Every revolution needs a novel. The Citadel’s protagonist, Dr. Andrew Manson, journeys from underdog trainee to posh practitioner before returning to an idealistic practice grounded in science. A funny thing happens on the way to the revolution: the book’s hope is small group practices “between state medicine and isolated, individual effort,” but this 1938 novel helped birth the bureaucratic National Health Service. Today the novel’s revolutionary cry sounds half MAHA–“If only she would walk out of his room and do something real; stop all the little pills and sedatives and hypnotics and cholagogues and every other kind of rubbish;”–and half the book of Acts–“give some of her money to the poor; help other people and stop thinking about herself! But she would never, never do that, it was useless even to demand it of her. She was spiritually dead, and God help him, so was he!” The confusion is, perhaps, implied by the two snakes on the cover of this edition. Cronin was the Abraham Verghese of his era….