Dr. Mukhtar

Dr. Mukhtar is the learned physician summoned from Boston to care for Beatrix Duquet, whose stomach cancer is already advanced. He cannot reverse her illness, but he names it plainly, relieves its pain, and remains at her bedside; in the final six weeks, his conversations and care become the setting for Beatrix’s last, unexpected love.

Arrival and Medical Reputation

Dr. Mukhtar enters the story through the uncertainty surrounding Beatrix’s illness. Dr. Hallagher, a new physician on Penobscot Bay, recognizes that her condition is serious but does not identify its nature. He recommends calling in Dr. Mukhtar, a foreign-born doctor in Boston with extensive experience treating stomach ailments, and offers to write to persuade him to make the journey. The referral establishes Mukhtar as a specialist whose expertise reaches beyond the local medical community.

He arrives on a cool autumn afternoon riding a black Arabian mare that has attracted attention all the way from Boston. Beatrix’s daughter, Elise, offers him the choice of pasture or stable; he chooses the pasture beneath the maples, beside a rattling brook. Elise finds his dark face frightening and his voice rough, though kind, and leads him into the house reluctantly. The scene sets her apprehension against his considerate manner, and makes his arrival a threshold between the family’s anxious uncertainty and a direct medical reckoning.

Examination and Diagnosis

Inside the house, Mukhtar immediately detects the fetid air. He puts his saddlebags on the great pine table in the schoolroom, where Beatrix had received visitors and served tea. His examination is practical and searching: he questions Elise, asks to see Beatrix’s soiled sheets, and examines them closely. He then asks about Beatrix, Elise, Kuntaw, the family’s circumstances, and even their food. When Elise explains Beatrix’s unusual fondness for meat smoked in the chimney, he nods as though the detail matters to his assessment. His attention makes the household itself part of the medical inquiry.

Mukhtar tells Elise that Beatrix has advanced stomach cancer and that nursing her is exhausting; Elise, too, needs help. The diagnosis shocks her because it makes the likelihood of death unmistakable. The news arrives in the same room where two small porcelain cups sit on the broad pine table, a fragile domestic detail set against the scale of the illness and the house’s history. Beatrix’s family home on Penobscot Bay had once been the great possession of Outger and Beatrix. Outger had left, and the trees around the house had been cut; Beatrix sold the last large pines to pay for repairs to the deteriorating roof and sills just as she fell ill. Mukhtar’s visit therefore takes place in a household already diminished by illness, absence, and the loss of its timber.

Care and Limits of Treatment

Mukhtar gives Beatrix a clear account of what medicine can and cannot do. He explains that the cancer is accompanied by fluid in her stomach, which he can relieve, but warns that both the fluid and the pain will return. He frames the illness as a battle Beatrix cannot win at this stage and estimates that she may have a month or two. He offers to stay in the house so that he can attend her and Elise can rest, and says he has brought enough elixir to soothe elephants for a decade. His confident promise concerns palliation, not cure: his role is to make the remaining time more bearable.

Beatrix says she wants to die and be free of pain and life, though the narration makes clear that this is not the whole of what she feels. Over the next six weeks, Mukhtar tries different means of easing her suffering as the first pain elixir becomes less effective. He remains on hand, including at night, and at one point sits in the dim room while Beatrix sleeps; her pain is temporarily at bay, to his satisfaction. The disease continues, but his attentive presence creates intervals in which pain recedes and conversation becomes possible.

Beatrix’s Last Attachment

The relationship that develops between Beatrix and Mukhtar is not presented as a cure or escape from death. Instead, as she weakens, they speak about books and ideas, places they have imagined but never seen, peace and quiet, and horses—an interest Mukhtar knows well. Beatrix takes pleasure in picturing galloping horses and their fluttering silky manes. At first he does most of the talking while she listens in a state between wakefulness and exhaustion; their closeness grows within the unequal conditions of doctor and dying patient, but becomes emotionally significant to them both.

In the last week of Beatrix’s life, her suffering is rendered through the image of being suspended in an immense bowl of water. Its water shifts from breathable to viscous as the growth presses against her lungs; orange currents and underwater storms give form to the pain. The image recalls the yellow crockery bowl in which she mixed bread dough, bringing an ordinary household object into her altered, failing perception. Against this inward, suffocating vision, Mukhtar continues trying to make her remaining days tolerable.

Francis-Outger, whose house is a mile away, comes each day with balsam boughs for the sickroom. Mukhtar crushes juniper berries, whose dry, bitter fragrance makes Beatrix smile, though the smile is nearly a grimace. She dies surrounded by that cordial of forest scents. The narration marks the contrast between her fifty-two strange years and the fact that she falls in love on her deathbed. Mukhtar’s importance lies not in defeating the cancer but in the care and companionship that accompany Beatrix to the end.