Outlander Book Club: A Breath of Snow and Ashes Chapter 61 breakdown

Just the Outlander chapter

We start the chapter finding out that Claire is looking at stool samples under her microscope. She wants to find out what the illness is. Sure, she won’t be able to tell exactly what it is, but she’s hoping that she recognizes something.

One thing she does know is that it’s something she’s likely not vaccinated against. This makes things dangerous for her, Bree, and Roger.

The conversation moves on to something Brianna did earlier. Jamie notes that she poured boiling water on her arms. He even saw the blisters, but she didn’t seem to notice them or care. And she scrubbed her arms hard. This was after she came back from the MacNeills’ cabin.

Claire notes that Bree was doing what she could to keep Jemmy safe. This would have also been one of the first times she would have seen a death like this. Claire was used to it with the Spanish influenza and then the Second World War. Jamie also knows death from his time on the battlefields and even just growing up in the 18th century.

Claire realizes that the first death Bree would have witnessed would have been Frank’s. That was when she was a teenager. The medicine of the modern world has helped to reduce death. There have also been fewer wars, although we know Bree would have some memories of what happened in Vietnam on the TV—it was on the TV, though. Everything Bree had experienced was in a fictionalized or televised form.

Now she’s seeing it first-hand, and this is something she’s not vaccinated against. There’s a fear of the unknown. We can look at how people reacted when COVID first came out with sanitizing everything, including their groceries they brought into the house. Fear is real, and it can lead to us doing some crazy things.