Father Jude is a personification of the deficiency of doctors: “After dinner , Father Jude led me to a library adjacent to my rooms. There we sat, the grotesquely lacerated priest and me, the powerless man of medicine. His impairments reminded me of my limitations as a doctor. If I could only place my hands on him and make him whole, I would have.” Father Jude’s disfigurements are beyond medical interventions. Therefore, doctors are not divine miracle workers who would be anticipated to restore disorders which are beyond healing. Medical occupation has integral restrictions which amplify the doctors’ restricted capability for they are mortals.
Father Jude’s oddity is influential in augmenting Morale’s explicit ideology of censuring religion: “He (Father Jude) removed the veil from his face, wiped his chin and carefully cleaned his exposed nasal orifices. His lacerations were nothing compared to the physical and mental wounds of the people to whom he ministered. His flock was a diseased, infested population: the prostitutes, the lepers, the abandoned children, the demented homeless people, the disenfranchised who survived in the filthy streets, the dung heaps and the garbage dumps of the city. Along with the labouring enslaved poor, these were Father Jude’s patients, who looked to him not only for physical and spiritual remedies, but for an insurgent attitude that made life tolerable and nurtured a growing desire for change.” Here, religion unreservedly flops in alleviating the aberrant nature of the city. Father Jude is illustrative of a hollow religion which does not emphasize on diagnosing and averting sinful engagements such as decadence. The father’s spiritual remedies are immaterial since they do not absolutely transmute the society’s wicked culture. He recommends unproductive remedies which are personified in his slashed visage.
The physician’s unconditional immersion in New Spain upsets his private life: “One morning I woke to the realization that I had lived and worked in New Spain for almost three years. I had forgotten the faces of my family and even the face of my sweetheart, Renata. New Spain had engulfed me with a plethora of physical activities, with struggles of survival, both individual and collective. I understood that the saving of these people ensures my physical and mental endurance, and most important the survival of my soul.” The physician exhibits the arduous nature of the medical vocation which would prompt an individual to detriment his/ her personal life. He espouses intrinsic motivation based on how he accredits the endurance of his soul to his patients’ existence. Being a doctor necessitates enthusiasm, willpower and ransoms especially when numerous lives are at stake.
