Too Slow... Again...

             In this section of the book I found it strange how, again, the doctor seems to be so slow in his assumptions. When the concierge falls fatally ill, even he knows the cause of his own illness. He is constantly breaking through his feverish haze to make utterances about “them damned rats” (22). A common concierge with no medical training is able to make this conjecture, yet the doctor seems to remain oblivious. Even when several other people fall ill, he still fails to begin to even speculate about the possible cause of this disease. Finally, after a “real epidemic had set in” (35) does he come to a conclusion, and not of his own choice; his conclusion is forced out of him by a friend, one of Rieux’s colleagues who is adamant that Rieux “know[s] as well as [he does] what it is” (36). Only then does Rieux concur that “everything points to its being the plague” (36).

             He takes a long time to come to his conclusion, similar to the previous amount of time he took to acknowledge that the dying rats were a problem(about 15 pages). This slowness may have stemmed from his reluctance to cause public panic, but I believe he should have been quicker in his assumption. It is not as if he was unfamiliar with the plague, for he remembers all of the facts he had read about past plagues: “Athens, a charnel-house reeking to the heaven and deserted even by the birds; Chinese towns cluttered up with victims silent in their agony; the convicts at the Merseille piling rotting corpses into pits; the building of the Great Wall of Providence to fend off the furious plague wing; […] the carnival of masked doctors at the Black Death” (40). He was not unversed in the ways of the plague- therefore he must have known that rats were a common factor its spreading. With all of this knowledge I found it incredible that he was so slow to come to an understanding of the disease ailing his patients.