THE PREFACE.
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.