“Use of Force” was originally published in the November-December 1933 issue of Blast. It was collected in Life Along the Passaic River (1938). It is currently most readily available in The Collected Stories of William Carlos Williams (New Directions).

Use of Force” by William Carlos Williams is a simple, very-short short story—three pages in most anthologies. Williams, himself a physician, tells the story of a young doctor making a house call in a community where several cases of diphtheria have recently broken out. His patient, a pretty little girl, who seems to be the only child of a working-class couple, the Olsons, refuses to open her mouth for a throat exam. Fearing she may be infected, the doctor forcibly enters her mouth to get a throat culture. But in the process he loses control and realizes his motivation is conquest, not care. He has tried to save her life and fulfill his social responsibility to protect the community but by means that involve a dubious use of force.

One of the things I love about this story is its unpretentiousness. Its craft is truly invisible. I'm reminded of an incident with my father when we visited the Museum of Modern Art in New York as newly arrived immigrants. We were standing in front of an abstract painting that might have been drawn by a child: a red square and a green triangle posed on a purple background. My father shook his head and whistled, “I could do that!” It was only years later, studying the work of Albers in a history of art course in college, that I understood the technique involved in creating his simple, luminous forms on canvas.

William Carlos Williams's story shares that apparent effortless simplicity. It is not an overtly literary story keeping us at a respectful distance. The style is no-frills, matter-of-fact. No Faulknerian rococo sentences, no stylized deployment of simple sentences as in a Hemingway story. The first-person narrator seems to be speaking the story or typing it out on his clunky Underwood typewriter between patients as Dr. Williams was known to do. Williams avoids the literary use of quotation marks that would make the talk look like “dialogue.”