SOURCE: "Physician, Behave Thyself," in The New York Times Book Review, September 3, 1989, pp. 2, 16.

In the following mixed review, Goreau criticizes West's portrayal of the poet George Byron in Lord Byron's Doctor, claiming that in an effort to elevate the importance of the poet's bumbling doctor, he renders Byron himself a caricature.

"Mad—bad—and dangerous to know," Lady Caroline Lamb wrote in her journal on the evening she first set eyes on Lord Byron. She was, like most of London in the latter part of March 1812, fresh from an impassioned reading of the first two cantos of "Childe Harold's Pilgrimage" and wild to know its author. Disregarding her own warning, Lady Caroline threw herself into a love affair whose notorious course shocked even Regency morals and launched Byron on the series of scandals whose accumulated force finally propelled him into exile from England four years later.

Byron did...