The Winter Soldier

Little did he know, but it would be nearly six months before he reached the front.

But to the victor go the spoils, right?”

But of all the cases he studied, it was the neurological ones that fascinated him the most. How extraordinary was the mind! To sense a limb years after amputation! To see ghosts at one’s bedside! To create all the symptoms of pregnancy (swollen abdomen, amenorrhea) by wish alone! The thrill he felt when he solved the most difficult cases was almost sexual. There was a beautiful clarity in the patterns, the possibility of locating a tumor simply by whether it destroyed language or vision, the opportunity to reduce the complexity of other people to the architecture of their cells.

Once, and only once, he was left alone with a patient, a wispy-haired Dalmatian from whose ear canals he extracted enough wax to make a small but working votive candle.

If a patient was brought before them—and even this was rare in the introductory classes—Lucius could scarcely see them, let alone learn how to percuss the liver or palpate swollen nodes.
Sometimes

It was in a state of general terror that the students attended his classes, for each week Grieperkandl would call a Praktikant before him, take down his name in a little notebook (always a his; there were but seven women in the class, and Grieperkandl treated them all as nurses), and proceed to submit him to an inquisition of such clinically irreverent arcana that most of their professors would have failed.

If he loved Medicine—yes, this was the word, this giddiness, this jealous guarding against fellow suitors, this pursuit of increasingly delicate secrets to be indulged—if he loved Medicine, what he had not expected was for Her to return his affections.

But he didn’t mind the remedial courses; there was magic in the choral recitations of Linnaean classification, in the luminous Crookes tubes brought out for physics demonstrations, the lesser alchemy that bubbled in the lines of Erlenmeyer flasks.

This whole gravity business is quite a craze.”

She had Klimt paint her portrait, first with Lucius at her side, and then, because she was enthralled by the patterns of gold on the portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer, she had Lucius painted over.