Dedication

Some remedies arrive at three in the morning — from a patient who cannot sleep, and a book that will not close.

This one began there. Not in a lecture hall, but at the bedside, in the long pause after a question; in the moment when a face, a voice, the way someone sits down, finally says what no list of symptoms ever could.

So it belongs to the people who taught it to me.

To my patients — who let me see them at their most tired and their most honest, and who never once asked me to be certain when I was not.

To my teachers — who put the old books in my hands, and then, more bravely, taught me to argue with them.

To my family — who learned the sound of my chair at the desk late at night, and who gave me those hours anyway.

And to the old writers — Boericke, Clarke, Kent, Allen, Nash, Farrington — dead a century and more, and still, on a difficult night, the best company a physician can keep.

If you have opened this with someone's case in front of you, then it has arrived exactly where it was meant to go.

— S. M.