P2Q2 example answer

The doctor in Source A and the nurse in Source B are working in different places.

Use details from both sources to write a summary of what you understand about the different places in which the doctor and the nurse are working.

Source A is written from a junior doctor’s perspective in a hospital in the modern day, where there is practically unlimited access to resources such as medicines and machines that could easily save someone’s life. Kay describes how, despite the signs that have “scarred [his] retina,” he still was exhilarated with the idea of becoming a doctor. We can infer from this that due to medical advancements in the modern day, doctors are much more important roles in saving people’s lives than they would have been in history, the history of medicine. Despite the hellish night shifts the writer describes, he concludes that even with the long hours and exhausting work of being pulled here, there, and everywhere, the fact that he was becoming a doctor made it all worth it.

In comparison, Source B describes a woman tending to men wounded from war. The horrors of war injuries are so much worse than that seen in a normal hospital, with Seacole describing a man who had been “hit in the forehead,” and she suspected that “his sight was gone.” The knowledge that these men had experienced the perilous and fatal scenes of war provides the writer with a deep sense of sorrow for these men. The sights of a war hospital, as depicted by Seacole, are far more emotionally demanding of a nurse than in a modern-day hospital. The lack of equipment and treatment, it is inferred that this is what had further provided the writer with sorrow for these men. She knows that the most she can do is provide them with comfort and clean dressings, compared to Kay’s ability to book MRI scans and different tests for patients in order to discharge them from the hospital. The tone in which Seacole writes infers that these soldiers may never be discharged.