Unnamed Doctor 6

Character Key Number: 
343
Display Name: 
Unnamed Doctor 6
Sort Name: 
Unnamed Doctor 6
Ever Present in Yoknapatawpha?: 
Yes
Biography: 

The Jefferson doctor who appears twice in Light in August is not named. Some years before the events of the story, he arrives at a cabin where Gail Hightower has just delivered a stillborn Negro baby. In the novel's present he is also the doctor whom Byron Bunch contacts when Lena goes into labor in a different cabin; again he arrives too late, but this time after Hightower has successfully delivered the baby. (In the various fictions there are three named Jefferson doctors who appear more than once - Habersham in the early life of the town; Peabody and Alford in the 20th century - but there are also over a dozen doctors who are never named. It's possible that Faulkner might have imagined one or more of them as Alford, or that he might have had the same different doctor in mind for more than one of the unnamed ones, but since the texts provide no evidence of that, we have created separate entries for all the local doctors without names.)

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