Ashoke Mukhopadhyay’s A Ballad of Remittent Fever is a remarkable book that manages the difficult task of balancing engaging characters with entertaining plots and fascinating, important questions that are impossible to answer. The braided plots tell the tales of three revolutionary men, all doctors and all members of the Ghoshal family, from the late 1800s through to the 1960s. It’s a marvel how Mukhopadhyay’s book manages to contain all this in a little over 300 pages. This book is beautifully translated by Arunanva Sinha, who knows just went to leave a word or two untranslated.
Dwarikanath Ghoshal broke with his rich family to pursue a career as a doctor, primarily in Western medicine although he respects his Ayurvedic colleagues. He diligently reads British, German, and Indian medical journals, combing the articles for the latest theories and treatments for illnesses that have plagued his city (which is Kolkata, although Mukhopadhyay uses the old spellings of all place names) for centuries. Dwarikanath focuses on Vibrio cholerae after saving the woman who would become his wife after her near-fatal bout of cholera. He even goes so far as to dragoon a nearby village to run experiments on sanitation, rehydration, and vaccines.
Dwarikanath’s son, Kritindranath, has a rockier path through life. Rather than rebel against folk remedies and superstition, Kritindranath instead balks at the social order—especially after he falls in love with his first cousin and serves with the British Army in the Mesopotamian campaign of World War I. Kritindranath is a runner. Unlike his utterly reliable father, Kritindranath runs from his feelings for years. He practices as an itinerant doctor wherever he goes. In his own way, he becomes as legendary a doctor as his father.
The last Ghoshal of the trio of protagonists in this novel is Kritindranath’s grandson, Dwijottam. Dwijottam—known as Digit—is a doctor in a modern hospital of the 1960s. Medicine has come a long way from his great-grandfather’s day, when anesthesia was new, blood transfusions were a dangerous experiment, and diabetes was completely untreatable. He can do so much more than his forebearers. And yet, his Kolkata hospital still sees people sick with preventable and treatable diseases. A pair of very young patients with sexually transmitted illnesses leads Digit to his own Quixotic quest. Where his great-grandfather fought to eradicate cholera and his grandfather to buck social norms, Digit tackles the nearly impossible task of convincing the local sex workers to use condoms with their clients so that they can all give the penicillin and salversan a break.
Mukhopadhyay brings a stunning array of eras back to life, from the 1880s to the 1960s, as his doctors do their utmost to save as many lives and limbs as possible. The three Ghoshals tilt at windmills for years without giving up. It’s amazing to witness, considering how much death they see. In other books about doctors (fiction and nonfiction), there are always moments when despair becomes overwhelming. How does saving a life here and there really matter, when there is so much pain and suffering all around? The three Ghoshals certainly consider the collective misery of their world, but they never seem to let it distract from saving the patient in front of them at the moment. They’re more likely to yell at someone for not washing their hands or dumping their refuse where they shouldn’t than give into hopelessness. That said, the three Ghoshals aren’t superhuman heroes (especially Kritindranath). Mukhopadhyay gives them enough flaws to make them interesting characters.
I really enjoyed this book and all its food for though. Fans of historical fiction and those curious about the history of medicine should check this book out.