Books: Doctor’s Denunciation

THE CITADEL—A. J. Cronin—Little, Brown ($2.50).

Amid the squalor and duress of Britain’s most “depressed area” (the South Wales mining district) a brilliant young physician, Andrew Manson, took his first medi-cal appointment. He scorned the mumbo-jumbo of outworn textbooks, went to the unprofessional lengths of helping dynamite a sewer at dead of night because he knew it responsible for a typhoid epidemic. Again & again in his crusading zeal “never to take anything for granted” in Medicine he was thwarted by the indifference of senile or mediocre colleagues. An original thesis on the causes of lung infection in miners won him a government appointment. He was again disillusioned. Instead of finding himself with opportunities to pursue his research, he was given six months in which to decide whether a two-and-a-half inch bandage is better than a three-inch. With his last £600 he bought a down-&-out practice in London, found after months of struggle that he had a charming bedside manner, settled down to make a fat living in the swank West End by flattery, worthless capsules, clothes made in Conduit Street.

Aimed at the whole precept-and-practice of the British medical profession, The, Citadel is a brilliantly bitter attack by a man in dead earnest. Says Author Cronin: The small-town English G. P. (general practitioner) who does everything from confinements to corn-cutting has no time, soon no desire, to keep up-to-date. The medical bigwigs are smothered in red tape. Worst of all, perhaps, are the specialists— typified by the word “Harley Street”— who exploit the rich, scratch one another’s backs to their mutual profit, in some cases make fortunes on the side by performing hush-hush abortions for careless socialites.

The Author cannot be dismissed as an intemperate tyro. A doctor himself, his writing, until July 1930, was confined to medical subjects (Dust-Inhalation by Haematite Miners, First Aid in Coal Mines); he has practiced in South Wales, has been down more than 500 coal mines. His first novel (Hatter’s Castle; TIME, July 20. 1931), a gloomy lengthy melodrama, was a surprise best seller. In neither of his professions has Dr. Cronin paid much attention to the rules. To the lay reader the “cut-shop” (medical jargon ) in The Citadel may seem tedious and overdone: but to many The Citadel will appeal as a spunky onslaught on an unco-sacrosanct stronghold. For “the bogus orf Harley-street” Dr. Cronin reserves his heaviest guns. Writing in London’s Daily Express after the book’s publication in Britain, he thundered: “I say to you, in all seriousness, that if half of this famous thoroughfare were bombed out of existence tomorrow, medicine, indeed all of us . . would be better off.”