Night and Dawn - RTP Books 18

"The doctor, who held them in disgusted contempt, often saved them from death, as he did Joana and her lazy womb, whose putrefied and black fetus had to be pulled out with forceps.
Dr. Providencia believed he could control the wretched through terror, and the terrifying clinical cases he attended were nothing more than blessings from Heaven: "hunger and illness made the peasants more docile". And thus, submissive and domesticated, he offered them to the feudal lords of the land, before their abundant tables."