particular stand out. Huyler uses irony and imagery i n these two pieces to describe how medical professionals have lost their sense of compassion and empathy due to being jaded and desensitized by the awful incidents they have witnessed during their careers. In a particularly morbid display of irony, Huyler, an emergency room physician who has pledged to serve the health of humanity, wishes his comatose patient was dead. In â€Å"A Difference of Opinion,† Huyler is treating a patient who has been in the Intensive Care Unit (ICU) for over a month and showed little sign of improving. Due to the