'David Illingworth belongs to a generation of doctors brought up in the finest traditions of Scottish medicine. In his professional career, in which he looked after the most humble of patients and the very grandest, he has always been guided by that particularly rigorous sense of duty and vocation which Scottish medical training has sought to inculcate. But at the same time, he has been able to appreciate the humorous possibilities which the practice of medicine inevitably presents, and many of these richly comic situations are presented in these memoirs. ... ' Alexander McCall Smith