Genre:

Novel, Serial, Abstract

Publications abstracted:

Hawthorne 1850

Subjects:

Medical Practitioners, Medical Treatment, Heterodoxy, Religion

    Chillingworth informs Dimmesdale of the peculiarity of his medical condition but asks him to recount 'all the operation of this disorder', arguing that a cure depends on knowing more than 'only the outward and physical evil' and that 'bodily disease' may be caused by a spiritual 'ailment'. Dimmesdale questions whether Chillingworth deals in 'medicine for the soul' and refuses adamantly to bear his soul to anybody but God, the 'one Physician of the soul'. (162) Later Chillingworth catches Dimmesdale dozing and, laying his hand on the clergyman's bosom, develops a look of 'ghastly rapture'. The narrator adds that 'what distinguished the physician's ecstasy from Satan's was the trait of wonder in it!'. Subsequently, Chillingworth seeks to wreak revenge on the minister and to see his 'guilty sorrow'. He 'became [...] not a spectator only, but a chief actor in the poor minister's interior world'. Owing to his knowledge of the 'spring' that controlled the minister's 'engine', he could put him 'on the rack'. (163) The minister, however, unable to gain a complete knowledge of the 'actual nature' of the old physician's evil, 'took himself to task for his bad sympathies' towards the physician.