Set in an imaginary medical institute, The Animal Doctor (Djurdoktorn) describes a not unforeseeable world dominated by administrative science and social technology. The human beings and the research animals face the same predicament: both can be observed, controlled, and thrown into mazes. When Evy Beck joins the institute as a veterinarian she innocently enters into combat with a wily and impenetrable bureaucracy. She has the considerable help of P. C. Jersild. His first novel, published in Sweden in 1973, has not lost its bite in this English translation by David Mel Paul and Margareta Paul.