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The Story of Doctor Dolittle

by Hugh Lofting

Doctor Dolittle prefers animals to patients and learns their language.

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Original language: EnglishLevel: Beginner3,510 characters · ≈ 5 minSource: Project Gutenberg

Opening lines

ONCE upon a time, many years ago—when our grandfathers were little children—there was a doctor; and his name was Dolittle—John Dolittle, M.D. “M.D.” means that he was a proper doctor and knew a whole lot.

He lived in a little town called, Puddleby-on-the-Marsh. All the folks, young and old, knew him well by sight. And whenever he walked down the street in his high hat everyone would say, “There goes the Doctor!—He’s a clever man.” And the dogs and the children would all run up and follow behind him; and even the crows that lived in the church-tower would caw and nod their heads.

The house he lived in, on the edge of the town, was quite small; but his garden was very large and had a wide…

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About the book

The Story of Doctor Dolittle is a children's novel by British author Hugh Lofting, the first in his Doctor Dolittle series. It tells of a doctor who loves animals more than his patients and learns to speak their language, becoming their champion around the world. Only the opening portion is included in the library.

About the author

Hugh Lofting (14 January 1886 – 26 September 1947) was an English-American writer, trained as a civil engineer, who created the classic children's literature character Doctor Dolittle. The animal-talking physician, based in an English village, first appeared in illustrated letters Lofting sent to his children from British Army trenches during the First World War, and he settled in the United States after the war before his first book was published.

Summary prepared with AI from Wikipedia: The Story of Doctor Dolittle (CC BY-SA)

How the glosses are made

Word glosses and sentence translations are generated in context by AI models (DeepSeek and Zhipu GLM), and every word is checked to have a gloss. AI can make mistakes; you can report problems from the book page.

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