This is the third of a biographical trilogy of Reginald Grove who, within weeks of becoming qualified at Guys Hospital, London, as a doctor was catapulted into running his father’s medical practice in 1894 in the market town of St Ives, Huntingdonshire.

His career spanned a period of immense change in medical practice ranging from house calls on horseback to carrying out surgical operations on the kitchen tables of his patients.

But it is also a love story between Reginald and Hilda described in over 500 letters that they wrote to each other during their courtship and marriage.

All the world’s a stage - and across Reginald’s stage flitted a cavalcade of colourful characters. Fraudsters like ‘’Sequah’, a Yorkshireman, who posed as Native American, to sell bottles of the elixir of life with his Wild West entertainment show. Tyndale-Biscoe, a young curate, attacked by a mob in London’s East End which thought he was ‘Jack the Ripper’. Rob Tattersall, a musical hall ventriloquist, who used life sized dolls for his end of the pier performances. Gustave Kunne who murdered his lover and then committed suicide as she lay beside him. And Major Herbert Armstrong, the only solicitor in England ever to be hanged for murder. These, and many others, form the backdrop of Reginald’s life in the Victorian and Edwardian periods.

He made a distinctive mark on the life of his community and was remembered at his death by his patients with great affection and respect as a reassuring family doctor who knew each of them personally.

The author, Peter Flower, is an historian with an interest in Victorian and Edwardian England.