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Any clinician interested in improving his ability to use his senses of sight, hearing, touch, taste, and smell, in sharpening his sensibility, and in seeing how one can use just the right word in just the right way, will be delighted to study Richard Asher's contribution to the sense and sensibility of medicine which embellishes the Lettsomian Lectures for 1959. Asher is a physician who has already established a wide reputation as a medical stylist and who knows well the influence of words in making or preventing medical progress. He is a down-to-earth clinician. He is the namer, though not the inventor, of the Munchausen Syndrome. As a writer of medical essays of great distinction, Richard Asher already has a following wherever elegant medical English is treasured. He is one of a diminishing—indeed, nearly extinct—tribe of physicians who are keen observers, sound thinkers, and articulate writers. The exquisite simplicity of