Ship fever
"Human desire to survive and the value of human lives." The book Ship fever by Andrea Barrett explores the development of science at an age when the society was on the entrance of progress. The little value placed on human life due to the diseases and wars that destroyed society held claim to the society's need to be indifferent to death. The need to survive was the primary desire and the concept of csurvival of the fittest' accepted by all. This story allows the reader to explore the worthlessness of human life even in face of the extreme need for survival.Humans have had a monumental effect on the state of the earth and, indeed, may have threatened their own survival. However, humans are also the only known species with the capacity to conceptualize and care about collectively induced charge and perhaps to ensure its own survival. The earth may not care which species remain and which do not, but arguably it could care about its own survival.In Andrea Barrett's "Ship Fever," Lauchlin, a young Canadian doctor, works on a quarantine station off the coast of Quebec. It is during the Great Irish Famine, and boatloads of typhus-ridd
en Irish immigrants arrive daily on the Canadian shore. With time, scientists came to see themselves battling for their lives and their freedom against faith. At a time when human life was not considered very valuable we see people fighting to keep the patients alive. Barrett's doctor is engaged in a great mission of improving the lot of mankind, not to mention enhancing his own professional stature. The desire of human's to survive against the odds has been appreciated over the centuries and in the most miraculous circumstances people will find the will to live. religion places value on life but the society of the times had no understanding of that fact. Barrett creates a situation where survival is almost impossible unless understanding of science comes and she in a sense removes the dilemma of conscience. The situation of the terrible tragedy of the Irish during the potato famine, and inadequacies of 19th century medicine in dealing with epidemics aboard crowded and unsanitary ships carry fleeing immigrants caused many of the people of the time to be completely frustrated. The struggle between science and the value of human life has always been an inherent one based on values, morals and ethics. In Ship Fever we read of the immigrants who know that death is approaching but still struggle to help the doctor in the hope that they may live to see the next day. The concept of the value of human life then becomes inexplicably linked to the need to survive. In the novella that gives the short story collection its name, a doctor on a Quebec quarantine island in the 1840s fights the fevers of wretched Irish immigrants fleeing the potato famine, and reviews his own life, too. But by the mid-19th century, when Charles Darwin sailed aboard the Beagle and hatched his theory of evolution by natural selection, the confrontation was acute. As I conclude, Barrett has presented one of the most tragic aspects of human life in her story. The struggle between science and environment and religion is isolated as the need for human survival becomes even greater.
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,
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Acceptance Essays
