246 journalist Calvo Asensio (Centeno 241-2). It was not uncommon practice in the Realist novel to use events set in the past to make comments about the present. Another example is the satirical letter sent to Jesús Delgado in 1863 by the young students and dated as if from 1883, the future date of composition of the novel, confirming that all the overdue educational reforms that he recommended had at last been implemented (Centeno 349-50) (when in fact none had been) thus satirically underlining the complete absence of any progress in educational reform in the intervening twenty years.
Another plane of degenerationist thinking lies in the, ―interés casi clìnico‖ with which Galdós describes Alejandro‘s wasting away from rapidly progressive pulmonary tuberculosis. Galdós had a particular interest in describing the process of dying in his novels 383 and did so with clinical accuracy. In no other of the four novels of this study, however, did Galdós devote so much of a whole book to a character‘s physical and mental dissolution. The fearfully widespread disease of pulmonary tuberculosis is described by Hauser as, ―la más terrible de todas aquellas à que está sujeta la raza humana‖ calling it a plaga social that was so common that it exercised a eugenic effect, ―un mal inherente á la organización viciosa de nuestra sociedad, sirviendo de medio de eliminación de los individuos degenerados‖ (Hauser, siglo 218). Continuing
process of dying: In the other three novels of this study the deaths of Tomás Rufete and José Relimpio are described in detail in La desheredada, as are those of Pepe Carrillo and José María Bueno de Guzman in Lo prohibido, and Mauricia la Dura and Fortunata in Fortunata y Jacinta. Galdós‘s description of severe, exsanguinating hemorrhage by mouth in Pepe Carrillo resembles Alejandro‘s hemptyses closely and may indicate a similar underlying cause. As quoted earlier, this propensity for detailing the process of death has been commented on, ―Galdós [...] no deja ya morir a nadie sin auscularlo y tomarle el pulso, ni deja de puntualizar los síntomas sin ahorrar tecnicismos.‖ (Montesinos, Galdós II 88) 383