The Serpent and the Staff

by Frank Yerby

First published 1958

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3.6(86)

Duncan Childers claws his way out of the New Orleans slums to become a nationally respected surgeon. Professional success brings money, elite patients and access to European medicine, but it also binds him to a marriage and social position increasingly at odds with the reasons he wanted to practise medicine in the first place.
Returning to the poorer Louisiana world from which he came, Duncan confronts yellow fever, racial and class violence, a lynch mob and the legal dangers of a society quick to turn reputation into accusation. Yerby uses the early twentieth-century medical setting to join scientific progress with the period’s persistent inequalities. The surgeon’s instruments and modern training may be new, but the communities around him remain shaped by poverty, prejudice and local power.