Only a very mediocre writer, said Somerset Maugham, is always at his best, and so it is hardly surprising that the quality of a collection of fifty-four short essays by a practicing doctor of literary ability and interests should vary considerably. After all, even Montaigne nodded.

I found myself alternately in strong agreement with Dr. John Launer and profoundly irritated by him. No doubt it is good that an essayist should evoke such differing reactions in a reader, for it keeps him, the reader, on his toes. There is a tendency for people (and I suspect an increasing one) to read only what they know in advance they will agree with, for then it will comfortingly confirm that they were right all along. Yet everyone will admit, in the abstract, that one ought as well to read points of view other than one’s own. It is therefore good to have two desiderata, the need for both agreement and disagreement, satisfied between the covers of a single book.

Sometimes I admired the unexpected lessons that Launer, a British general practitioner, draws from encounters in his consulting room of the kind with which all doctors are familiar. On the whole, though, I sensed a slightly sickly odor of evangelical well-meaningness running through the book, a refusal to face up to the tragic dimension of life. The writer, who spends much of his time teaching and assessing younger doctors, gives the impression that, with enough therapy and training in