Medicine And One's Humanity In Contract Tracing By Vincent Lam

Bloodletting & Miraculous Cures examines the connections between the complications of medicine and one’s humanity. The author Vincent Lam does this by crafting a story that explains the emotional and distancing consequences of practicing medicine. Firstly, he achieves this by employing complex medical terminology that readers are unfamiliar with. This creates a feeling of detachment, which is something doctors themselves experience in their profession. Similarly, Lam employs a creative formatting to further to capture this feeling. In the short story “Contract Tracing,” he delivers the plot through files, transcripts and notes. This paints the conflict, reveals details, and adds a much-needed sense of urgency. In “Contract Tracing” by Vincent

Lam, distancing diction and a carefully chosen format develop the idea of the struggle to keep one’s humanity in the medical profession.

In “Contract Tracing,” Lam uses excessive medical terminology and detail to deliver a satisfying but somehow distancing story. In particular, many of the stories are littered with medical terminology and lengthy descriptions of medical procedures. There are sentences that are deliberately written to be difficult for a reader to fully understand. For example, Lam initially uses this technique to introduce the conflict of Fitzgerald suffering from SARS. Lam describes Fitzgerald as having “mild tachypnea” and “fine inspiratory crackles” (273). While the vocabulary immediately brings urgency into the situation, it also makes the severity of Fitzgerald’s illness unclear. Thus, it may influence readers to overlook Fitzgerald’s suffering. Afterwards, Lam also utilizes this same technique when updating Fitzgerald’s condition. Instead of simple explanations, Lam uses convoluted descriptions. As readers comb through the doctor's notes, they discover Fitzgerald’s X-ray shows “patchy densities and air bronchograms suggestive of widespread consolidation” (Lam 273). In this description, the language and tone used are objective and impersonal. Similar to the reader

distancing themselves out of confusion, Fitzgerald’s doctor, Dr. Zenkie, also portrays a sense of detachment. He reports these results from a distant point of view. Consequently, it becomes easy for readers to lose focus of what Fitzgerald himself is feeling or experiencing. This distancing effect is a direct reflection of a doctor’s need to distance himself or herself from patients. Doctors do this to set emotional boundaries, or to avoid letting their feelings influence their judgement. However, this leaves room for frailties to emerge, where human connection and empathy can become lost. As a result, medicine and cures become the focus, at the expense of human empathy. Doctors become stripped of their humanity through their own detachment and lose the human ability to connect. Thus, Lam’s use of word choice allows readers to see that medicine can begin to deprive one’s humanity.
The strategic word choice is effective in communicating the theme, but Lam also relies on format to establish tone and to further the theme. The majority of the story’s plot is told through medical notes, professional files, and transcripts. These memos, coupled with intense medical terminology, shove the reader into the fast environment of the situation. Similar to using complex terminology, the unique format also distances the reader from the story. An example of this formatting is when Lam uses a news clip to hastily mention that Fitzgerald had “collapsed within an isolation room” (304). By framing the incident as a news story of the past, it is portrayed as a distant memory instead of a pressing matter. Readers feel less emotion compared to when Lam employs first-person narrative in his other stories. In those stories, the reader is engrossed in the emotions of the character; whereas in “Contact Tracing”, it is easy to be unemotional. Likewise, this detachment also arises when the reader obtains crucial information “from the files of the World Health Organization” (Lam 269). The third-person narrative describes how “the majority of SARS cases occur in health care workers,” and this diverts attention away from the illness of the characters (Lam 283). For the desensitized reader, this is portrayed as yet another inevitable event that has happened. Furthermore, the story continues in such a quick pace that there is no time to reflect on these developments. By using a quick, third-person narrative that is often ambiguous, Lam conditions the reader to be desensitized and distant. Ultimately, these techniques are effective in pushing the reader away in order to show the reader the distance some doctors feel.
Character actions are key pieces of evidence demonstrating the distancing of the doctors of Bloodletting & Miraculous Cures.

For example, there is a consultation report from Dr. Zenkie that initially seems professional and brief. However, the diction used can give insight into Dr. Zenkie’s personality. For example, his notes impersonally refer to Fitzgerald as a “timely and interesting case” (Lam 274). By using this distancing language, Fitzgerald is treated as if he were a puzzle to solve and not an actual human. Lam has purposely portrayed Dr. Zenkie as someone who has this mindset. However, Dr. Zenkie is not the only person who has this character flaw. Ironically, Fitzgerald himself confesses his own feeling of detachment in his job. He describes his job as “playing Mr. Doctor,” like an actor assuming a role (Lam 291). It is easy to see Fitzgerald is no longer the same person who had a love for medicine. Overall, these subtleties are how Lam shows that doctors are dehumanized because they treat patients as problems, rather than humans they must attach to and emphasize

with.
Through the story “Contract Tracing,” we are given many insights on the role of medicine in shaping a person’s humanity. The author’s approach to literature delivers an insight into the human condition and presents realizations, even to readers. Lam takes readers onto this path by first creating distance between the reader and the story. As readers, we develop a detached feeling because of the complex medical terminology used. This mirrors the need for doctors to distance themselves from their patients. Furthermore, Lam uses certain formats to tell a distancing version of events. These connections are brought together with evidence to support the overarching theme of the book. It allows Lam to create an understanding that an individual can be victimized by the dehumanizing nature of medicine. An interesting extension to this close reading could be to analyze Dr. Sri and to hypothesize how medicine has shaped his humanity.