Preface

ROUND THE RED LAMP

BEING FACTS AND FANCIES OF MEDICAL LIFE

By SIR ARTHUR CONAN DOYLE

THE PREFACE.

[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.