A murderer on the Costa Brava

Doc­tors are not al­ways the good guys in nov­els. It is some­thing that should not sur­prise us: there are few pro­fes­sions that are so ro­man­ti­cised in fic­tion and so ma­ligned in pri­vate. Char­ac­ters usu­ally keep to a pat­tern of hon­esty and ded­i­ca­tion that in the wider world does not cor­re­spond to re­al­ity. These facts are il­lus­trated in a novel that was all the rage a few years ago, by the renowned Dutch writer Her­man Koch. The first words from the pro­tag­o­nist, Dr. Schlosser, are: ”I am a gen­eral prac­ti­tioner.” The jour­nal­ist Lluís Bonada pub­lished an in­ter­view with the au­thor in the mag­a­zine, El temps. Asked about where the story is set, Koch ad­mit­ted it was the Costa Brava, where he spends the sum­mers.

Specif­i­cally, the au­thor men­tions a place be­tween Calella de Palafrugell, Llafranc, Tamariu and Pals. He also gives some clues about his char­ac­ter. He is a mur­derer but not a mon­ster, and there are things to like about him, as he is at­ten­tive to his fam­ily and the reader can even iden­tify with his mo­tives for vengeance. He ob­serves work and life with a cyn­i­cism that a reader who is also a doc­tor will find un­pleas­ant, al­though it al­lows him to avoid com­pla­cency. Asked “Do you know if there are many doc­tors who be­have with the same lack of sen­si­tiv­ity to their pa­tients?” The an­swer: “I think so. Most gen­eral prac­ti­tion­ers have told me that a good num­ber of them end up that way... More than one of them has thanked me for say­ing things pub­licly.”

What are those things? The ex­pres­sion of so­cially in­cor­rect feel­ings of re­pul­sion for the pro­fes­sion and pa­tients, a lack of con­sid­er­a­tion on be­half of spe­cial­ists and hos­pi­tal staff to­wards the gen­eral prac­ti­tioner… Koch is not a doc­tor, but he seems to know some. Es­pe­cially in­ter­est­ing is the char­ac­ter of a pro­fes­sor ex­pelled from uni­ver­sity be­cause of his rad­i­cal opin­ions, Dr. Aaron Herzl, pos­si­bly in­spired by an aca­d­e­mic who taught un­ortho­dox stud­ies on the per­son­al­i­ties of crim­i­nals. His opin­ions are the dis­til­la­tion of co­her­ent and lucid think­ing but laden with cyn­i­cism.

Here is a taste of what Dr. Schlosser thinks about his pa­tients: “My pa­tients con­fuse time with at­ten­tion...What I needed to see I saw in a minute, the other 19 I fill with at­ten­tion... I make an in­ter­ested face. Mean­while, I write some­thing on a piece of paper. Oc­ca­sion­ally I ask them to un­dress be­hind the screen, but I nor­mally avoid it. Their bod­ies are al­ready un­pleas­ant with their clothes on… I pre­tend to look but I think about other things… Some pa­tients can hardly hide their dis­ap­point­ment. A sim­ple pre­scrip­tion? They are dis­heart­ened for few sec­onds, with their pants around their knees. They have asked for a morn­ing off work, they want more for their money… The doc­tor’s years of ex­pe­ri­ence is not enough, it is not enough that his clin­i­cal eye de­tected what is wrong with them straight away be­cause he has seen it a thou­sand times... Ex­plain­ing the work of a fam­ily doc­tor is easy. All he has to do is avoid send­ing too many pa­tients to the spe­cial­ists and hos­pi­tals… The sys­tem would col­lapse.”»

And to end, some ex­otic thoughts from pro­fes­sor Herzl: “Cul­ture and the rule of law force us to con­trol our in­stincts. But in­stinct is never far away. It waits to at­tack when no one is pay­ing at­ten­tion.” “In fact, an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth is much closer to human na­ture than we dare openly admit.” “Ninety per cent of women find mar­ried men more at­trac­tive than sin­gle men… Sin­gle and avail­able men are like a house that has been empty for too long. There must be some­thing wrong with it.” “The di­nosaurs pop­u­lated our planet for 160 mil­lion years and then went ex­tinct. What a waste of time! There is no di­rect evo­lu­tion­ary line be­tween the di­nosaurs and hu­mans. If hu­man­ity and the con­tin­u­ance of the species were so im­por­tant, why have the di­nosaurs first?”

Among the novel’s virtues I would high­light these and other shock­ing re­flec­tions, rather than the plot, which is at­trac­tive but a bit ir­reg­u­lar. In short, sum­mer read­ing for a hol­i­day on the Costa Brava.

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