The Physician and the Philosophers – 201

(Written from his chamber at the villa, ink smudged from late-night thinking)

My dear Mary,

Your proposal has set my mind whirling like a freshly wound clock. To summon the philosophers themselves! It is a notion at once thrilling and unnerving. Imagine, Adam Smith taking his tea beside us, speaking of invisible hands and moral sentiments while I, a mere physician with poetic pretensions, nod as though I understand half of it.

Still, I confess the temptation is strong. I should like to see how these titans of thought comport themselves when drawn from parchment into parlour. Would they recognize the world their ideas helped to build — a world of engines and ledgers, of nations governed more by calculation than by conscience?

Perhaps I would question them — politely, of course — whether their reason has left sufficient room for the heart. For all their talk of virtue, I wonder if any of them truly understood the cost of ambition, the malady of striving. We physicians see the toll it takes upon the body; poets, upon the soul.

If your dear Molly can indeed make such introductions, I shall keep my lancet ready, just in case any of them faint upon discovering what their enlightenment has wrought.

Ever your faithful (and occasionally exasperated) servant,
Polidori