Do No Harm

Do No Harm is the physician’s ethical creed that gives moral weight to Larry Stryker’s conduct as a doctor. Its significance in the novel lies in the distance between the duty to protect patients and a medical environment in which vulnerability and professional authority were exploited, while the later gap in Roseanne Orozco’s hospital record impedes scrutiny of what happened to her.

The Meaning of the Creed

Larry recognizes that his conduct violated the physician’s obligation not to harm. He also distinguishes that wrongdoing from murder: in his view, abusing a patient could end his medical career and expose him to criminal proceedings, but it did not make him a murderer. That distinction reveals how narrowly he frames the principle. The creed names a serious breach, yet his acknowledgment does not encompass the full harm to the person placed in his care.

A Hospital Culture of Abuse

The novel presents Larry’s misconduct within a wider pattern at the hospital. When a high-school girl became a patient, doctors were alerted; the attending physician would sedate her, and other doctors would take turns visiting her room to exploit her incapacitated state. Their treatment of this abuse as a joke or game stands in direct opposition to the duty expressed by Do No Harm. The setting is therefore not only the scene of an individual doctor’s violation: the account describes a shared practice among people entrusted with patients’ care.

Roseanne Orozco’s Case

Larry’s violation of the creed becomes bound to Roseanne Orozco’s history. She was fifteen, had been hospitalized for a ruptured appendix, and was due to be released the following day when Larry sexually exploited her. After a condom broke, he admitted her for a series of tests; the pregnancy test was positive. The sequence makes the conflict between medical duty and self-protection concrete: a physician who had harmed a patient then used medical procedures to respond to the consequences of his own conduct.

Records and Accountability

Years later, Emma Orozco reports that the hospital could find no record of Roseanne having been admitted. Emma disputes the suggestion that the records had simply been lost: the hospital had located her own file, which documented three admissions, including her hysterectomy fifteen years earlier. The contrast gives the ethical breach an institutional afterlife. Do No Harm concerns the doctor’s duty to an individual patient, but Roseanne’s missing record also leaves her family confronting the limits of institutional accountability and the difficulty of recovering a history that the available documentation does not preserve.