Summary:

William Morton first introduced ether anesthesia in 1846. This was followed shortly by nitrous oxide and chloroform. Within a few years, surgical anesthesia was being used throughout the United States. However, widespread acceptance did not mean universal usage. Physicians and surgeons debated the risks and benefits of anesthesia. Anesthesia was thought to be dangerous. Some argued that pain was a necessary part of life, that it made people stronger, and/or that it was a punishment from God. Others argued that anesthesia constituted an abuse of medical power.

Surgeons took care to select appropriate patients for anesthesia, while performing surgery without anesthetics on others. Women, people of higher social and economic classes, and people of the white race were thought to be more sensitive to pain than men, the poor, and Negroes and American Indians. Likewise, the young experienced pain more than the elderly. Certain procedures (e.g. major limb amputations and prolonged tissue dissection) were also thought to require more anesthetic than others (e.g. natural childbirth or ENT surgery). These beliefs carried over into practice, as evidenced by records from the Massachusetts General Hospital and other hospitals in the mid-19th century.

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Consuelo Camacho Ramos (Connie) was placed in Bellevue Hospital because she abused drugs and alcohol after the police killed her blind, African-American lover. She was accused of child abuse and her daughter was put up for adoption. When the novel opens, Connie has been released and is living in New York with little money and no hope of a job.

She begins to be visited by an individual from the year 2137 who calls "himself" Luciente. He communicates with Connie mentally and she visits his world in the same way, experiencing everything without moving her body. Luciente’s community is not divided along gender lines. Indeed, "he" turns out to be what Connie calls "female," though the name means nothing in this future world.

Reproduction takes place in an artificial environment in which fetuses are delivered at ten months to improve their strength. Every child has three "mothers," but is raised by the entire community. Luciente’s community is fighting a war against forces that want people to live in a hierarchical system in which women all become prostitutes, victims of a larger, manipulating force, a battle Connie also fights in her world.

When Connie breaks the nose of her niece’s pimp, he takes her back to Bellevue. No one believes that she did not provoke the attack. They assume she is mad. In an exemplary moment, the nurses who attend to Connie talk over her head about how dirty these mad people are. Left tied to a bed for many hours, Connie has urinated on herself and has been unable to wipe her nose. The nurses ignore every word she says.

Connie learns to manipulate the system, not swallowing her pills and telling her counselor that indeed she was sick but now feels much better. She draws the line, however, when she is chosen to be a subject in an experiment. The doctors plan to implant electrodes into the patients’ brains to control the patients’ emotions. Connie kills the doctors by slipping poison into their coffee.

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In her youth, Mrs. Palfrey had been a model British woman. She married a military man, moved to Borneo and lived happily and properly, giving direction to the natives. She and her husband retired in Britain. Now, however, Mrs. Palfrey is a widow. Her daughter Elizabeth, who lives in Scotland, has not invited her to stay and she is not sure she would want to. Instead, she courageously decides to move into the Claremont Hotel in London, where she meets the other permanent residents who, like herself, are old and rather poor.

Mrs. Palfrey gets the attention and envy of the group when she tells them that her oldest grandchild and heir, Desmond, works at The British Museum and will undoubtedly be coming to visit. He never comes.

One day as Mrs. Palfrey is out for a walk, she falls. A young man, Ludovic Myers (Ludo), comes out of his basement apartment to help her. He takes her inside, doctors her knee, and gives her a cup of tea. He is trying to write a book and finds her an excellent study.

Mrs. Palfrey asks him to pretend to be Desmond so that she can save her reputation. He agrees. Mrs. Palfrey fancies that she is in love with him. They meet rarely, though once he invites her to dinner at his house. He makes an otherwise lonely and dull existence exciting. He is the only one who visits The Claremont without immediately rushing out, feeling as if a terrible duty has been fulfilled.

When one of the older residents at The Claremont becomes incontinent, the management forces her to move. She dies quickly, alone in an understaffed nursing home. Mrs. Palfrey has another fall and winds up in the hospital. Ludo comes to see her; he spends more time with her than any of her family.

She dies.

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As a young woman, Fermina Daza kept a lengthy and passionate correspondence with Florentino Ariza, who was socially her inferior, but was desperately in love with her. They became engaged through their letters, exchanged through hiding places and telegrams in code.

But one day, when Fermina Daza comes close to Florentino Ariza in the market, she feels suddenly ill and tells him it was all a mistake. Instead, she marries Dr. Juvenal Urbino, a European-educated perfectionist, who falls in love with her on a medical visit. Their tumultuous but affectionate marriage lasts over fifty years, through a civil war, cholera outbreaks and the Doctor's brief affair with a patient. Juvenal Urbino distinguishes himself by instituting policies to combat cholera. He dies, falling from a tree as he attempts to catch his pet parrot.

Florentino Ariza comes to the wake. He is now about seventy and controls a wealthy shipping operation. After the other guests leave, he approaches Fermina Daza, saying, "I have waited for this opportunity for more than half a century, to repeat to you once again my vow of eternal fidelity and ever-lasting love."

She throws him out of the house, but continues to think of him. He becomes a regular visitor. Finally, they take a boat ride together, down the rivers that are being slowly drained and poisoned, listening for the cries of the manatees. They do not return, but prepare to sail on forever.

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Scarry argues that pain is the most absolute definer of reality. For the person in pain, there is no reality besides pain; if it hurts, it must be real. This characteristic of pain makes it useful politically. In torture, for example, the reality of the one being tortured is reduced to an awareness of pain, while the torturer’s world remains fully present. This is realized most emphatically when torture is described as information-gathering. The torturer insists on questions that for the tortured are no longer of any concern.

