How the Doctor Copes

In this section of the novel the author talks about the several ways the townspeople are coping with the invasion of the plague into their daily lives. Dr. Rieux, in particular, is a main focus. For Doctor Rieux, his method of coping is a result of the sorrow he is personally responsible for bringing families on a daily basis. In the town, since the public confirmation of the epidemic, those infected have been taken from their homes and forced into sanatoriums in an attempt to stem the disease’s spread. Rieux now spends the majority of his daily visits accompanied by a police officer, because when diagnosing victims with the epidemic – and therefore ordering them out of their homes and away from their loved ones – many people view him as the villain [not the plague] and react violently. He responds by slowly loosing touch with the emotional side of the epidemic, labeling it as “abstraction”- he can only, for the purpose of the good of the community, concern himself with “facts as everybody can see them” (87). These facts agree with the shutting of the gates; facts that are impervious to “common human feelings” (87), feelings, as Rambert describes, that should be inherent when dealing with people cut off from their loved ones by the sealing of the gates. The doctor continuously seems to withdraw from all emotions, he even “grows out of pity [because] it’s useless” (91) in times such as these. The doctor is faced daily with “the dreary struggle in progress between each man’s happiness and the abstractions of the plague” (91) and this constant struggle is wearing on him, for he continuously has to disregard emotion and empathy and follow medical facts and protocol in an attempt to do what is best for his town as a whole. As a result, his compassion begins to fade. This, however, does not make him a bad person; it simply makes him a person coping with the horrors of the plague as best he can.