Volume 3 Kickstarter tier spotlight: The Book Where It Happens
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Two days later.
Yellow: Uuwaaagh . . .
Chartreuse: Ze can’t just go home. Zer housemates don’t have space to quarantine a sick person.
Imri: If we keep loaning rooms to sick townies, we’ll run out of space.
Chartreuse: Not any time soon, Lord Imri. And there’s only three sick, so far.
Imri: Why not just ship them off to the hospital?
Chartreuse: The county’s an outbreak hotspot, sir. Hospitals aren’t taking patients with mild cases. They’d run out of space.
Imri: So take the dire cases that are probably going to die anyway, toss them in the river, and make space! How is that hard?
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If only this was 100% satire.
Too true.
Where can I join the queue for the torches and pitchforks?
*Has the stand set up*
RIVER? What if someone downstream is using that water without cooking it?
Also, what’s hard? Guessing who has bigger chance to survive. The reason hospitals care for all cases, instead of like giving them enough morphine to kill them, is that even cases which looks hopeless sometimes got better in past.
On top of which, if you give doctors the ability to decide “this case is hopeless, so I won’t treat them,” some doctors will start saying “what a coincidence, this person who can’t pay for treatment/doesn’t share my ethnicity/isn’t attractive in my opinion is a hopeless case! Better clear them out, and give me more time to focus on treating this rich/white/skinny person.”
(Not that triage is never necessary — sometimes there’s an emergency and it’s physically impossible to treat everyone — but yeah, it’s not something you do just because a rich vampire is inconvenienced…)
Even being rich, white, and skinny isn’t salvation if the doctor has other priorities; See
the deaththe euthanasia of George V. George’s physician, as a proponent of euthanasia being solely at the discretion of physicians as well as feeling the country would be best served by reading of the King’s passing in the morning edition of the paper, administered lethal amounts EACH of cocaine and morphine.As for Imri’s remark. I’m sure he’s being metaphorical. It’d be more practical to have a mass grave and incinerate the corpses to make sure the disease doesn’t affect the rest of the
livestockpopulation.To be fair, while religion-based opposition to euthanasia is mentioned, there doesn’t seem to be any mention of possibility that George V would survive even just to next day, AND he was in pain.
Depending on level of technological progress at that point, incinerating the corpses, in winter, might not be that easy.
Yeah, of course, doctors are only people and better not give them more possibility to get corrupted with power than necessary … except, of course, that if they don’t care about someone it’s already easy to treat them in suboptimal way resulting in lowering their chances. There is no “ability to decide” which would change things by itself. What would be really dangerous would be external limits on how many people they can treat – oh, wait, lot of insurance companies already forces that.
Seriously, insurance companies limiting amount of money for doctors pretending it’s not causing people to die are the real problem here.
Regarding emergencies, in most cases the triage is more about who can wait and who need to be treated immediately, although yes, sometimes it does involve deciding someone would be not worth saving.
I described Imri and Stanczia as “soulless blood-sucking capitalists” to a friend after the third strip of this latest arc and I have been giggling to myself at it every time I see them since.
I know, I know, I can’t believe I didn’t catch the pun sooner myself, but here we are, finally
In this world it would actually be worth asking: do they have some way to verify if someone has soul and did they tried on vampires?
“Soulless” is nice metaphor but I wouldn’t be surprised if the ownership of soul wouldn’t have any influence on their ruthlessness.
Well, it’s worth mentioning that there are no verifiable records of a vampire (a) drawing a heartsword or (b) being reincarnated as a long-runner after dying.
There are plenty of theories about what that means about the state of their souls (or lack thereof), but all of those are unverified too.
Given the number of vampires, I suspect it can still be only pure chance.
So the answer is “no”. They have way to confirm someone has soul, but not that someone doesn’t, and most people fall in the “we don’t know” column.
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