War also makes use of pain. In the dispute that leads to war, one country’s beliefs are pitted against another’s. Both sides’ positions are thus called into question; if there is disagreement about the facts, it becomes apparent that the facts are based in opinion, not reality. The injured bodies of war re-connect the victor’s beliefs with the material world. If the injured body is the ultimate in reality, the injured bodies of war can be used to signify the reality of the victor’s position. Simultaneously, the pain of individuals in war is transferred to inanimate objects or large groups. Thus, one speaks of "Division Six" being wounded or weapons being disabled.

This language also uses the absolute reality of the body in pain to secure the truth of a cultural/political position. Scarry discusses the reality-producing quality of pain in Judeo-Christian scriptures, Marx, and humans’ relationships with inanimate objects.

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Rubyfruit Jungle is about growing up a lesbian in America. Molly Bolt is adopted by a poor Southern couple, Carrie and Carl, who want a better life for their daughter than they've had. Molly does too, but she has different ideas about how that will unfold. As a child she plays bawdy practical jokes and has sex with her girlfriend in the sixth grade; as one of the most popular girls in high school, she plays heterosexual games but is the lover of the head cheerleader; she is thrown out of college after she is found out to be lovers with her alcoholic heiress roommate. She journeys to New York City, where she waitresses her way through film school, having one adventure after another, armed with startling beauty, wicked wit, and fierce determination to become a great filmmaker.

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Jules, the Prince of Bramante, has been disappointed in his hopes of having a male heir. His oldest son and wife produced only a girl child, then died. Jules decides to have their child, Gabriel, raised as a boy. She is to be instructed that women are mindless slaves to men, born to suffer, so that when, at adolescence, her sex is revealed to her, she will decide to accept instead the sex her grandfather has given her.

When she is told the truth, Gabriel does not abandon her male costume or demeanor, but she does want to make sure that Astolphe, her cousin who should rightfully inherit the family fortune, has all the money he needs. She sets out to find him. They meet in a bar and before Astolphe learns her identity, they fight with some thieves and are taken to prison. In prison, they swear life-long affection and decide to travel together, winding up in Venice for the carnival.

Astolphe, who has long been disturbed by his attraction to the gentle Gabriel, asks her to dress as a woman to attend a masquerade. She agrees, and he is dumb struck by her appearance. Every man at the ball falls in love with her and when Astolphe reveals that (as he believes) she is really a man, many are astonished. When Astolphe returns home that night, he catches a glimpse of Gabriel undressing and realizes that she is a woman. They become lovers.

Gabriel dresses as a woman and becomes submissive. But Astolphe is unable to achieve the higher love to which Gabriel aspires. He is consumed by jealously, finally locking Gabriel in her room. She escapes and leaves him, returning to her male identity. The story ends when Gabriel is murdered by a man hired by her grandfather to cover up her disobedience. Sand revised the play in 1850 and made Gabriel into a much less independent character named Julia.

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The story takes place in the men's cancer ward of a hospital in a city in Soviet Central Asia. The patients in Ward 13 all suffer from cancer, but differ in age, personality, nationality, and social class (as if such a thing could be possible in the Soviet "classless" society!). We are first introduced to Pavel Rusanov, a Communist Party functionary, who enters the hospital because of a rapidly-growing neck tumor.

We soon learn, however, that the book's central character is Oleg Kostoglotov, a young man who has recently been discharged from a penal camp and is now "eternally" exiled to this particular province. Only two weeks earlier, he was admitted to the ward in grave condition from an unspecified tumor, but he has responded rapidly to radiation therapy. Among the doctors are Zoya, a medical student; Vera Gangart, a young radiologist; and Lyudmila Dontsova, the chief of radiation therapy.

Rusanov and Kostoglotov respond to therapy and are eventually discharged; other patients remain in the ward, get worse, or are sent home to die. In the end Kostoglotov boards a train to the site of his "eternal" exile: "The long awaited happy life had come, it had come! But Oleg somehow did not recognize it."

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This book, which is subtitled "Seven Paradoxical Tales," contains seven of Oliver Sacks' clinical stories of persons whose unusual neurological deficits teach us something about the way the brain (and, therefore, the mind) works. In "The Case of the Colorblind Painter" an artist learns to adapt to a completely black-and-white world after sustaining trauma to his occipital lobe.

"The Last Hippie" portrays a man whose ability to form new memories was destroyed by a massive midline brain tumor; he still "lives" in the 1960's. "A Surgeon's Life" depicts a Canadian surgeon with Gilles de la Tourette Syndrome, showing how he is able to live as a respected member of the community and practice surgery despite this disabling condition. "To See and Not See" tells the tale of a man in his 50's who is suddenly able to see after being blind since early childhood.

In "The Landscape of His Dreams" Sacks introduces a painter who, after a serious illness in the 1960's, apparently developed extraordinary and persistent "waking visions" of Pontito, his hometown in Italy. For many years he has obsessively painted remarkably accurate scenes of Pontito. "Prodogies" and "An Anthropologist on Mars" both deal with autism. The first tells of an autistic boy from England who has remarkable skill in visual memory and drawing; the second is about an autistic woman with a Ph.D. in animal science, who teaches at Colorado State University.

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In the winter of 1945 during the last days of the Nazi occupation of Holland, a Nazi collaborator is assassinated.

In retaliation, the Germans execute the adults in a Dutch family but eventually deliver one 12 year old son to safety. The Assault traces the lifelong repercussions of this event on Anton's life. It examines his attempts to forget and the strange periodic "episodes," little chance events, that continue to force the memory to surface long enough to become complete enough that he, as an aging adult, can finally effect closure and true "forgetting."

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