Outlander Book Club: The Fiery Cross Chapter 106 breakdown

Foreshadowing in the Outlander chapter

I think there is a bit of foreshadowing within this chapter when it comes to the upcoming Christie storyline. Claire is concerned that she’s going to be arrested if her notes fall into the wrong hands.

Claire knows that her medicine isn’t understood by the people of the time. What she does can look like she’s doing harm, and sometimes it looks like witchcraft. When Malva’s body is found and Claire has tried to save Malva’s unborn baby in A Breath of Snow and Ashes, it’s not surprising that she ends up being arrested for that. People believe she killed Malva.

This whole second foreshadows Claire’s fear. It’s just not in the surgeon’s notes that it all comes up, but just in Claire’s actions.

Adapting The Fiery Cross chapter

The chapter was partly used for the series but not in the way you’d think. We’ll start with the penicillin reaction. Claire is sure that Rosamund died of an allergic reaction, and we know that there are people allergic to penicillin. This was used in Outlander Season 5 when it came to the Beardsley twins having their tonsils removed.

Claire wanted to make sure the twins weren’t allergic first. She notes that a patient did die of an allergic reaction to penicillin in her own time. It was her fault and she was going to be investigated. That’s when she opted to take Bree to England and then Scotland, and when she found out Jamie was still alive.

I liked the way the storyline was used in the series. We got this patient who had been mentioned in Outlander Book 3 brought into the story finally, and it made sense to talk about potential allergic reactions with the Beardsley twins. We didn’t need another patient to have a problem.

Claire does struggle with the loss of a patient, though. It’s a man who had appendicitis and his wife gave him mercury. We get to see the medicine of the time, and Claire knows that she could have saved him if given the chance sooner. She wants to make sure nobody else at the Ridge dies unnecessarily, and it pushes her to bring Marsali in as her apprentice.

Again, I adored the way the show handled this. I love that Marsali got a bigger role and we got to see that bond form with Claire. I also love that we saw Claire want to do good for the people at the Ridge.

I do keep the books and the show separate. There are a lot of constraints in the world of TV that books don’t have, so I look at how a storyline had to work for those constraints. In this case, everything worked perfectly well for me.

What did you spot while reading The Fiery Cross Chapter 106? Let us know in the comments below.

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