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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 12 March 2025
These stories have all some bearing, more or less direct, upon medical men and medical subjects. In looking them over I am struck by the fact that within the covers of one book I have used two entirely different methods of literary treatment. Five of the stories, ‘His First Operation,’ ‘The Third Generation,’ ‘The Curse of Eve,’ ‘A Medical Document,’ and ‘The Surgeon Talks,’ are strictly – some would say too strictly – realistic. The others are all tinged with romance. Holding, as I do, that the ultimate object of all fiction is interest, and that it is immaterial by what method or device you gain your end, so long as you do gain it, I have not concerned myself about this variety of treatment, and I have hoped that it might even have a good effect, since the lighter papers may relieve the intolerable grimness of medical truth.
One of the short sketches, ‘A Straggler of ‘15,’ has had the good fortune to furnish Sir Henry Irving with the materials for his ‘Story of Waterloo,’ in which a great artist has shown how much may be made of the slightest studies.
A. Conan Doyle
Undershaw, Hindhead, 1901.
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