The Elixir, and Other Stories

A physician in an old German town has a remedy that may or may not be what he claims, and a household stakes everything on it. Ebers found the medical papyrus that bears his name — one of the oldest medical texts in existence — and dug in Egypt for years; the interest here is that a man who had read the world's first prescriptions was writing about faith in medicine. Fifty-four plates, from Lucas Cranach to Edvard Munch, trace the Northern European town and its uneasy interiors across five centuries, matching the story's old streets and private reckonings.