Doctor in the house Essay

Under our study the passage of the story ‘Doctor in the house’ written by a famous British writer and an assistant editor of the British Medical Journal of the 20 th century Richard Gordon who worked also as a ship’s surgeon, but left his medical practice in 1952. The story ‘Doctor in the house’ is one of Gordon’s twelve ‘Doctor’ books and is noted for witty description of a medical student’s years of professional training. ‘Doctor in the house’ is not really intriguing title for the story, but, perhaps, this simplicity makes this story so attractive for an experienced reader, who is able after looking through passages to find extremely interesting phrases, word combinations, unusual style of writing and etc. Speaking about the style of the story we can say that it is autobiography. The plot of the passage is build round ‘an unpleasant inevitability’, we mean the final examination of medical students. At the beginning we dive in the meaning of the final examination in medical universities. Here we meet the main character who is the young author at the same time. Trying to pass his exams the author managed to pass his true emotions and feelings before, during and after exams. What is more, Gordon gives us a brilliant systematic structure of the social types of people using a little bit irony. Well, when young Richard knew his results, the whole world stood still round him and everything was calm. We see so-called ‘Happy End’ of the passage. In my opinion, in these pages we see a conflict which can be described as the conflict between man and fate. The person who saw many examples during the examinations different styles of behavior, and he was getting nervous about failing his chance. Even his friends told him that ‘One doesn’t fail exams. One comes down, one muffs, one is ploughed, plucked or pipped. These infer a misfortune that is not one’s own fault. To speak of failing is bad taste. It’s the same idea as talking about passing away and going above instead of plain dying. ‘ The general atmosphere of the extract is ironic. We can see it from the first sentence of the passage in a phrase ‘ an unpleasant inevitability to be faced sooner or later’. During the text we see a lot of examples of the irony such as the description of the visiters in the waiting-room, the process of passing exam in Cambridge and some others. This stylistic device was used by Gordon to make his story lighter and funnier for the reader and, perhaps, future and still students of the medical examinations, and maybe not only for them but for all students who prepare themselves to any exam. May be in such case Richard Gordon wanted to attract our attention to the fact that we should enjoy with the process of studying and getting edication, and even exams which are very remarkable event for us every session&&&. Defining the style of the abstract we can say that it is bright example of science fiction. Observing the author’s vocabulary I can say it is very simple. The vocabulary is full of colloquial words, but at the same time he used special terms, in my opinion it is used to show that as the narrator is medical student, of course, he knew the medicine terms. What makes the author’s language interesting there is a great number of epithets ( an unpleasant inevitability, fragrant cheating, frustrated brilliance, imminent thunderstorm and others), simily ( exam like death, porters were like the policemen that flank the dock at the Old Bailey, candidate will come to the end of his interrogation struggling like a cow in a bog), metaphors ( feeling if I had just finished an eight-round fight, Speaking about syntax I can say that it is quite varied from very simple sentences which are refer to very difficult sentences which transfer all features of oral communication (‘I started off confidentially, reeling out the lines of treatment and feeling much better’). To sum up I want to say that I really like this story because a lot of ideas to think. The lesson from this passage is that you can get everything if you try hard, and you should always believe in good, but to be prepared to the worst, as Russsian proverb said.