This little book was something I designed long ago, but time would not allow me to realize it; a hasty guide would take me by the hand every so often and lead me briskly to other attractions of Neo-Hellenic dramaturgy and theater, ever larger and more significant, so this pleasant little theme remained like a souvenir on the shelves of memory and seemed smaller and smaller amid the dust of so many unfulfilled projects and the disarray of unrealized plans that in the end are collected by the junk dealer of oblivion.

But it showed amazing resilience and persistence in the whirlwinds of work and in the cycles of time and grew and matured with me, becoming richer in meaning and emotion. This hidden affection for this somewhat marginal theme, which secretly nourished the tender sprout, is explained, like many other things, autobiographically: I am surrounded, in past, present, and future, exclusively by doctors, I, the only one destitute of the art of Asclepius.

Thus, with my feeble powers, I began to gather material for many years, and with the help of certain postgraduate works, it took on significant dimensions, and the books I had collected for this purpose formed a small tower. From the creative warm haze of enthusiasm, shapes and ideas occasionally emerged, which took on ever clearer forms, which finally united, like the voices of a symphony, into a complete diagram.

Now there was the purpose, the method, the execution chart - but the time was still lacking. And this summer, it seems, the time had come, the "moment," that tempting moment that you seize like Fortune by the hair, and I stole the time, like the shirt of a fairy, to do what I had longed for.

An homage to Greek doctors, which should of course be read with the appropriate humor, and a kind gesture to the people who surround me with their presence and love. And if I did not become, amidst so much Hippocratic light, a healing warrior of the inevitable, but remained an unhealed "patient," let this be a small indication that I did not remain completely colorless and unilluminated in the catacombs of footnotes and in the dark courts of scientific proof in a field seemingly unrelated to the art of Hippocrates.

The theme combines theater with medicine, the stage with the duty, the performance with the healing. The sacredness and critical nature of the doctor-patient relationship has always intrigued dramatists, and by offering a small gallery of portraits of the doctors of Neo-Hellenic dramaturgy, not always free from satire and caricature, I hope to contribute a small mosaic to the world literature on this subject. [...]

Pélion, August 15, 2003