The protagonist, Dr. Jonathan Hullah, who uses Jungian as well as holistic principles in his practice, can sense, even smell, the nature of disease. He is an expert diagnostician, a quality he shares with his author. When Mr. Davies was a student at Oxford University, he began reading the work of Georg Groddeck, an unconventional Austrian physician and author who used psychoanalysis in his treatment of disease. Dr. Hullah is inspired by Groddeck and other doctors the author has known. Here again are the various Gilmartins and Hugh McWearie, the journalist who writes about religion.
Characters also flow from other books.
Mr. Davies is himself represented in Dr. Hullah's analysis of Victorian fiction. When he refers to Heroine's Disease, or death by Ingrowing Virtue, it is a borrowing from one of Mr. Davies's own speeches. For both the author and the character, physical and emotional causes of disease are inseparable. As thick as a Davies trilogy, it documents the writer's life in minute detail. Although Mr. Davies cooperated with Mrs. Grant during her 12-year project, the book does not leave him in a state of rapture, despite the biographer's admiration.