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

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This is what makes her a fortunate woman, and indeed all of us to be fortunate, witnesses to the extraordinary every day. Beautifully written, beguiling, important, overlaid with kindness, quietly woven with a sense of place and a profound insight into how rural communities function. Little did I know it was linked to a previous book A Fortunate Man: The Story of a Country Doctor, and the GP practice in Morland's title is the same one as featured in that book. I know this not because I am a doctor myself, but because I’ve spent the last two years studying one. He wears hospital scrubs because he doubles as a subspecialist in dermatology doing minor operations.

A Fortunate Woman: A Country Doctor’s Story - Goodreads A Fortunate Woman: A Country Doctor’s Story - Goodreads

Then there is a man who has just been made redundant and has fallen off the wagon of a recommended diet for his type 2 diabetes. This beautifully crafted book drew me in immediately by reminding me of so many reasons why I became a general practitioner in the first place…a compelling narrative based on patient stories. The workload that has been growing for a decade and was exacerbated by the pandemic has just continued to increase, she says. 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.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. As patient numbers have risen, speed of access to a doctor – any doctor – has become the overriding priority, the policy goal to eclipse all others. Published this year, A Fortunate Woman chronicles through Morland’s eyes the life and work of an unnamed country GP during the pandemic.

A Fortunate Woman - Polly Morland

In a series of coincidences, unbeknown to her, author Polly Morland found that she was living in the same remote valley that was the setting for A Fortunate Man.Log in to your NB Dashboard and use the 'Add Reflective Note' button at the bottom of a blog entry to add your note. It explores the choices the doctor made in her young life, and the difficulties, decisions, risk assessments, ethical questions and occasional spells of anguish that make up a GP’s normal day, as well as the jokes, tea and levity. I sit quietly in the corner and, with consent, observe that still sacred confessional between GP and patient. John Berger’s A Fortunate Man, written in 1967, is a poetic tribute to a heroic rural GP, Dr John Sassall, who embodied the selfless compassion of the early NHS. The author, Polly Morland, is a journalist and film-maker with a kindly, dramatic writing style and a feel for the human story.