Touching Distance

London: Macmillan, 2008. A Fine unmarked copy with Fine dustjacket which is not price clipped. First Edition, First Printing. Based on a true story, this is a stunning historical novel that brings to life a fascinating period in world history. It is 1790, and after 10 years of training in the great medical schools of Europe, Alec Gordon has returned to Scotland to take up the post of Physician to the Aberdeen Dispensary. His plans for modernizing medical practice and dreams of progress are thrown into disarray when a mysterious disease suddenly strikes the town, attacking and killing every newly delivered mother for miles around, which he recognises as childbed fever, a condition that has baffled the great physicians, an illness with no known cure. Alec sets out on an astonishing medical quest to conquer the disease, but while he struggles to find solutions that lie far in the future, his wife Elisabeth is increasingly lost in the past, prey to terrifying memories of her childhood in Antigua, as she knows and he will learn, some diseases lie beyond the reach of reason. **** NOT EX LIB **** B2C. First Edition. Hard Cover. Fine/Fine. 8vo - over 7¾" - 9¾" tall.