Word: doctorings
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...novel centers on an emotional triangle involving an immigrant's daughter, Fermina Daza, a brilliant young doctor, Juvenal Urbino, with, as Thomas Pynchon has written, Florentino Ariza serving "as the hypotenuse." Florentino becomes obsessed with Fermina, who is about 13, and he writes her passionate, though unsuccessful, love letters. In typical Latin American fashion, the young woman is chaperoned and kept at a safe distance from suitors. Fermina's aunt agrees to serve as a courier, however, and soon the two fall hoplessly in love, exchanging piles and piles of stamps, envelopes and surreptitious locks of braided hair...
Fermina meanwhile marries Juvenal Urbino, a famous doctor who, having studied medicine in Paris, tries to reform the health standards of the city, which is presumed to be Cartagena or Barranquilla--on the Colombian Caribbean coast. Their match, while longlasting, is hardly ideal, and Marquez writes that "the problem with public life is overcoming terror; the problem with marriage is overcoming boredom...
These primitive practices were introduced to England and the American colonies. In 1721 and 1722, during a smallpox epidemic, a Boston doctor named Zabdiel Boylston scratched the skin of his six-year-old son and 285 other people and rubbed pus from smallpox scabs into the wounds. All but six of his patients survived...
...when the family members, aided by Jack's doctor, manage to convince him in an overly dramatic end to the first act that he is not actually the god of love, Jack naturally becomes the devil. Of course, Jack as devil conforms much better to the expectations of British nobility than did Jack as god of love. Message: man, or at least members of the British ruling class, is essentially evil in his inability to love, and sanity can be inseparable from insanity. A simple enough concept to grasp, but it takes the play the greater part of three hours...
...doctors are offering an alternative: aborting some of the fetuses in order to save the others. So far, fewer than 100 women have undergone the procedure, called fetal reduction, at a handful of U.S. hospitals. Usually performed before the twelfth week of pregnancy, it requires that the doctor pierce the mother's abdomen with a needle and, guided by an ultrasound image, inject a lethal drug into the fetus. It dies within minutes. The remaining infants, usually two, then have a much improved chance of developing normally...