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Inquisitor 1688: Targeted Treatment

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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This is the website of Paul Henderson, who sets crosswords for The Independent (London) under the pseudonyms Phi, for the Daily Telegraph (London) under the pseudonym Kcit, and anonymously for The Times (London) amongst many other outlets. For a more detailed biography see the About Me page.

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