A Fortunate Woman: A Country Doctor’s Story - The Top Ten Bestseller, Shortlisted for the Baillie Gifford Prize

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This is not your average "health worker" memoir, it is so much more. It is a meditation on place, belonging, nature and history.

A Fortunate Woman by Polly Morland - Pan Macmillan

If you want to read a book that moves you both at the level of sentence and the quality of language and with the emotional depth of its subject matter, then A Fortunate Woman is definitely the book you should be reading’ - Samanth Subramanian, Baillie Gifford judge

This was “Dr John Sassall”. How capable he was, how eccentric, how dedicated and how unlikely, nowadays, was revealed in John Berger’s classic 1967 book A Fortunate Man. Sassall was a friend and Berger shadowed him for some months, along with the Swiss photographer Jean Mohr. The subtitle of their collaboration is The Story of a Country Doctor. It is not a story as such; it proceeds through a series of vignettes, psychological explorations, case studies and in-depth enquiries into the relationship between one man and his calling, his patients and his environment. Rachel Rutter near her practice in Stroud. ‘For a long time now, we have in essence been firefighting the daily triage list.’ Photograph: Gareth Iwan Jones/The Observer This is a contemporary look at a rural practitioner, who serves the same Gloucestershire community as the Fortunate Man of Berger's classic, but so much more emotive and visceral. She, as her predecessor (bar one), embeds herself in the community she serves and shows rather than tells the huge benefits for both patient and clinician of this cross-pollination for their health. A quiet, composed love letter to the art of general practice. I assumed this was written by the doctor herself, but it was actually by a journalist who observed the doctor before and during the pandemic, as she worked long hours to support her patients and the wider community.

A Fortunate Woman by Polly Morland - Pan Macmillan A Fortunate Woman by Polly Morland - Pan Macmillan

As author Polly Morland was cleaning her mother's library she came across a misplaced book. It was, "A Fortunate Man" (1967) by John Berger, which was about a country doctor who practiced in her own community some five decades before. The book is about the doctor who replaced the Fortunate Man, who herself was inspired to pursue family medicine by the same book when she was a medical student two decades earlier. A compelling response to Berger’s classic account…drawn with colour and respect in Morland’s sensitive prose. The Tablet The Aspen partnership merged five smaller practices in a purpose-built complex, in common with trends across the country, to give it the scale to create specialist teams and to spread risk. “There is,” Hodges says, “always the threat in small partnerships of being the last man standing; if you are in a partnership of two and your partner resigns then you have all the financial liability of an asset you are not allowed to sell.”In May, the Commons Health and Social Care Committee held an evidence session on continuity of care. They heard from Dr Jacob Lee about what it’s like to see someone in a practice that doesn’t have personal lists. “You are trying to read their notes and get a feeling for what has been happening in the past. It makes the consultation really challenging when you are looking at blood test results and letters for patients you do not know because they are split between the different GPs who are in that day. It is so inefficient and difficult to try to do a good job for that individual.” Do away with the local doctor, her bike and wellies, her familiar car, her listening ear, her “accumulated knowledge” of yourself, your family and circumstances, a doctor you say hello to on the street, who recognises you “as a person, rather than a pathology” – remove her, and our whole heath system collapses too.

A Fortunate Woman: A Country Doctor’s Story - The Top Ten A Fortunate Woman: A Country Doctor’s Story - The Top Ten

Listening has become even more crucial. Ten-minute appointments are bad enough. Covid meant doing that behind a mask and face-visor, in scrubs made of old duvet covers. Now there is the telephone consultation. In the before-times, the doctor made a point of accompanying a patient from waiting room to consulting room, because it gave her a chance to assess their mobility and demeanour. Now there is the phone. The doctor has become adept at reading a voice, its hesitancies, emotions, evasions; 16 calls in a morning is the norm. Wendy Moore, TLS This book deepens our understanding of the life and thoughts of a modern doctor, and the modern NHS, and it expands movingly to chronicle a community and a landscape – “the valley” itself is a defining feature of people’s lives.

Revisiting Berger’s story after half a century of seismic change, both in our society and in the ways in which medicine is practiced, 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. Insightful, moving … instructive when so many practices are in crisis. A Times Audiobook of the Year 2022 I was consoled and compelled by this book’s steady gaze on healing and caring. The writing is beautiful. Sarah Moss, author of Summerwater and Ghost Wall That’s one of the reasons there are so few takers. When Hodges got his first salaried GP job there were 50 applicants. Today, all the local GPs I speak to insist that you could pretty much walk into any practice in the county and be hired on the spot. Not surprisingly, young doctors often prefer a few days a week as a contracted locum without the pressure of also being responsible – as here – for the management and livelihoods of 140 staff. The result is a kind of perfect storm of stress on the traditional partnership model – a recent Royal College of General Practitioners survey found that 42% of GPs in England were “likely or very likely to leave the profession in the next five years”, with nearly half of those suggesting burnout or stress as the prime reason. A Fortunate Woman is 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.

A Fortunate Woman by Polly Morland, Richard Baker - Waterstones

When Polly Morland is clearing out her mother’s house she finds a book that will lead her to a remarkable figure living on her own doorstep: the country doctor who works in the same remote, wooded valley she has lived in for many years. This doctor is a rarity in contemporary medicine – she knows her patients inside out, and their stories are deeply entwined with her own. I only realised that Polly Morland wrote ‘The Society of Timid Souls’ which I absolutely loved when I got the Fortunate Woman home. It was one of the few books that made it to my new book shelves when I moved house. Her second book is no less compelling or beautiful. A Fortunate Woman is a portrait of a dedicated GP who has been rooted in her village community for decades. She’s the successor to a more eccentric doctor who’s life was detailed in another book written decades ago called ‘A fortunate man’ It’s makes the case for continuity of care, the quiet joy of community and how neighbourliness enriches our lives. Vivid case studies of the patients and residents in the community are interspersed among beautiful and poignant nature writing. Care and Compassion. Dedication. Resilience. Adaptability. Crisis management. Continued learning. Family and community based holistic care. Above all a keen interest and mutual respect for her team and patients. So many wonderful foundations for an excellent example of what many of us want from “our doctor”. Timely… compelling…[the] vital perspective of a single frontline clinician… A delicately drawn miniature. Financial Times

In the snow-bound January of 1947, a new GP arrived in “the valley”. He had served as a navy surgeon in the war, but now he was a country doctor, there to stay. Eighteen months later, each of his patients received a terse letter: “You are now part of the National Health Service, so you don’t need to pay me any more, thank you very much.” He remained for 35 years. Every reader will meditate on their own encounters with GPs. Of her doctor, Morland writes: “Her life’s work is not simply about the application of a body of knowledge to an assortment of human objects… it is a pursuit meaningful in and of itself.” The word “relationship” is often used. The doctor says that hers is the only branch of medicine founded on relationships.