I quite recognise the force of your objection that an invalid or a woman in weak health would get no good from stories which attempt to treat some features of medical life with a certain amount of realism. If you deal with this life at all, however, and if you are anxious to make your doctors something more than marionettes, it is quite essential that you should paint the darker side, since it is that which is principally presented to the surgeon or physician.
[Being an extract from a long and animated correspondence with a friend in America.]
I quite recognise the force of your objection that an invalid or a woman in weak health would get no good from stories which attempt to treat some features of medical life with a certain amount of realism. If you deal with this life at all, however, and if you are anxious to make your doctors something more than marionettes, it is quite essential that you should paint the darker side, since it is that which is principally presented to the surgeon or physician. He sees many beautiful things, it is true, fortitude and heroism, love and self-sacrifice; but they are all called forth (as our nobler qualities are always called forth) by bitter sorrow and trial. One cannot write of medical life and be merry over it.
Then why write of it, you may ask? If a subject is painful why treat it at all? I answer that it is the province of fiction to treat painful things as well as cheerful ones. The story which wiles away a weary hour fulfils an obviously good purpose, but not more so, I hold, than that which helps to emphasise the graver side of life. A tale which may startle the reader out of his usual grooves of thought, and shocks him into seriousness, plays the part of the alterative and tonic in medicine, bitter to the taste but bracing in the result. There are a few stories in this little collection which might have such an effect, and I have so far shared in your feeling that I have reserved them from serial publication. In book-form the reader can see that they are medical stories, and can, if he or she be so minded, avoid them.
Yours very truly,
A. CONAN DOYLE.
P.S.-You ask about the Red Lamp. It is the usual sign of the general practitioner in England.
The Preface
17/11/2017
Behind the Times
17/11/2017
His First Operation
17/11/2017
A Straggler of '15
17/11/2017
The Third Generation
17/11/2017
A False Start
17/11/2017
The Curse of Eve
17/11/2017
Sweethearts
17/11/2017
A Physiologist's Wife
17/11/2017
The Case of Lady Sannox
17/11/2017
A Question of Diplomacy
17/11/2017
A Medical Document
17/11/2017
Lot No. 249
17/11/2017
The Los Amigos Fiasco
17/11/2017
The Doctors of Hoyland
17/11/2017
The Surgeon Talks
17/11/2017
Other books by Conan Doyle
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