ABSTRACT
The Physician's Tale can be taken on its own. Chaucer (and it must be Chaucer, no Narrator) never finally decided how it would fit into the Canterbury Tales sequence. It has no headlink or Pro logue. It is firmly tied to The Pardoner's Prologue and Tale by the begnning of the Introduction to The Pardoner's Prologue and Tale and the conjunction obviously aims at variety and contrast. The end of The Pardoner's Tale has no further link. Both tales have a simple traditional but very different core, elaborated in Chaucer’s normal
manner. The folktale structure gives the basic poetic power; each story is extreme in very different ways.
