The Preface, v-vi
[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, self-sacrifice and love; 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 its 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 will see that nearly half of the contents have not appeared
before.'
