Word: eichner
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...would begin prosaically-with a tea party or dinner in a restaurant-and then break into paroxysms of action. This technique underlies this first novel by Texan Terry Southern, 34, who lives and writes in Switzerland. The book opens quietly at a posh Los Angeles clinic where Dr. Frederick Eichner, "world's foremost dermatologist," listens to the symptoms of a new patient, Felix Treevly. Six pages later the calm is shattered by a verbal and physical violence, and the book careens off on a hounds-and-hares chase that dooms Patient Treevly and involves the pragmatic Dr. Eichner...
Side by side with Dr. Eichner's misadventures runs the dewy romance of Nurse Babs Mintner and her college-boy lover. This minor theme leads to the funniest scene of an often funny novel: the seduction of featherheaded Babs which takes place one rainy night in a drive-in theater and rages through three continuous showings of Wuthering Heights. There are other comic set pieces, notably a TV quiz called What's My Disease?, where panelists triumphantly identify gruesome samples of elephantiasis, icthyosis and multiple goiter...