Dom Casmurro 29.37 · 29.37

With 'a medicina é uma grande sciencia' the Emperor states the daydream's real creed. Against the seminary — the study of the soul, of the hidden and the divine — Bentinho sets a science of the visible body, something you can learn, test, and master. The whole fantasy leans toward that clean, provable world.

Machado, who elsewhere in his fiction treats doctors and their certainties with a wary smile, lets the claim stand plainly here because it is the boy's, not his own. A grown reader hears the innocence in it: the belief that a 'great science' could set life in order, banish the doubts a priest would have to sit with. The tragedy of the later chapters is that Bentinho ends up needing exactly the science the seminary might have taught him — how to live with what cannot be proven — and never learns it.

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