This collection of chronicles continues the project by Companhia das Letras to publish a significant selection of the chronicles written by Moacyr Scliar during his more than thirty years of collaboration with the Porto Alegre newspaper Zero Hora.
Literature and medicine are two constant themes in Scliar’s thinking: the writer, a doctor of public health himself, tirelessly returned to the subjects that fascinated him. In his mind, the two are linked by the word. Thus, these chronicles showcase doctor-writers (from Galen and Vesalius to Thomas Mann, Tolstoy and Molière); memories of his student days at the Faculty of Medicine of Porto Alegre; stories of medical practice; writers suffering from diseases and how they dealt with their own physical limitations; writers who wrote about medicine… And yet, in another vein, political and ethical issues, such as the collaboration of some doctors with the dictatorship, both in Brazil and in other authoritarian regimes.
Scliar’s humor is more in the realm of mischief than irony. It is responsible for the enchanting lightness of these chronicles, which do not shy away from the gravity of many of the issues they address, starting with the biggest one, the core of both literature and medicine. For the writer, medicine performs “small resurrections” in the face of the “sting of death.” “Death has the last word. But until it arrives, medicine has much to say.” And so does literature.
