The Doctor and the Doctor’s Wife by Ernest Hemingway was published in the short story collection In Our Time in 1925 and was the third story about Nick Adams, a semi-autobiographical character of Hemingway’s.
Nick’s father, a doctor, enlists the help of an Indian man named Dick Boulton to assist him in cutting logs. The logs were lost off of a boat, and would never be used, so Nick’s dad takes them from himself. Dick wants to see who the logs originally belonged to, and accuse his boss of stealing the logs. Nick’s dad doesn’t like that, and says for Dick not to saw them up if he believes them to be stolen, eventually exploding into a fight.
Nick’s dad is forced to walk off because Dick is a bigger man, and when he tells his wife that Dick was trying to start a fight because he owed him money, she refuses to believe it and says that no one could be that bad. She asks for her son, but when her husband leaves and finds him he asks to go with his dad to find black squirrel’s and he agrees, ignoring the request of Nick’s mother.
The Doctor and the Doctor’s Wife shows how important honor is to a man. Everyone knows what is going on with the logs, but Nick’s dad will not allow himself to be characterized as a thief, which he of course is not. It is hard to tell whether Dick really does owe money to Nick’s dad, but it seems likely because he’s a doctor and doctor’s are expensive. If that is the case, then Dick is able to easily get at Nick’s dad simply by making an implicit attack on the man’s honor. What is ironic is that if Nick’s dad was really and truly a thief, the charge that he was stealing would not bother him; it is only because of his honorable that an attack of inhonorability can get to him.
The main point of the story, however, judging both by the content and the title, is the relationship between the doctor and his wife. She lives near men, but she is not there when the action takes place. She gives advice on how her husband should see things and what he should do, but he doesn’t really take it seriously. She asks to see her son, but even this is not granted her. Even though she thinks she is part of the world of doing, of men, of working, really she is very far away from it.
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