The Ameican Grain: William Carlos Williams's great short story

William Carlos Williams's justly famous very short story The Use of Force just barely qualifies as fiction - if written and published today it would probably be considered an essay or a chapter or section in a memoir - though it's remotely possible that WCW took great liberties (aside from naming the patients - I assume that even in the 1930s medical ethics would not have allowed him to write about his patients by name) in crafting this piece. If so, that's further testament to his excellence as a writer because everything in this story feels likely and true: WCW as a middle-aged pediatrician pays a house call on a family, new patients to him, whose daughter has been feverish for 3 days. Fearful of a diphtheria outbreak in the area, WCW tries to get a throat culture from the young (8 years old?) girl, but she refuses to open her mouth - in fact reaches out and claws his eyeglasses to the floor. Over the course of the story WCW becomes increasingly aggressive and very conscious and honest (to the readers) about the anger he felt toward the girl and her parents - he's in a strange predicament, though maybe part of a pediatrician's daily life: forcing a child to endure a test but for their own health and safety (and that of others as well). If he truly loathed the child, he would just walk away from the situation - but his professional responsibilities compel him to stay and do his job. He saves the child - but leaves w/ some shame and some insight into the inflammability of his own temper. One oddity is it's not clear to me - maybe not to him either - why he begins to despise the parents - surely not for their minor blunder in saying that the doctor was a "nice man" and wouldn't "hurt" the child. Maybe it's because he believes they should have better control over their child? Or something meaner and darker? On another level, this story endures as a fine document about medical care nearly a century ago: the doc making house calls, with limited wares in his black bag, the provision of care to the poor and the working class, the fee of $3!, his thought that maybe he should have left for a while and let the situation cool down and return in an hour (today, the md's schedule is sacrosanct - the idea of coming back in an hour is almost incomprehensible). Also the story standing alongside WCW's great imagist poetry in "the American grain," as he called it gives a more complete picture of the simplicity, clarity, and beauty of his work w/ language. Story stands well alongside of other great medical short stories, from Chekhov obviously - also thinking of Hemingway's Indian Camp and even Kafka's weird story about an itinerant physician.