The Strange Case of R L Stevenson by Richard Woodhead. Luath Press, £16.99, pp 208. ISBN 0 946487 86 3. Rating: ★★★
The writer Robert Louis Stevenson was born in Edinburgh, Scotland, in 1850 and died in Upolu, Samoa, in 1894. His best known works are probably Treasure Island (1881-3), Kidnapped (1886), and The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (also 1886). Throughout his life Stevenson suffered from respiratory symptoms that were attributed to “consumption”—pulmonary tuberculosis. Richard Woodhead, a retired doctor, believes this diagnosis was wrong. He thinks Stevenson suffered from a rather less romantic malady: bronchiectasis. Acknowledging that such a posthumous diagnosis is difficult to prove, Woodhead has cast his ideas in the form of a novel—essentially a fictional pathography.
In Woodhead's book, five doctors offer their reminiscences of Stevenson. Each is based upon a factual, historical figure, but Woodhead fleshes out the details of their consultation techniques and their inner motivations with compelling style. This is a book that can be read in a day and is a real page turner.
Although the central idea is a quest for Stevenson's true diagnosis, what is most enjoyable is the varying evocation of character and place as Stevenson (often in the company of his long suffering wife) encounters a society doctor in London, a mountain resort specialist in Davos, a pleasant general practitioner in Bournemouth, a proto-scientist in the Adirondack mountains, and an avuncular German company doctor in the humid heat of Samoa. Recurring themes include the various uses of diagnostic labels (by doctor and patients alike); and the tensions arising between a general, but imperfect, understanding of the human condition and a precise specialism, which is artificially narrow (one doctor confines himself to anatomy “above the diaphragm”).
Some of the book's concerns are peculiarly contemporary; indeed, they seem rather anachronistic, which suggests that the author may be teasing some of his ex-colleagues: “The only option left to the governors at times of crisis was to close the hospital to all admissions other than accidents and emergencies, and this was a course of action that they took again and again” (p 17). This, in a fictional memoir, attributed to the late 19th century. Maybe some themes are truly perennial.