Doctor Heech

Doctor Heech is the physician responsible for caring for Eva Waldvogel during her terminal illness and for treating Roy Watzka after a dangerous relapse. Across both crises, he combines technical instruction and blunt authority with visible anger at the limits of medicine. He can arrange urgent treatment, teach Delphine to manage pain, and insist that Roy survive, but he cannot undo either patient’s underlying condition.

Medical Care for Eva

When Delphine returned from Doctor Heech’s house, she had Eva in the delivery car under morphine and carried his medical orders. He had identified a tumor pressing on Eva’s vital organs and warned that it could kill her within days if it was not removed. He was urgently contacting a surgeon at the clinic to prepare for her arrival. His alarm was sharpened by personal fondness for Eva, and, once Delphine understood how long Eva had concealed her suffering, his helpless frustration turned into repeated reproaches that she should have come to him sooner.

The treatment that followed was invasive and ultimately unsuccessful. After surgery, Eva received radium in hollow metal tubes that were repeatedly removed, refilled, and reinserted during her hospital stay. When the cancer continued to spread, Doctor Heech administered monthly radium treatments in his office, using long gold needles tipped with iridium. Eva was given ether for the procedure and morphine afterward; the needles remained in place for six hours. Doctor Heech feared that the treatment was useless, and his anger at that possibility was so strong that he left the room cursing under his breath. The scene presents medical procedure not as mastery over disease but as labor performed while the outcome remains uncertain.

Teaching Delphine to Provide Care

As Eva’s illness advanced, Doctor Heech taught Delphine to prepare Magendie’s solution fresh so it would not develop fungus, and instructed her in administering morphine. He trusted her skill, telling her that she was better at giving Eva the dose than any nurse. Delphine was proud of this responsibility despite her intense dislike of needles. She learned to judge when Eva needed relief not by a schedule but by the lucid shock of pain in her friend’s expression, and prepared the prescribed one-to-thirty solution for injection.

This instruction makes Doctor Heech’s role extend beyond the clinic: the care he teaches Delphine enables her to respond to Eva’s pain at home. Delphine’s competence does not erase the tragedy of the illness, but it gives their daily care a deliberate, practical form. Doctor Heech supplies the knowledge and prescription; Delphine bears the recurring work of recognizing suffering and administering relief.

Roy’s Collapse and Treatment

Later, Doctor Heech came to examine Roy after Roy’s delirious flight through town. Delphine had brought him home, given him water with sugar and salt, put him to bed, and called the doctor. Heech assessed Roy’s liver as gravely damaged by his drinking, describing its condition in deliberately forceful terms and concluding that it was in ruin. Roy pushed back against the examination and said he had tried, while Heech’s response showed how little confidence he had in Roy’s physical prospects.

When Delphine asked whether Roy would live, Doctor Heech refused to make a reliable prediction, saying Roy defied physical laws. Yet his uncertainty shifted into an emphatic command: he insisted Roy would live, declaring that Roy should not die before showing consistent goodness to Delphine. The outburst turns his medical judgment into a demand that Roy remain accountable to the daughter who cares for him. He instructed Delphine to taper Roy off the alcohol and gave her a bottle of cough syrup. He also told her not to spend much on Roy’s funeral when he eventually died, but to use the money for herself—a grim, practical remark that acknowledges both his poor prognosis and Delphine’s constrained circumstances.

Character and Narrative Function

Doctor Heech’s care is neither detached nor sentimental. With Eva, he is alarmed by a disease already dangerously advanced and angry that she delayed seeking help; with Roy, he condemns the damage caused by drinking but still insists that the man live. His manner can be severe, yet his actions repeatedly place him beside people whose suffering he cannot simply cure. The contrast between his precise instructions—freshly prepared medicine, a measured solution, a staged taper—and his uncertainty about survival defines his limits as much as his competence.

He also stands within a network of care that depends on others. Delphine carries out Eva’s home treatment and later monitors Roy, while Doctor Heech diagnoses, prescribes, teaches, and visits. His presence therefore links professional medicine to the often exhausting domestic work that continues after the consultation ends. The two illnesses offer different outcomes in the material available: Eva’s cancer progresses despite surgery and radium, while Roy survives this particular collapse, though Heech treats his condition as perilous. In both cases, care is shown as necessary without being a guarantee of recovery.