Spare Hours

Essays and recollections by an Edinburgh doctor: the dog Rab and his master, a case of typhus, Thackeray remembered, notes on Scottish preaching and on the education of a physician. John Brown wrote little and was loved for it; "Rab and His Friends" was known by heart in a hundred thousand households. The medical pieces are as unsentimental as the dog story is not. Fifty-nine plates after Raeburn and Landseer carry the same Edinburgh and Lowland Scotland that shaped Brown's medicine and his dog.