That doctors aren’t supposed to become incurably ill is something their patients might say, and about as useless as declaring that dentists are forbidden from contracting toothache or that undertakers should live forever – seeing other people out, not themselves.

For Peter Goldsworthy – eminent novelist, poet, librettist, and an Adelaide general practitioner for more than forty years – the notion of being diagnosed with multiple myeloma (cancer of the plasma cells) was as unthinkable as it was putatively unethical. Even Hippocrates himself (so it was said) didn’t die until his late nineties, of causes unknown. Goldsworthy was at least thirty years short of that when, in August 2018, he had an MRI scan for a severe knee problem. The radiologist called him into the office to inspect the images: bone oedema, knee-replacement suggested. ‘There might be another problem,’ the radiologist continued. ‘The bone marrow. Looks a bit odd. It might be multiple myeloma.’