A Fortunate Woman: A Country Doctor’s Story

"This is such an interesting one. It’s a companion book to A Fortunate Man , John Berger ’s book from the late 1960s about a country doctor. In that sense, you might think it’s going to be derivative, but it’s not at all. It opens with a wonderful story about how Polly Morland came upon a copy of A Fortunate Man and realized that it was set in the very same valley where she lives, which now has a female GP looking after it. I love the blend that Polly Morland achieves in the book. It’s reportage, but so creative in the way that she sets out the life and work of this country doctor. She did lots and lots of interviews with her and shadowed her and I found myself marveling at how she seems to be in the head of this woman so effectively. It’s a wonderful portrait. It’s coupled with wonderful nature writing and the descriptions of the countryside where the doctor is working. The book is also compellingly topical, because it’s about how we care for people, how the National Health Service should best operate. The GP is the closest doctor to most people. The doctor in this book builds extraordinary relationships across the community by being embedded in it herself. She is living there; she’s a close neighbor. The way she works is quite old fashioned, but I think it has so much to tell us about when medicine and caring for people is effective, and what’s needed to really make that happen. The book is just over 200 pages long and the blend is brilliant, these spare pages also broken up with fantastic photographs by Richard Baker. It’s a microcosmic gem. Yes, a country doctor but at a time when it was much more common for a GP to know their patients. Back then, the GP might have worked with generations of the same family. That’s much less common now, with shifting populations. In that sense, it’s not too typical, perhaps, but a real object lesson in what’s possible when you really know your patients and build relationships with them. Of course, for many people in the NHS that’s been made impossible."