Though he does not figure largely in the novella’s plot,
the doctor is an important character in The Pearl because
he represents the colonial attitudes that oppress Kino’s people.
The doctor symbolizes and embodies the colonists’ arrogance, greed,
and condescension toward the natives, whom the colonists do not
even try to understand. Like the other colonists, the doctor has
no interest in Kino’s people. He has come only to make money, and
his greed distorts his human values. As a physician, the doctor
is duty-bound to act to save human life, but when confronted with
someone whom he considers beneath him, the doctor feels no such
duty. His callous refusal to treat Coyotito for the scorpion
sting because Kino lacks the money to pay him thus demonstrates
the human cost of political conquest rooted in the desire for financial
profit. As his interior monologue in Chapter