Medical professionals occur often in Adams's stories. Clyde Drake, the incompetent psychiatrist whose botched shock treatments kill Sally Jane in A Southern Exposure (1995), is the epitome of Adams's questionable doctors, along with the idea of the doctor as an authority figure. The California setting and the focus on friendship are frequent Adams motifs. Women's friendship has been a staple since her earliest novels, and the concerns presented in Superior Women (1984; see separate entry), extending from the 1940s until the 1980s, continuing the tradition of friendship and pleasure as women on the margins of a male-dominated, life-threatening larger society, are still present, although transformed by the apocalyptic themes of terminal illness and mechanical medicine in Medicine Men. A character in Second Chances (1988) dies from a brain tumor similar to Molly's own (and similar, too, some sources say, to Adams's own experience), while disease and death, as well...