With reference to Dr Baker's Mackenzie lecture,1 I sometimes think that we are in danger of forgetting that John Berger, the author of A Fortunate Man is, among his many other intellectual pursuits, a novelist.2
His description of the work of Dr John Sassall was an interpretation of someone else's life experience in the distinctive style of the author. Berger has remarked himself that:
‘Some say of my writing that it is too overburdened with metaphor and simile: that nothing is ever what it is but is always like something else’.3
The images and feelings portrayed by Berger are stories conveying his particular vision of being a country doctor. As doctors, we feel a resonance with the humanity displayed in the book, but are perhaps seduced into wishing to emulate the lifestyle by the beautiful obliquity of the language and a yearning for an ideal doctor–patient relationship involving mutual respect, empathy and development.
As well as being longitudinal (a rare luxury these days), Dr Sassall's relationship with his patients was interwoven (even rarer). It is, and was, a hard act to sustain and is perhaps reflected in the tragic irony of the book's title in view of Dr Sassall's suicide several years after publication.
- © British Journal of General Practice, 2005.
