The Animal Doctor
The original novel was published in 1973.
Set in an imaginary medical institute, The Animal Doctor (Djurdoktorn) describes a not unforeseeable world dominated by administrative science and social technology. The human beings and the research animals face the same predicament: both can be observed, controlled, and thrown into mazes. When Evy Beck joins the institute as a veterinarian she innocently enters into combat with a wily and impenetrable bureaucracy. She has the considerable help of P. C. Jersild. His first novel, published in Sweden in 1973, has not lost its bite in this English translation by David Mel Paul and Margareta Paul.
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P. C. Jersild
Per Christian Jersild, better known as P. C. Jersild, (born 1935) is a Swedish author and physician. He also holds an honorary doctorate in medicine from Uppsala University, and another one in engineering from the Royal Institute of Technology (1999). P. C. Jersild was born in Katrineholm in a middle-class family, his first book was Räknelära which he released 1960 at the age of 25, although he had already been writing for 10 years at that time. Until now he has written 35 books, usually focused on social criticism. His most famous work is Barnens ö (Children's Island), which tells the story of a young boy, on the verge of adulthood, who runs off from a children's summer camp to spend time alone in the big city, Stockholm. Another book worth mentioning is Babels hus (The House of Babel) which gives an account of the inhuman treatment of patients at a large modern hospital, said to be modeled on the Karolinska Hospital in Huddinge, outside Stockholm. Aside from his literary production, Jersild has also been a columnist for Dagens Nyheter since the mid-1980s. In 1999, he was elected a member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences.
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