To Gaze Upon Wicked Gods by Molly X. Chang

“Don’t you remember? How surprising all semester long we’ve heard so much about your amazing powers of recollection.”

We covered ‘beneficence,’ or acting in our patients’ best interest, in that same unit.” He smiled unpleasantly. Quinley’s voice was clipped and precise when he answered. “Will we also be asked to essay on salus aegroti suprema lex?” he asked.ĭr. West, undeterred, lowered his hand, cleared his throat, and pushed his glasses up the bridge of his aquiline nose before speaking. The classroom momentarily transformed into a viper pit as sighs hissed out of many, many mouths. Masheck Quinley, his tweed-swathed back still turned to the class, “but since you will be essaying on this idea as part of your final exam, I feel it would behoove us to review it.” Without turning around, he sighed as he scraped the final hatch-mark of the x in lex and said, “Yes, Mr. “I know we covered this fundamental of medical ethics-respecting the supremacy of the patient’s will-in our very first unit,” said Dr. When the chalk squeaked halfway through suprema, West was the only student who did not flinch. Behind his thick spectacles his eyes were firmly fixed upon the professor as the man scrawled “ voluntas aegroti suprema lex” across the board. Inside the classroom, most of the students dandled their pencils over their notebooks as they ignored the lecture, choosing instead to watch the slow transformation of the bland, institutional buildings of Miskatonic University into a Christmas picture-postcard.Ī boy called West sat in the back row, hand aloft, arm quivering with tension. Outside the smudged panes of the classroom’s high rectangular windows snowflakes were slowly accumulating in the boughs and hollows of the trees drifting down from the leaden sky to carpet the quad. It was the last day of the last week of the fall semester. “Herbert West in Love” - illustration by Miko:

To Gaze Upon Wicked Gods by Molly X. Chang