The doctor who wrote this account of his early experiences died in 1911, and readers who know nothing about the daringly experimental history of Scottish medicine will perhaps mistake it for a grotesque fiction. Those who examine the proofs given at the end of this introduction will not doubt that in the final week of February 1881, at 18 Park Circus, Glasgow, a surgical genius used human remains to create a twenty-five-year-old woman. The local historian Michael Donnelly disagrees with me. It was he who salvaged the text which is the biggest part of the book, so I must say how he found it.

Life in Glasgow was very exciting during the nineteen seventies. The old industries which had made the place were being closed and moved south, while the elected governors (for reasons any political economist can explain) were buying multistorey housing blocks and a continually expanding motorway system. In the local history museum on Glasgow Green the curator Elspeth King, her helper Michael Donnelly, worked overtime to acquire and preserve evidence of local culture that was being hustled into the past. Since the First World War the City Council had given the local history museum (called the People’s Palace) no funds to buy anything new, so Elspeth and Michael’s acquisitions were almost all salvaged from buildings scheduled for demolition. A store was rented in Templeton’s carpet factory (which was soon closing down) and to this place Michael Donnelly brought troves of stained-glass windows, ceramic tiles, theatre posters, banners of disbanded trade unions and all sorts of historical documents. Elspeth King sometimes gave Michael manual help with this work, as the rest of her staff were attendants sent by the head of the city art gallery in Kelvingrove and not paid to retrieve objects from dirty, unsafe buildings. Neither, of course, were Elspeth and Michael, so the new and very successful exhibitions they put on cost the City Council little or nothing.

While passing through the city centre one morning Michael Donnelly saw a heap of old-fashioned box files on the edge of a pavement, obviously placed there for the Cleansing Department to collect and destroy. Looking into them he found letters and documents dating from the early years of the century, the refuse of a defunct law office. A modern firm had inherited what remained of the old business, and thrown out what it did not need. The papers mainly concerned property dealings between people and families who had helped to shape the city in its earlier days, and Michael saw the name of the first woman doctor to graduate from Glasgow University, a name only known to historians of the suffragette movement nowadays, though she had once written a Fabian pamphlet on public health. Michael decided to take the files away by taxi and sift through them at leisure; but first he called on the firm which had put the boxes out and asked permission. It was denied. A senior partner (a well-known lawyer and local politician who will not be named here) told Michael that his look through the files had been a criminal act since they were not his property and intended for the municipal incinerator. He said every lawyer was sworn to keep a client’s business private, whether the lawyer inherited the business or not and whether the client lived or died. He said that the only sure way to keep old business private was to destroy proof that it had happened, and if Michael Donnelly saved any part of the heap from destruction he would be charged with robbery. So Michael left the heap as it was—except for a small item he had casually pocketed before learning this was a crime.