To the Editor: I offer the following additions to the growing list of favourite books with a medical flavour.1,2

The house of God, by pseudo-intern Samuel Shem, is an irreverent, bawdy, cult classic ("Catch-22 with stethoscopes"). I was particularly intrigued by the "laws of the house of God", including "placement comes first" and "if you don't take a temperature, you can't find a fever."

The woman who walked into doors, by Dubliner Roddy Doyle, is a heartrending narrative of emotional and physical abuse of a woman by her partner, and of neglect by her health professionals. "A nurse . . . She'd seen me before . . . I waited to be asked. Ask me. Ask me. Ask me. I'd tell them everything. Look at the burn. Ask me about it. Ask. No. . . Her boyfriend was waiting." "The doctor never looked at me. He studied part of me but he never saw all of me."

Another is The plague, by French novelist Albert Camus and translated by Stuart Gilbert.

" 'Please, doctor, what is it?'

'It might be — almost anything. There's nothing definite as yet.' . . .

On returning to his flat [Dr Bernard] Rieux rang his colleague Richard, one of the leading practitioners in the town. "'No,' Richard said, 'I can't say I've noticed anything exceptional.'

'No cases of fever with local inflammation?'

'Wait a bit! I have two cases with inflamed glands.'

'Abnormally so?'

'Well,' Richard said, 'that depends on what you mean by "normal".' "