Physicians' Fare

An essayistic volume of clinical observation in the early-twentieth-century British tradition — less a textbook than a series of reflective pieces on the physician's working life and the cases that shape it.

C. G. Learoyd's Physicians' Fare collected twenty-one short pieces of medically themed fiction, by turns humorous, macabre and sentimental, drawn from the consulting room and the home visit. Trade dealers still catalogue the volume as a high point of inter-war British 'doctor fiction', and contemporary wrappers pitched it as 'slices of life' rather than a textbook.

Its presence on the Edward Arnold medical list reflects an editorial habit of the period: between the wars Arnold occasionally crossed from textbook publishing into belles-lettres written by practising clinicians, and the firm gave shelf space to first-person clinical observation alongside the working manuals. Of interest now mainly to medical-humanities readers and to historians of the inter-war British medical profession.