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By Root 1987 0

someone’s massive incompetence, high snow, ice, etc., I was brought to the hospital having virtually bled to death. Apparently, there’s more to blood transfusion than just establishing that I was A+. But, the emergency team had no time for niceties—they grabbed the first A+ to hand. I was very lucky and it happened to be a perfect match, but the boys were still terribly upset when I woke up, because I could have died on them—apparently. The thing is, that was a modern hospital, and they still had no option. Neither did Claire. I could understand her self-recriminations if she had a number of choices and made the wrong one. Even then it would have hardly been a murder. You’ve tied both her hands behind her back with the state the woman was brought in, the woman’s and then her husband’s refusal of amputation and insistence on pigeon poultice (pigeon poultice?!—did they really do that?), the absence of any other medication, etc.… Would a mature woman and a practicing, experienced doctor really blame herself that much for taking the *only* option open to her? I think I’d rather see anger that she wasn’t allowed to do her job as she saw fit, at the futility of the woman’s death.

Having said that, I like very much her reluctance to enter the details in her log book. That is very nicely done.

Mira

Fm: Diana Gabaldon 76530,523

To: Mira Brown 100425,170 (X)

Dear Mira—

Well, as you say, the medical people at the hospital were terribly upset, because you _could_ have died, and they felt responsible, even though they had no choice. I’ve talked with a number of doctors by way of research (and curiosity), and an underlying sense of deep responsibility—that does go beyond reason, now and then—seems to be a trait they share.

One doctor told me about in-house inquiries into patient deaths—a vague variant of which I used in this scene—and mentioned that one of the chief intentions/effects of this was to provide catharsis for the physician who had caused/presided over the death, because there _was_ a deep feeling of guilt attending, no matter whether the physician _could_ have prevented the death or not.

In other words, Claire’s feelings of responsibility and guilt are pretty much based on testimony by Real Doctors I Have Known (and read about). They may be slightly complicated here by the use of the penicillin; that is, she _knows_ how chancy the stuff is, though the chanciness would more often have to do with a lack of effectiveness, or an accidental contamination, than with a straightforward hypersensitivity. Still, she knows how desperately valuable an antibiotic can be, and has been making steady efforts throughout the book to find a way to make it reliable enough to be useful.

So, this penicillin is entirely her game, so to speak; naturally, she’s going to feel responsible for anything that happens in consequence of using it, no matter what the other circumstances.

As to anger—well, she’s been in the eighteenth century for a longish time now, and she’s seen one hell of a lot of (what would be by modern standards) unnecessary deaths. I don’t think she’d waste a lot of time getting angry at people for ignorance—she never has, if you look back at the other books. She’s pretty outspoken about telling people what they _ought_ to do, but she’d lived in primitive places long before her disappearance into the past; she isn’t one to look down on people or get mad at them because they don’t know what she knows.

Besides. I wanted to make the point about mortality and immortality. For the first time, Claire admits—if offhandedly—that she’ll die herself one day. What she knows is very, very valuable in this day and age; she _has_ to find a way to pass it on, if she possibly can. Notes in her casebook are all very well, but what she _really_ needs is to find an apprentice.

Likewise, she realizes—also perhaps for the first time—that she _has_ given part of herself to her daughter, and that will continue, even after Claire herself has gone.

So, the guilt and responsibility flow naturally into that whole mortality/immortality theme