![]() The doubleness of the epigraphs, and the contrast between them – indeed the contrast which Ivy McKenzie draws between the physician and the naturalist – corresponds to a certain doubleness in me: that I feel myself a naturalist and a physician both and that I am equally interested in diseases and people perhaps, too, that I am equally, if inadequately, a theorist and dramatist, am equally drawn to the scientific and the romantic, and continually see both in the human condition, not least in that quintessential human condition of sickness – animals get diseases, but only man falls radically into sickness. ‘The last thing one settles in writing a book,’ Pascal observes, ‘is what one should put in first.’ So, having written, collected and arranged these strange tales, having selected a title and two epigraphs, I must now examine what I have done – and why. ![]()
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