ABSTRACT
A short story by Ernest Hemingway entitled Indian Camp, fits the bill nicely. At around 1500 words (five pages in my budgetprice paperback edition of selected stories by the author1), it can be read in a few minutes. Hemingway's prose is straightforward enough, at least in terms of syntax and vocabulary - so nothing there to deter the apprehensive first-time reader. And the story line could have been custom-made by a medical educational board: in the Michigan countryside, a doctor takes his brother and his son Nick to watch him deliver a (Native American) Indian woman's baby in her shanty home. He has to perform a Caesarean with improvised equipment; the mother and child both survive; the Indian father, bedridden in a bunk above his wife because of an injury, commits suicide, an event which goes unnoticed until the delivery is over. The doctor and his son go home.
