The history of medicine runs deep in Philadelphia. You can go to the oldest hospital, medical school, and operating theater in the country. Most medical tourists, however, go straight to The Mütter Museum, peering at specimens in jars, deformed skeletons, and other medical curiosities. There’s an element of the freak show about it, with the skeleton of a 7’6” giant and the conjoined liver of the twins, Chang and Eng. The stories, the context, and the past explanations are part of what draw us in, making us look at ourselves in a new, otherworldly light. Vikram Paralkar’s The Afflictions has a similar appeal. The book follows Maximo and his guide to the Central Library, where he learns of The Encyclopedia Medicae. We occasionally return to their discussion, but the bulk of The Afflictions is the almost fifty entries from this fictive medical reference.
Some of the entries start off sounding like Mütter exhibits. Membrum Vestigiale presents as “a limb bud, which typically sprouts from the scapular” or with a variety of other deformities: “webbed toes, double rows of teeth, or redundant chambers of the heart.” Where a Mütter guide might show us these things, jarred and stoppered, only to eventually explain away their mystery, Paralkar tends to double down on the strange and keep on going. That limb wasn’t human. It might have been a dormant wing or claw, or “tissues with the potential to confer clairvoyance, glands capable of secreting patience.” The Afflictions speculates that this is man’s ambition cut short, our desire to grow beyond our limits, only to be struck down by a God who is “swift to censure creatures that aspire to abilities they do not yet deserve to possess.” This affliction then gives way to many others, a woman locked in perpetual childbirth, an actor doomed to forget all his lines, and amnesiacs who do not forget but are gradually forgotten by friends and loved ones.
The challenge of a book like this is it has no plot to speak of, no characters to develop, but then, the same could be said of Jorge Luis Borges’ Book of Imaginary Beings or Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities. Perhaps it’s unfair to burden a new, contemporary author with this lofty comparison, but I think he holds up favorably. Paralkar’s book has a similar sense of imagination, description, and brisk metaphysical commentary. The author also has qualifications that these other fabulists did not. He’s a physician-scientist at the University of Pennsylvania who spends much of his time studying leukemia and its cures. I’m fascinated that anyone can make the leap between writing for The New England Journal of Medicine and something like The Afflictions, and I look forward to reading more of his fiction. Aptly, his second book Night Theater, a novel about a surgeon operating on the dead, recently had its launch party at the Mütter Museum. (It has been ably covered by Write Now Philly here and here.)
The Afflictions
by Vikram Paralkar
Lanternfish Press
Published on October 31, 2014
182 pages
Ted Fristrom, PhD, teaches writing at Drexel University and is involved in the medical humanities program there and at the Drexel College of Medicine. His interests include medical narrative; literature and the environment; and trashy Scandinavian mystery novels. He also cultivates a shallow but far reaching interest in piano music, photography, cat wrangling, and cooking.