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 ¡®survival 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-ridden Irish immigrants arrive daily on the Canadian shore. The doctor tends them and searches for a cure. Lauchlin is obsessed by his scientific work trying to find a cure for the deadly disease that grips the immigrants.
             At a time when human life was not considered very valuable we see people fighting to keep the patients alive. 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. Barrett's doctor is engaged in a great mission of improving the lot of mankind, not to mention enhancing his own professional stature. The doctor tries to find out why the disease is spreading in the manner it is and what the cure is. The doctors dedica...

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