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The Surgeons' Tale

by John Woodyard

290 pages; quality trade paperback (softcover); catalogue #06-1728; ISBN 1-4120-9971-4; US$25.13, C$28.90, EUR19.60, £12.99

Older male surgeon and younger female have a relationship - elsewhere an operation goes badly wrong. Two common tales that coincide but with a happy ending.

About the Book

In the mid-seventies in a West Country hospital Ronald Datchett, the powerful (and married) senior surgeon, gradually seduces Valerie, his younger and single colleague. Having had a loveless relationship with her church Minister father, perhaps she feels Ronnie is the father figure she never really had - he is charming, generous and successful in everything he takes on. But when she becomes pregnant the course of what she feels is true love runs anything but smoothly. Nor does an operation on a child's leg as Duncan, a promising young surgeon, is drawn into a legal nightmare. When the experienced senior he is assisting gets things badly wrong it looks like the end of his promising career.

These two scenarios eventually coincide when the child*s care is handed over to Valerie. Despite her personal problems she rescues Perry, and eventually finds elsewhere the substitute father figure she has been looking for.

As the story unfolds, the lives of other members of staff, their colleagues, patients and friends intertwine with those of the main characters to reveal an intriguing and fascinating insight into life as it used to be in a busy West Country hospital in a bygone age.

About the Author

John Woodyard was born in 1931. After qualifying as a doctor he did National Service and then commenced his training as a surgeon, most of it in the South West of England. He later moved as an orthopaedic surgeon to Stafford where he stayed for 21 years.

He is happily married with 2 grown up children.

His interests are reading, golf, gardening and moderately long walks.

He had always felt there was a novel to be written from a different standpoint to so many of the usual doctor/nurses/hospital stuff. The medical case in this book was suggested by experience but he has no knowledge of romances between young women doctors and older married ones, though he suspects they exist.

Excerpts