There’s not a lot to say about this one, especially as I cannot recall quite when or how I happened to be reminded of “Physician, heal thyself”. It certainly wasn’t from reading the original. I had forgotten – if I’d ever even registered – that it was from Luke. I suppose the appearance of ‘thyself’ is a hint to a possible Biblical origin, and, once that is granted, Dr. Luke is the most likely gospel candidate.
Once it was there, it was not a long hop to deciding that the healing of the physician might be effected by restoring a jumble. Around that time the old numerological thinking kicked in: HEAL THYSELF has 11 letters, which inclines me to a 13 x 11 grid. And DOCTOR has 6 letters – if there’s another medico with six letters, then I can see a symmetry emerging. Hmm – another 6-letter medico? What could that be…?
After that it’s the process of getting alternative words in place. I was pleased with the ACNE/A-ONE and OINKED/TINKED pairs, but I was more concerned that I didn’t cut the two sides of the puzzle off from each other, which looked plausible for a time. Looking at the solution proof (which I did a few hours ago) I was struck by how many of the down entries had to be affected. Perhaps I should be happier with having got everything into the grid?
Then the possibility of HEALTHY SELF vs HEAL THYSELF occurred to me, and you ended up with that curious tripartite 6 down arrangement. And it was not too onerous to allocate misprints to only nine clues, so misprints it was.
The original title was ‘Focused treatment’ (which I must have typed a few times as it just turned up in my predictive text) but this shifted to ‘Targeted’, and I think the alliteration sounds better.
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