May 10, 2008: Garcia Marquez describes the doctor Abrenuncio - 0 Comments

Introducing the doctor Abrenuncio:

"His disputes with other physicians, who would not forgive his incredible successes or uncommon methods, were constant and bloody. He had invented a pill to be taken once a year, which enhanced one's health and lengthened one's life but caused such mental derangement for the first three days that no one but the doctor had dared to swallow it. At one time he had been in the habit of playing the harp at the bedside of his patients in order to sedate them with certain music composed for the purpose. He did not practice surgery, which he always considered an inferior art fit only for charlatans and barbers, and his terrifying specialty was predicting the day and hour his patients would die. Both his good name and his bad, however, were based on the same circumstance: It was said, and no one ever disproved it, that he had resurrected a dead man."

- Garcia Marquez, Of Love and Other Demons, 1994.