All of these pieces, with one exception, were first published in journals and periodicals, some as commissioned reviews, others as commentary pieces that I cajoled the editors into publishing. Some of them still bear the cauls of their first emergence, but generally I’ve attempted to coat and shoe them as literary essays, able to stand on their own while taking their place in this book’s A–Z schema of things. Some first saw light as occasional pieces in the British Journal of General Practice, and I acknowledge a debt of gratitude to Alec Logan, its deputy editor, who for many years kept asking me to provide a feature on medicine and writing for the Christmas edition of the journal. I am also grateful to the editors of Times Literary Supplement, London Review of Books, Medical Humanities, PN Review, Parnassus, Quadrant, The Linguist, Lapham’s Quarterly, British Medical Journal, The Lancet and the Bulletin of the World Health Organization for allowing me to develop and republish articles from their pages. ‘Crise de Foie’ first appeared in German translation in the weekend feuilleton of the Süddeutsche Zeitung thanks to the efforts of my father-in-law, Christian Schütze, who also translated it.
A number of the essays in this book constituted a good part of the manuscript Medicine and the Imagination submitted to the University of Glasgow in 2009 for the degree of Doctor of Letters by publication. I would like to thank Michael Schmidt and John Coyle for alerting me to the existence of a Scottish Universities by-law the terms of which were previously unknown to me, and for their encouragement, and not least that too of my external referees Kenneth Boyd and Peter Davidson, whose appraisals reassured me that I wasn’t entirely on a hiding to nothing.
Thanks are also due to my helpful friend Richard Price at the British Library, and to staff at my local institute, Strasbourg’s newly refurbished National and University Library (BNUS)—a magnificent Italianate edifice built in the Wilhelmine period when Strasbourg was Strassburg and second now in France in terms of its collections only to the National Library in Paris—is a precious resource for me as an expatriate writer. Further thanks are also due to colleagues and friends in medicine and the wider world, with whom I have discussed some of the issues raised in this collection at various times: Olivier Wong, Frank Slattery, Douglas Shenson, Carl Elliott, Bruce Charlton, John and Mary Gillies, Jeremy Garwood, Christopher Harvie, Christine and Richard Thayer, David Bellos, Jim Campbell, Gerald Mangan, Les Murray, Alberto Manguel, Frederic Raphael, Marjorie Farquharson, Desmond Avery, Brian Hurwitz, William Ian (Bill) Miller, Peter and Maria McCarey, as well as to my editors at Carcanet Helen Tookey and Luke Allan. I would like to thank Lewis Lapham for commissioning me to write a ‘reappraisal’ of The Magic Mountain, one of the key novels of the twentieth-century, and for Alastair Campbell and the medical ethics staff at the National University of Singapore, who allowed me to expand some of my thoughts about Hans Castorp at a meeting of their journal club. Living in Strasbourg—or ‘Strasburg’ as Laurence Sterne spells it in Tristram Shandy, where it gets a whole chapter to itself—has been to be aware of living (for twenty years now) ‘far out in the centre’, to purloin the title of a book by Dannie Abse: in the heart of a Europe that has no body politic. That unreality notwithstanding, my wife Cornelia was a constant presence in good and bad times, and I feel fortunate to have enjoyed the companionship of my family throughout the years covered by this book, during which my two children Felix and Claire have grown up. ‘Sooner or later,’ as Germain Muller, founder of the local dialect theatre De Barabli, noted, ‘all Strasburgers end up loving Strasbourg.’
Needless to say (although it must be said), the opinions expressed in the essays engage my responsibility only.