Marjorie Holme of Moonsilk Stitches tagged me for the Bookworm Award.

The rules for this award are: Open the book closest to you, not your favorite or most intellectual book, but the book closest to you at the moment, and turn to page 56. Write out the fifth sentence, as well as two to five sentences following that. And pass the award on to five blogging friends.

The book nearest to me is James Paget's Clinical Lectures of 1875. It's one Carroll thought very highly of, and the relevant sentence goes:

"....It was removed, and erysipelas set-in and of that he died. And then it was found he had albuminuria, a condition which made him so liable to erysipelas, or to pyaemia, or to some form of blood poisoning, that if it had been ascertained beforehand no prudent surgeon would have thought of operating. Another person was a drunkard, on the sly, and yet not so much on the sly, but that it was well known to his more intimate friends. His havits were not asked-after, and one of his fingers was removed because joint-disease had spoiled it..."

Carroll had a huge medical library, and must have known almost as much about the human body as a doctor. He liked looking after his friends when they were ill and tending their ailments. I feel that if his life had taken a slightly different turn, and he'd had different opportunities, we'd maybe have had "Dr. Dodgson."

One of the top books I've read lately is "From Youth Onward" by Dr. Jacob Ley who was an exact contemporary of Carroll's. Dr Ley was a great raconteur and his book gives hair raising descriptions of how it was to "walk the wards" of some of the poor slum hospitals of Victorian London.

Now I've got to think who to pass the award onto. There are some good candidates.