Norman Bethune was a Canadian doctor who went into the Civil War to help defend the Republic. His great contribution was the blood transfusions on site, with which he saved the lives of many wounded, often risking his own. Doctor Guillermo García Medina is something like his student, he learned the technique of blood cooling and transfusion from Bethune: he is the head of the transfusion unit for the defense of Republican Madrid.
The difference between the two is that the first is a real character and the second is a fictional character created by Almudena Grandes for the novel Los pacientes del doctor García, which premiered as a series this week on La 1 and on zu see is the future on netflix The author herself warned that this was fiction interwoven with real wickerwork: reviewing the scripts was one of her last activities before her untimely passing in 2021.
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The series is part of a genre that has been so widely treated in Spanish culture that it has even been derided: the civil war and the post-war period (see the title of ¡Otra maldita novela sobre la Guerra Civil!, by Isaac Rosa), but whose frequency had decreased recently. Los pacientes…, a choral series starring Javier Rey, Verónica Echegui, Tamar Novas or Nancho Novo, deals with the Civil War and the decades that followed, but its plots are universal: there are love stories (with plenty of bed scenes) in which they delve into the Possibility of relationships between ideological rivals or entertaining espionage schemes involving CNT militiamen, communist commissars and even President Manuel Azaña (another real-life character played by Luis Bermejo).
Another storyline also revolves around a real-life character: Clara Stauffer (Eva Llorach), the deputy head of the women’s department of Pilar Primo de Rivera, a Falangist who helped numerous Nazi leaders flee to Latin America after World War II. Perhaps what is most fun about this product is Grandes’ recreation of all those little stories from time that could have been preserved for the general public down the ages. Barely accessible, the novel of almost 800 pages and more than 200 characters was adapted into a television screenplay by José Luis Martín, as he himself explained, trying to be faithful to the text “but not to the letter”.
In the historical series of RTVE (like El Ministerio del Tiempo or Isabel), the setting always seems perfectly worked out and believable, but at the same time completely fabulous, like in a straightforward Franco-Belgian comic. It’s real but fictional; believable but not quite. The same thing is happening here: Madrid besieged by Franco’s troops and the fascist Nazi powers is carefully recreated, the horror of war is pronounced, there is blood, explosions, fears and intrigue … but you can’t breathe this despair.
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