A CLASSIC book about a Wye Valley doctor in the 1960s has inspired a critically acclaimed sequel more than half a century on.
A Fortunate Man by Booker Prize winner John Berger took a St Briavels GP as its subject and has inspired numerous medics since its publication in 1967.
Now Wye Valley-based journalist and author Polly Morland has revisited the subject, following an unnamed local GP during the early days of the Covid crisis in her book A Fortunate Woman, published this month.
The writer said she was inspired to tackle the subject after finding a battered paperback copy of A Fortunate Man fallen behind the bookshelf when clearing her late mother’s house.
She was amazed to see a photograph inside of the wooded valley where she lives, and was inspired by the book to find the doctor who serves the same community today.
The current GP also admitted she had been inspired to take up medicine after reading A Fortunate Man.
With photos by Richard Baker, A Fortunate Woman: A Country Doctor’s Story is described as “a compelling, thoughtful and insightful look at the life and work of a country doctor.
“Funny, moving and not afraid of the dark, it will speak to readers everywhere,” say its publishers Picador.
“A Fortunate Woman tells her compelling, true story, and how the tale of the old doctor has threaded through her own life in magical ways.
“Working within a community she loves, she is a rarity in contemporary medicine: a modern doctor who knows her patients inside out, the lives of this ancient, wild place entwined with her own.
“Revisiting Berger’s story after half a century of seismic change, both in our society and in the ways in which medicine is practised, A Fortunate Woman sheds light on what it means to be a doctor in today’s complex and challenging world.
“Interweaving the doctor’s story with those of her patients, reflecting on the relationship between landscape and community, and upon the wider role of medicine in society, a unique portrait of a twenty-first century family doctor emerges.”
The new work has won rave reviews with philosopher and author Alain de Botton saying: “Polly Morland and Richard Baker have more than done justice to the original John Berger book - and produced a work that stimulates the eye and mind in equal measure.”
The original work followed Dr John Eskell - given the pseudonym John Sassall - as he treated his patients, and is regarded as a masterpiece for its philosophical insight into the world of medicine and healing.
Acclaimed as “a truly moving meditation on society” and “the most important book about general practice ever written”, it was dramatised on BBC Radio 4 in 2020.
Famous art critic Berger, who lived in Newland in the 1960s, penned the book with pictures alongside Swiss photographer Jan Mohr.
It was immediately hailed as an amazing illustration of a compassionate doctor working in a rural community, and today’s critics say A Fortunate Woman has done the original proud.
Trisha Greenhalgh, Professor of Primary Care at the University of Oxford, calls it: “A vibrant and authentic portrait of the rural family doctor in these difficult contemporary times.”
Award-winning novelist Laura Cumming adds: “Superb - beautiful, enthralling, careful, tender, a humanitarian act in itself, deeply moral, moving, lucid and loving.”
And writing in The Times, John Self commends it for defending “the vital long-term relationships on which good medical care thrives”.
A Fortunate Woman: A Country Doctor’s Story by Polly Morland is out now, priced £16.99.