TY - JOUR T1 - Books: <em>A Fortunate Woman: A Country Doctor’s Story</em> JF - British Journal of General Practice JO - Br J Gen Pract SP - 287 LP - 287 DO - 10.3399/bjgp22X719741 VL - 72 IS - 719 AU - Roger Jones Y1 - 2022/06/01 UR - http://bjgp.org/content/72/719/287.abstract N2 - Polly Morland. Illustrated by Richard Baker Picador, 2022, HB, 256pp, £16.99, 978-1529071139]ohn Berger’s A Fortunate Man: The Story of a Country Doctor was published in 1967. It was written after Berger and the photographer Jean Mohr had spent several weeks with a single-handed GP on the edge of the Forest of Dean, on the Gloucestershire/Monmouthshire border.The doctor, John Eskell, is given the pseudonym John Sassall in the book, and was Berger’s GP. Eskell was troubled, bipolar, hyper-conscientious, and eccentric. He was completely committed, and always available to his patients, who adored him. In the book Berger scarcely mentions Eskell’s wife Betty, who ran his practice and was the essential interface between him and his patients. She died quite suddenly in her early 60s and, not many months later, Eskell left the practice, travelled in China, and, finally, shot himself.The book is regarded as a medical classic, and was re-published in 2015, having gone out of print. It is often cited as a reason for doctors, including the subject of this marvellous new book by Polly Morland, deciding on general practice as a career.A not very alternative reading is that entrants to the profession need to be very careful not to make the kind of Faustian pact that Eskell made in the Forest.I grew up in the Forest of Dean, where my father edited the weekly newspapers, and would have known Eskell. I am not a great admirer of Berger’s book, partly because I found his depiction of forest people as uncultured … ER -