Between the summers of 1996 and 1997, after a decade of surgical training in the USA, Charles Stewart Roberts went to the Royal Brompton Hospital in London, to train in paediatric cardiac surgery under the distinguished consultant cardiothoracic surgeon, Christopher Lincoln. Lincoln describes surgical training as "stoking the fire"; tending it for a sufficient period of time, to grow accustomed to its heat. Roberts' personal memoir of his experience in London, inside and outside the hospital, is an account of surgical training under Lincoln, a personal insight about the surgical profession, as well an American perspective on life in England.

This book describes seven generations of a single Roberts lineage in the Southern States. A selection of public and private papers is included which refl ects the times and the temperaments of the authors. The Roberts in this lineage crossed the Blue Ridge in 1770 and were British loyalists on the Virginia frontier at the outbreak of the Revolutionary War. In the next three generations, the family settled in newly-opened Indian Territory in South Carolina, Georgia, and Mississippi, respectively. At the outbreak of the Civil War, the Roberts patriarch was a Unionist judge in Georgia, while the eldest son was a Secessionist attorney in Mississippi. The post War generations commenced with a literary college president who was life-long friends with the Candler brothers of Emory and Coca Cola. The next three generations were physicians. The first was the fi rst cardiologist in Georgia and a national medical leader. The second is a researcher in heart disease whose publications and addresses have had worldwide influence in medicine. And the last is author of this book. Cover Photograph James William ("Will") Roberts was twelve when this photograph was taken in Atlanta during the Civil War, in which his father, in the 13th Mississippi regiment, had died. To support his mother and younger siblings, Will sold newspapers and apples (shown in the basket he is holding) in front of the Atlanta hardware store of Joseph Spencer Stewart, an Emory College graduate (1849), who later funded the education of Will at Emory College (1st honors,1877) in Oxford, Georgia. Will married Cliff ord Rebecca Stewart, a daughter of Mr. Stewart, and became minister of Trinity Church in Atlanta and president of Wesleyan College in Macon.