"To Throw at the Cat"

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"A medical textbook might well be like one of those omnibus volumes of 'Detection, Mystery and Horror' ... but as it is, the average textbook is about as readable as a telephone directory. Take, for instance, the biography of a red blood corpuscle, from its birth in the bone-marrow, with its capillary wanderings and its moving adventures by flood and field to its normal gradual old age and burial in the spleen or to its tragic end in a haemorrhage. It might be made a vivid odyssey, but how dull it all sounds in a textbook of physiology—as arid and sterile, as dry and dusty as the sands of the Sahara. . . . Medical writers are not only afraid of romance, they even fight shy of humor. . . . And yet it is probably true that a writer has never really mastered his material until he can jest about it; until then it has mastered him."