Medicine has always carried a latent science-fiction premise.

Primarily, that one body is granted authority to enter, alter or rescue another, using knowledge the patient cannot fully inspect. This 1963 anthology gathers eighteen stories that push that premise toward experiment, satire, horror and speculation. Its doctors encounter artificial nurses, mysterious epidemics, radical procedures, poisoned bodies, alien ecologies and technologies whose therapeutic promise is inseparable from their capacity for control. 

The selection reaches well beyond mid-century magazine science fiction. Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “Rappaccini’s Daughter,” Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar” and Arthur Conan Doyle’s “The Great Keinplatz Experiment” place modern medicine beside its Gothic ancestors: mesmerism, poisoned gardens, suspended death and the scientist whose curiosity exceeds his ethics. They sit alongside Arthur C. Clarke, C. M. Kornbluth, Murray Leinster and several physician-writers, giving the collection the peculiar atmosphere of a medical cabinet assembled by people who know precisely where professional confidence becomes professional madness.

A handsome vintage anthology for readers of medical humanities, speculative fiction and old paperbacks with covers that look faintly hazardous to touch.

Scarce copy from Collier Books, 1963. Paperback original. General cover rubbing, creasing and edge wear; small surface marks; binding intact and internally clean.