Wodehouse Is the Best Medicine

by P.G. Wodehouse

The 11 case histories collected in this anthology show Wodehouse at his therapeutic best.

Contents:
Romance at Droitgate Spa (Mr. Mulliner)
Jeeves Takes Charge (Jeeves & Wooster)
The Man Who Gave Up Smoking (Mr. Mulliner)
Sleepy Time
The Spot of Art (Jeeves & Wooster)
Mulliner's Buck-U-Uppo (Mr. Mulliner)
Without the Option (Jeeves & Wooster)
The Truth About George (Mr. Mulliner)
The Fat of the Land (Drones Club)
Mr. Potter Takes a Rest Cure (Bobby Wickham)
The Medicine Girl : novella also published as Doctor Sally

Genres: Humor, Fiction, Short Stories

336 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1995

About the author

Sir Pelham Grenville Wodehouse, KBE, was a comic writer who enjoyed enormous popular success during a career of more than seventy years and continues to be widely read over 40 years after his death. Despite the political and social upheavals that occurred during his life, much of which was spent in France and the United States, Wodehouse's main canvas remained that of prewar English upper-class society, reflecting his birth, education, and youthful writing career.

An acknowledged master of English prose, Wodehouse has been admired both by contemporaries such as Hilaire Belloc, Evelyn Waugh and Rudyard Kipling and by more recent writers such as Douglas Adams, Salman Rushdie and Terry Pratchett. Sean O'Casey famously called him "English literature's performing flea", a description that Wodehouse used as the title of a collection of his letters to a friend, Bill Townend.

Best known today for the Jeeves and Blandings Castle novels and short stories, Wodehouse was also a talented playwright and lyricist who was part author and writer of fifteen plays and of 250 lyrics for some thirty musical comedies. He worked with Cole Porter on the musical Anything Goes (1934) and frequently collaborated with Jerome Kern and Guy Bolton. He wrote the lyrics for the hit song Bill in Kern's Show Boat (1927), wrote the lyrics for the Gershwin/Romberg musical Rosalie (1928), and collaborated with Rudolf Friml on a musical version of The Three Musketeers (1928).

Reviews

[S. Suresh · Rating 5 out of 5]

I was going through a reading funk and couldn’t have picked a better book to cure me of my ailment. Perfectly curated, Wodehouse is the Best Medicine is a riotous collection of ten short stories and one novella, themed around the world of medicine.

The novella, Medicine Girl, is the same story that was released with the alternate title, Doctor Sally. Three short stories are from the Jeeves-Wooster collection, four come from Angler’s Rest, that friendly neighborhood pub where Mr. Mulliner reminisces about his extraordinarily extended family of nephews and cousins. A Drone’s Club story and a wicked Wickham (Roberta Wickham) story rounds out the rest of the anthology.

[Flynt · Rating 4 out of 5]

Laugh-out-loud short stories, plus a novelette that was a bit too long for my taste. Still, a very nice collection of Wodehouse humor.

[Scilla · Rating 4 out of 5]

This includes 11 short stories with the theme of medicine connecting them. One story is about when Jeeves is first hired; his first act is giving Bertie his famous medicine for hangover. In the first story, the elderly sit around Droitgate Spa and discuss their ailments. The one who has had the worst health problems has the most status, and thus Mr. Mulliner gets his conjurer's assistant approved by his uncle because her uncle has the admiration of all the oldies. I enjoyed the story of the hypnotist who improves someone's golf game. The collection includes the story of the fat uncle contest, Mulliner's Buck-U-Uppo, Mr. Potter's rest cure, and Bill Bannister's wooing of Dr. Sally. Even when I'd read some of them before, it was an enjoyable read.

[Linda K · Rating 4 out of 5]

Funny, clever short stories with that British spin always makes for a good read. Contrived plots filled with quirky characters and it all comes right in the end.

If you love humorous writing and especially British humor, you will love these stories.

[Mesembryanthemum · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.25 stars. The Jeeves & Wooster stories are great, as are some of the others. But a few stories are less than great, and "The Medicine Girl" is dull.

[Sapiophial · Rating 5 out of 5]

Brilliantly funny