Gabriel Garcıa Marquez

Then he felt so bad that he agreed to a visit from a doctor with the condition that he (the doctor) wouldn’t examine him, nor ask questions about his pains, nor attempt to give him anything to drink. "Only to talk", he said. The electee could not have matched his desires more. His name was Hercules Gastelbondo, and he was an old man blessed with happiness; he was huge and placid with a shining dome of total baldness and the patience of a drowned man, and that alone would relieve the illnesses of others. His skepticism and scientific courage were famous on the whole coast. He prescribed chocolate cream and melted cheese for bile distress, advised love-making during digestive lethargy as a good palliative for a long life, smoked endless carter’s cigarettes done up in brown wrapping paper, and prescribed them for the sick against every type of malady of the body. The patients said that he never cured them fully, but that he entertained them with his flowery words. He exploded in plebeian laughter. “The other doctors may kill as many sick people as me,” he said. “But with me, they die happier.”

 

 

Gabriel Garcıa Marquez

El General en Su Laberinto (The General in His Labyrinth)

Barcelona: Plaza & Jane´s; 1998;219-20