Abstract
Abstract This article analyses the short story ‘O Lapso’ (1883). It demonstrates how Machado de Assis connects social medicine and the capitalist system via a quote by the early Romantic writer Charles Lamb. Resorting to a fragmentary and ironic narrative style, the narrator recollects the story of how the Dutch doctor Jeremias Halma cures the nobleman Nicolau of a fantastic disease which prevents him from understanding why he has to pay for services. Through intricate intertextual references, Machado demonstrates how Imperial capitalism reduces social relations to an intense game of competition and self-interest, which characterises the coloniality of power in nineteenth-century Brazil.
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