Doctors and patients - Essay Example

The patient happens to be the narrator of the story and told the story from a first-person account of the horrors surrounding the mental ailment of depression and a slow descent into insanity. The author gives a thinly-disguised autobiographical account of her sickness, how the people around her had responded to her predicament, such as her husband and her sister-in-law, while giving a dispassionate account of the shapes she supposedly found in the wallpaper of the room where she is confined.

The other viewpoint in this story is the reaction of her doctor-husband, who took the rather nonchalant view of her ailment and considers her sickness to be the product of imagination only and therefore nothing very serious. From this perspective, her husband-doctor thinks that a good rest is all that was needed for her to easily recuperate and recover her senses. This short story gives readers a rough idea on how doctors of medicine usually think of their patients with regards to certain ailments, and how they think about their patients, in general.

Medicine as a practice or profession requires a certain kind of acceptable behavior as a modicum of acceptable social interaction. In short, doctors should exhibit a high degree of professionalism in their work at all times under all circumstances, according to strict ethical standards. The story is different when told from the perspective of a patient as contrasted with the view of the doctor. This gives the readers an excellent opportunity to evaluate and consider which viewpoint is more accurate in terms of details of an ailment, in this case, an incipient insanity of the wife.

There will always be two sides to a coin, as in this case, there are also two sides to the same story. This paper likewise contrasts the two viewpoints regarding the severity or seriousness of the ailment. The similarity between the two viewpoints is that both husband and wife agreed to take a well-advised vacation by renting an isolated ancestral home. The doctor-husband came to the view his wife needed a change of scenery for her health to improve and the wife had agreed to the temporary move of three months only because she was hesitant to insist that she is not sick and two eminent doctors (her husband and also her own brother) had expressed their opinion that she was not really sick at all.

Both spouses were in agreement the wife needing the rest to restore her mental health due to postpartum depression after childbirth (Schorkhuber, 2008, p. 4). The two spouses had originally been in disagreement as to which room to take among the several rooms in the large rented house; they eventually settled on a room on the second floor as the more appropriate choice for their purpose. The author-wife had initially preferred a ground floor room to take up residence but she later agreed to the second-floor room as the better choice because of the wonderful views it afforded of the surrounding areas, including the garden and the streets down below, up to the little private wharf of the estate, and to preoccupy her mind too.

The two of them, once agreed on taking a second-floor room, decided on the playroom of the house, among the several rooms to be chosen. Both of them helped in clearing out some of the old furniture, moving some of these old items downstairs while bringing up some items they had brought along for the purpose of having a good rest and recuperation for the wife. However, the contrast is in the ulterior motive of each spouse as to why they choose that particular room. For the doctor-husband, it was the safe area in the house because the room had windows with the grills to prevent his