In Adam Haslett’s short story, “The Good Doctor,” setting is both an historical and a geographical context, the decades-long persistent local economic depression and a history of failure of the federally funded medical outreach program, sponsored by the National Health Service Corps, to respond effectively to local substance abuse needs. The chronic poverty and the…
Tag: The Good Doctor
The Good Doctor by Adam Haslett – Setting
National Health Service Corps According to its website, the National Health Service Corps (NHSC) was established in 1972, as a part of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, a federally funded agency to address the medical and psychological needs of underserved populations, wherever they are found in the United States, from rural and…
The Good Doctor by Adam Haslett – Literary Devices
Setting “The Good Doctor” is set in northeast Nebraska, near the small towns of Atkinson, Tilden, and Ewing. The Buckholdt family lives in a “white fifties prefab, sagged on one side” with “empty prairie stretching miles in every direction.” The first thing Dr. Briggs notices on the property is “the skeleton of a Chevy Nova,…
The Good Doctor by Adam Haslett – Themes
Chemical Drug Use and Abuse “The Good Doctor” is much concerned with drug use and abuse. Life in this rural, economically depressed Nebraska prairie offers little opportunity or hope, and drugs become the means by which people dull disappointment and disillusionment. Jack Buckholdt promised his wife they would leave for a better life in California;…
The Good Doctor by Adam Haslett – Characters
Anne Anne is a psychiatrist who went through residency with Frank Briggs and visited him once in Ewing Falls, Nebraska. They had dated for six months but are now no longer a couple. Like Frank, Anne was trained in “biological psychiatry”; unlike him, she does not question this drug-based method for treating mental illness. Dr….
The Good Doctor by Adam Haslett – Summary
Set in the barren prairie of northeast Nebraska, “The Good Doctor” tells the story of an at-home interview between psychiatrist Frank Briggs and Mrs. Buckholdt, a patient who has been using sedatives and antidepressants for four years and who has recently missed several of her clinic appointments with her regular doctor. Young and somewhat idealistic…