PHYSIC AND FICTION.
SIR SQUIRE SPRIOGE, in his new book, Physic and Fiction (Iiodder and Stoughton, 12s. 6d. net), discusses a variety of questions in which the medical profession and the laity are equally interested. He examines the proposal that persons desiring to marry should be required to furnish a clean bill of health and (ii .,misses it as an idle and useless precaution. " In real life it is not Cinderella's lungs, but her accent and her ignorance that spoil domestic life." He looks into the after-careers of medical students and finds that about two-thirds of them do well and that the successful practitioners are usually those who have shown high promise in the medical schools. Ho discusses a number of poisoning cases to show that the danger to the public is not increasing and that " secret poisoning by inoculation of specific germs is well-nigh impossible." The most interesting chapters are concerned with " Medicine in Fiction " and " The Medicine of Dickens." The author ridicules the ordinary novel- ist's ideas of heart disease, but commends Maupassant's Une Vie for the accurate description of the Baroness's cardiac symptoms. Dumas is praised for his " scientific triumph " in the description of old Noirtier's aphasia in Monte Cristo. The author thinks that Dickens showed wonderful insight in his numerous pictures of mental defectives like Squeers, Quilp, Flintwick or Smike. Yet in the only case in which Dickens tried to justify his accuracy from a medical standpoint—the death of old Krook in Bleak House from spontaneous combustion—" the pathological notes of his [Krook's] illness and death would not be accepted as sound by any medical man."
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