The Island of Dr. Moreau

br DR . MOREAU : A REFLECTION ON MODERN MEDICINE

YOUR NAME COURSE NUMBER DUE DATE INSTRUCTOR NAME The Hippocratic Oath is a promise in essence to do no harm ' made by a new doctor before becoming a practicing physician . The oath has been a standard of the medical community for several centuries . It remains just as meaningful and valid today as when Hippocrates wrote it in 400 BC . Medical ethics in today 's modern society has become very blurry and hard to understand (Price 1 . It is not the oath that

has acquired a more complicated meaning . It is the practice of medicine that has become more complex . Presently , it is becoming increasingly more difficult for doctors to discern good medicine from bad medicine . In our current society political correctness , policy , and politics have come to define good medicine as opposed to what is best for the patient . Over a century ago , H .G . Wells was criticized for his novel The Island of Doctor Moreau written in 1896 . Literary critics and the general public were appalled by the atrocities depicted in the text Contemporary authors , physicians , and scientists could not fathom the cruel behavior of Doctor Moreau . And it was easy to see that Dr . Moreau was practicing bad medicine and had broken his vow to do now harm

The Island of Doctor Moreau was a novel written late in 1896 by H .G Wells . The plot seems relatively simple and typical of a science fiction novel . A young civil servant is the sole survivor of shipwreck He is found floating along side the island of Doctor Moreau who rescues him . The young man has no knowledge that Doctor Moreau has fled from his home nation fearing charges of animal cruelty . Upon first impressions , the young man falls in love with the island . Slowly he remembers stories about Dr . Moreau and the horrors he created . The lush fauna and sandy beaches are exciting and new to him . To paraphrase John S . Partington , in The Death of the Static : H .G . Wells and the Kinetic Utopia , Dr . Moreau 's island was like Eden , Dr . Moreau was God , and Prendick was like Adam . When curiosity gets the best of him he wanders deep into the overgrowth and what he finds there is deeply shocking Doctor Moreau is using a process called vivisection to create a hybrid of animal and human . His research goal is to make man be absent of evil . In the end Moreau is killed and the young man , Prendick , escapes and lives to tell the tale

To gain a better understanding of the novel and the beliefs of H .G Wells it is important to look at the prevailing scientific knowledge of the time in which the novel was written . The late 19th century was when Darwin first made known his theories of evolution and survival of the fittest . Darwin believed that all species including humans , change with time . In time when God was the creator of all , the idea of...