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After all, I had already fallen in love with the savage brat, the parents were contemptible to me. In the ensuing struggle they grew more and more abject, crushed, exhausted while she surely rose to magnificent heights of insane fury of effort bred of her terror of me.
The father tried his best, and he was a big man but the fact that she was his daughter, his shame at her behavior and his dread of hurting her made him release her just at the critical times when I had almost achieved success, till I wanted to kill him. But his dread also that she might have diphtheria made him tell me to go on, go on though he himself was almost fainting, while the mother moved back and forth behind us raising and lowering her hands in an agony of apprehension.
The parents have just scolded their daughter and threatened her with having to go to the hospital, abandoning any attempt to comfort or reassure her in her fear. In these lines, the doctor reveals how he sees the Olsons, using particularly strong language. They are not just inconsistent and ineffective in this losing battle; they are “contemptible” and “abject.” Their inability even to follow his orders frustrates the doctor into murderous thoughts that, even though they are fantasy, suggest his willingness to judge and condemn them. He sees the father as unwilling to follow through with what must be done, though readers easily perceive the man’s terror for his daughter. The mother, by comparison, is even less useful, simply waving her hands about in panic. And both suffer when compared to the child, who never hesitates in her efforts to keep the doctor away from her. In her unwavering efforts, she alone earns the doctor’s grudging admiration.
The damned little brat must be protected against her own idiocy, one says to one’s self at such times. Others must be protected against her. It is a social necessity. And all these things are true. But a blind fury, a feeling of adult shame, bred of a longing for muscular release are the operatives. One goes on to the end.
In a final unreasoning assault I overpowered the child’s neck and jaws.
These lines occur just before the doctor uses the spoon to force the child’s mouth open so that he can examine her throat, and they reveal the extent of his internal conflict. After raging at the child as a “damned little brat”—stronger language in 1933 than it likely would be in a story today—and an idiot, the doctor suddenly switches to more formal, almost detached diction. “One” says this thing and “one” does that thing, for reasons that are all “true.” The child needs protection, the community does as well, and these are pressing and real matters of public health and medicine. The doctor is aware of the other forces driving him, however, and knows that they cause him to be “blind” to the situation and to use force to meet his own needs.
The line that begins the next paragraph gives the lie, however, to all the reasoning and “true” things that the doctor rehearses in his mind. What happens next, ironically given the attempt to justify his actions, is an “unreasoning assault” and a use of brute power against a constrained, panicking child to achieve not just a diagnosis but also a much-desired “muscular release”—the opposite of medical professionalism.
