Give Me A Doctor - Analysis

A wish for comfort disguised as a medical request

The poem’s central joke is also its central claim: the speaker doesn’t really want a doctor who will save him; he wants a doctor who will let him remain himself right up to the end. The opening demand—Give me a doctor—sounds practical, but the chosen qualities are almost entirely about temperament and indulgence. Even the body-type wish list (the doctor as partridge-plump, broad in the rump) reads less like professionalism and more like a desire for someone cozy, unthreatening, and faintly comic—someone whose presence won’t feel like judgment.

The plump doctor as anti-moralist

The speaker specifies an endomorph with gentle hands, but the real requirements are moral: this doctor must never make absurd demands that the speaker abandon all my vices. The adjective absurd is doing a lot of work: it reframes any serious health advice as unreasonable meddling. What the speaker wants is a professional who won’t turn illness into a sermon. Even in danger, the doctor must not pull a long face in a crisis—no theatrical solemnity, no scolding, no dour realism that would force the speaker to behave differently.

Charm in the face of the worst news

The poem turns sharply in its final couplet. After all this insistence on comfort, the speaker accepts the ultimate verdict: I have to die. The startling part is the requested manner—with a twinkle in his eye. That tiny sparkle of friendliness becomes a kind of anesthesia: the speaker can tolerate truth if it comes wrapped in warmth. The tone, throughout, is brisk and playful, but the last line reveals what the playfulness has been protecting the speaker from: not illness exactly, but the humiliation of being corrected, improved, or frightened.

The tension: refusing reform, accepting death

There’s a pointed contradiction here. The speaker rejects change—no giving up vices, no hard demands—yet calmly requests the most final, unchangeable outcome. In a way, the poem suggests that what the speaker fears is not dying but being managed: being turned into a project, made virtuous, made anxious, made to perform seriousness. The ideal doctor, plump and kind, offers a fantasy of control: if death must come, at least it will arrive without moralizing, without drama, and without forcing the speaker to pretend he ever wanted to be anyone else.