The story of the doctor who fell in love with the paradisiacal island of Capri

Anyone who reads this book will have a great time! If the author didn't confess in the subtitle that it's an autobiography, we would read it as if it were a novel, so fabulous and even unbelievable some of the events he recreates seem to us. Axel Munthe –a Swede who lived between 1857 and 1949– worked for many years as a "fashionable doctor" in Paris and Rome. He treated countless women –especially women, and of high standing– who were hysterical –mainly hysterical–. In his therapeutic practice, he resorted to medical (or pseudo-medical) uses that were beginning to become popular at that time, such as hypnosis. "There is no medicine more potent than hope," he writes in one of the central chapters, and indeed he put it into fruitful practice.

But, above all, Munthe was a vocational psychologist: with a quick glance he could size up his patients, and immediately determine their ailment. He was a lover of animals, who recognized him as one of their own. Some of the most amusing pages of this work are precisely those dedicated to these companions of his life. Let the reader not look for a masterpiece here: The Story of San Michele is a lived novel, enjoyable from the first page to the last, with an allegorical (also very amusing) ending in which the writer, already dead, arrives in heaven, and before Saint Peter and the court of angels, faces a kind of summary judgment. Before, however, here on earth, he emerged unscathed from a terrible cholera epidemic in Naples, where he helped to save many lives, from a pistol duel with an insufferable boaster, and from a dire ascent of Mont Blanc where he narrowly escaped dying from freezing.

The author occasionally met Henry James (in fact, the New York writer was the one who recommended he write these pages) and, as a doctor, he treated Guy de Maupassant, a kind of very annoying patient. But the aura of celebrities did not blind him, quite the contrary. He preferred simple people and, as I have written here before, even more so animals. He found his particular paradise on earth on the island of Capri, where he built a house with the help of his neighbors. In the years he was building it, the villagers still unearthed precious treasures from Roman times, but no one paid much attention to them. What's more: anything that, according to the locals, came from the years of Emperor Tiberius and his reign, was systematically rejected (Tiberius was blamed, quite unfairly, for all the evils and abjections in the world).

Doctors and piety

The book, uneven, is full of splendid moments: “Wasn’t my mission to help those I couldn’t help live to die?” There is a personal philosophy behind this work: that of an unredeemed vitalist, who has learned to endure the blows of fortune with stoicism. “One cannot be a good doctor if one does not have pity,” he writes. Advanced ideas coexist with others that, today, are obsolete and even perverse. Among the former, he proposes that those condemned to life imprisonment or death participate in daring medical experiments; as for the latter, the fact of considering homosexuals sick (of sexualinversion...).

The doctor Munthe never loses sight of death, as a medical professional that he is, but also as a philosophical writer: “I haven’t spent so many years observing the battle between life and death without getting to know the two combatants a little better.” Of course, he knows very well who always ends up taking the prize. Faced with bodies embracing each other in love, “blinded by lust,” he points out that it is “death who presides over their union, with an aphrodisiac in one hand and a narcotic in the other.” Later, referring to the diverse vanity of the world (possessions, pursuit of power), he points out: “What is the use of accumulating money if they will soon take it away from you anyway? Death has a copy of the key to your safe.”