The Book of Madness and Cures by Regina O’Melveny, John Murray (Hachette), $29.99
Four hundred years may separate the fictional life of thirty-something Dr Gabriella Mondini, as she battles discrimination in Venice, circa 1590, as a woman physician, and equality today, but some delightful aspects never change in this invigoratingly off-the-wall novel.
When her doctor father and co-compiler of an encyclopaedia of illness, “The Book of Diseases,” fails to come home, plucky Gabi sets off across Europe to find him.
At a time when midwives were condemned as witches, the progressive female doctor uses poultices – and dollops of good old medieval lateral thinking – to treat maladies such as “Lapsus,” (where a woman forgets her place of origin and longs for the world at large).
And when attending “anatomy” for students, at which musicians play a lute and a viol in the amphitheatre alongside the cadaver, it’s tempting to see our Renaissance doc scrubbed up at Seattle Grace (the hospital setting of TV series Grey’s Anatomy), rock classics blaring in surgery!
An unexpectedly enjoyable read.
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