Résumé
Résumé de John Silence, médecin extraordinaire
À qui s’adresse-t-il ?
For readers who love ghost stories with atmosphere, old-fashioned detectives, and fear that grows from places and landscapes.
De quoi parle ce livre ?
John Silence is a book of five tales by Algernon Blackwood, published in 1908. At the centre of each stands the same man, a doctor who takes on patients whose troubles no ordinary medicine can explain. A house seems to hold something hostile. A pretty town draws a visitor in against his will. A camp on a wild shore carries a feeling of being watched. Blackwood wrote for readers who enjoy the shiver of the unseen, and he built these cases with care.
What do you get from it? You get a detective in all but name. He is calm, patient and kind, and he will not call anything impossible until he has looked at it. You get five cases, each with its own setting and its own kind of dread. You also get a picture of how a writer in the early 1900s tried to join the language of the doctor with the language of the occult. Let us begin with the man who holds them together.
Dans ce résumé
- 1A doctor who treats the unseenFree
- 2A writer's rooms hold something hostile
- 3A quiet town draws a traveller in
- 4Old places keep their own powers
- 5A camp where something prowls
- 6Fear as a force in mind and nature
Point clé 1 sur 6
A doctor who treats the unseen
The first thing to know is the man himself. John Silence is a physician who has set aside the ordinary work of a doctor to study troubles of the mind and spirit that other people laugh at or fear. He works from his own means and takes the cases that interest him. People come to him when everyone else has failed them.
Blackwood draws him as quiet, attentive and gentle. He does not shout or posture. He listens, asks plain questions, and treats the patient as a sane person who has met something real. That choice matters, because the reader is invited to trust him before any ghost appears.
This figure belongs to a tradition of doctors and scholars who investigate the supernatural as if it were a disease or a crime. Silence uses both medical habits and a deep knowledge of old ideas about the soul. He believes the world holds forces we cannot see, and he approaches them with care rather than fear.
The stories are mostly built the same way. Someone in distress brings a puzzling case, the doctor looks into it, and he goes to the place where the trouble lives. Yet each tale changes the mood, so the book never feels like one story told five times. As you read, notice how little Silence boasts and how often he warns that the danger is real.
That’s 1 of 6 key points.
The rest of the summary, written and spoken, and the whole book: free to start.
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Who’s who
- John Silence
- A privately supported physician, he helps patients whose troubles of mind and spirit lie beyond ordinary medicine.
- Arthur Vezin
- A mild traveller, he tells John Silence about his unsettling stay in a small town in France.
- The troubled writer
- A writer whose health and work suffer in his rooms, he seeks John Silence's help.
- The returning schoolboy
- A former pupil revisits his school in Germany, where he senses something hidden beneath its familiar surroundings.
About this edition
Every format is free to start, and print and large print are at cost.
- LengthAbout 109,000 words
- Reading timeAbout 7 h 15 min
- FormatseBook, large-print eBook, audiobook, 15-minute summary
- LanguagesEnglish and 11 other languages
Questions about John Silence, médecin extraordinaire
What is John Silence, Physician Extraordinary about?
It is a collection of five supernatural tales. In each, a doctor named John Silence helps people troubled by strange forces, in settings such as a haunted house, a French town, a school and a wild camp.
How many stories are in John Silence?
There are five tales: A Psychical Invasion, Ancient Sorceries, The Nemesis of Fire, Secret Worship and The Camp of the Dog. Each tells a separate case, and Silence links them together.
Who is John Silence?
He is a physician who treats people whose troubles seem to come from the supernatural. He is calm, kind and careful, and he approaches each case as a doctor and a student of hidden forces.
When was John Silence written?
Algernon Blackwood published it in 1908. The tales are fiction, though Blackwood drew on his lasting interest in mysticism, nature and the borders of ordinary experience.
Is John Silence hard to read?
The language is clear, and the fear builds through mood and detail.