Mercy

When the next smallpox pandemic comes, none of our society's hubris will soften its devastating public health impact. You inhabit the shoes (''play'' is the wrong word entirely) of Dr. Peter Basham, in gentler times a pediatrician, working overtime to process the hideous and deformed smallpox victims, racked with pain, in a hospital of psychopomps only equipped to deliver mercy, not cures. The social blows, though softer, are no less deleterious to our cultural framework: not only has the outbreak deprived you of your career and wife, but your conception of self and the very prospect of conducting a meaningful existence in the face of so much random and arbitrary suffering.