4 ideas
Emilia Sauri, daughter of a liberal pharmacist in Puebla, loves Daniel Cuenca, a childhood sweetheart who keeps leaving to fight in the Mexican Revolution, and Antonio Zavalza, a physician who stays and teaches her medicine. Daniel keeps disappearing into the war and coming back, while Emilia trains as a healer beside Antonio and treats the wounded of the conflict. The novel ends with her still bound to both men rather than cleanly choosing one.
The novel argues that loving two people at once can be the honest result of having more than one need, not a moral failure or a sign of confusion. Daniel embodies passion, absence and shared history, while Antonio embodies presence, work and daily partnership. Forcing a single choice would require amputating a real part of the self, so the heroine keeps both loves instead of resolving them.
The book narrates the Mexican Revolution through households, pharmacies and field hospitals rather than through battles and generals. Seen this way, a war becomes a sequence of wounds to treat, absences to endure and conversations at the kitchen table. The women who stay behind and repair the damage become the main witnesses of the history.
The title's 'mal de amores' treats love as a real illness running parallel to the bodily diseases Emilia learns to cure. Her training gives her remedies for fevers and wounds, but the ache of a divided heart has no remedy. It can only be lived with, which marks the limit of what healing knowledge can do.