Facts and fancies of medical life. This collection includes two fantasy tales, "Lot No. 249," featuring a reanimated mummy, and "The Los Amigos Fiasco," in which an attempt to electrocute a criminal creates a superhuman prisoner who cannot be killed.
This collection began as a series of eight stories commissioned by Jerome K. Jerome for his Idler magazine, but, of the eight, only three appeared there, the other five having been rejected for being too "realistic". In his preface, Doyle notes that a red lamp "is the usual sign of a general practitioner in England." This volume includes 15 medical stories. Several of the short stories appear in this volume for the first time because "when they were written, they proved to be too strong for the public taste." Doyle defends the emphasis in these stories on "the graver side of life," and compares their action on the reader to a tonic, "bitter to the taste but bracing in the result." [Note: Doyle wrote 18 short stories that Rodin and Key defined as "medical fiction."]