In mid-nineteenth century society, how did health practitioners deal with the psyche? Were there healers who intuitively did the work of today’s psychologists? The male protagonist in this novel, young Dr. Lacey, echoes the view of Florence Nightingale—that sometimes what the nurse gave the patient was more important than what the doctor had to give. He eventually teams up with a Nightingale nurse to create a charity hospital for children living in the poorest neighbourhood in the London of the period. He saves her from utter economic destitution, but she saves him from the effects of a debilitating sense of guilt and malaise. She becomes his emotional and psychological healer using her compassion, concern, and deep understanding. Their small Whitechapel hospital alas never existed, but the ideas, social and medical, they discuss were definitely in the air. And at the end of the book, it is the male doctors who suggest that a women’s college of physicians should be established because women who wished to study to become doctors would be ridiculed and humiliated by the male students in a traditional university setting. This is the year 1860 and the London School of Medicine for Women was founded in 1874. The main characters in this novel are a little ahead of their time, but Florence Nightingale, through her writings and work certainly set the stage for all that occurs within this story. Joyce Myerson taught for many years in Italian Studies at McGill University in Montreal and is now a professional translator from Italian of articles and academic books (medieval history, psychoanalysis, and art history). She has also translated a book of medieval Tuscan poetry (2013). Her translation of the novel, The Caravaggio Syndrome, by Alessandro Giardino was published in March 2024 by Rutgers University. Her short stories have appeared in various literary journals in the U.S. and Canada.