VACATION STORIES

Newly translated by Laura Otis, these five wordy, didactic stories, first published in 1905 under the pseudonym "Dr. Bacteria" by Spanish neurobiologist Cajal (who would later win a Nobel Prize for medicine), are both intensely philosophical and heavy-handedly satiric. They feature a series of brilliant and often unlikable scientist protagonists. In "For a Secret Offense, Secret Revenge," a bacteriologist named Dr. Forschung (whose name translates as "research") becomes enraged when his beautiful and much younger wife begins a flirtation with his lab assistant and arranges to have them both secretly infected with tuberculosis. In "The Fabricator of Honor," another scientist, Dr. Alejandro Mirahonda, convinces the population of an entire city that he has an antitoxin that "has the singular property of tempering the activity of nervous centers where the antisocial passions reside." Inoculation, he claims, will make it impossible for anyone to act in an immoral fashion. Cajal uses his stories to play with a variety of what were at the time cutting-edge scientific theories and to push a variety of philosophical and political ideas. A liberal by the standards of his day, he was nonetheless both a decided misogynist and an anti-Semite. At times rather unpleasant, these stories are of some historical importance, but are unlikely to be of interest to anyone but academics. (June)