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, 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.
